Entrancing concepts - Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene is a very popular and somewhat controversial book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976.

It builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's first book Adaptation and Natural Selection. Dawkins coined the term selfish gene as a provocative way of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes, and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes. An organism is expected to evolve to maximise its inclusive fitness – the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Andrew Brown has written:
"Selfish", when applied to genes, doesn't mean "selfish" at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word – but "selfish" isn't it.


A crude analogy can be found in the old saw about a chicken being just an egg's way of making more eggs. In a similar inversion, Dawkins describes biological organisms as "vehicles" or survival machines, with genes as the "replicators" that create these organisms as a means of acquiring resources and copying themselves. At the level of organisms, we can see genes as being for some feature that might benefit the organism, but at the level of genes, the sole implicit purpose is to benefit themselves.