The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins

It’s nearly spring at the cottage and time to cut back the tough grass and weeds already. There’s one I find afterwards that I spared because it’s almost indistinguishable from oregano. And I think, “Aren’t you clever, making such a good imitation?” As if the plant had purposefully developed in this way to escape the gardener with his strimmer.

I don’t know about you, but I find this tendency to anthropomorphize strongly persuasive. To know that such thinking is mistaken takes away none of the charm of the pathetic fallacy, any more than an understanding of our genetic inheritance takes away the fact of human kindness: it just makes it overwhelmingly interesting.

Referring to the theory of evolution, Dawkins’ opening line reads: “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it works out the reason for its own existence.” In this book, he takes Darwin’s great idea a huge step further.

The unit of selection, he will show, is not the individual (mammal, plant or insect), but the gene. It is not so much that we benefit from a particular configuration of our DNA, but that we are vehicles and reproducers of convenience for its constituent genes.

A gene, just as the oregano lookalike, has no agency. It does not want to be replicated, but the ones best adapted to survive and prosper in their environment will do so. The existence of a gene is proof of its success in being replicated: tautologous but accurate. Nothing succeeds like success. We have only to watch a TV documentary to see “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” and if at times selective altruism is practiced, it is only because such behaviour is the optimum survival strategy.

Knowing this gives us pause and crucial understanding that can inform our choices. Because interestingly, humanity, with its “unique… capacity for conscious forethought” is not compelled to act out its genetic conditioning. We can even discuss ways of cultivating altruism, “something that no other species has ever aspired to.”

How the complexity of consciousness and empathy has come about is not the remit of this book, and I will look at it my next post.