The book provoked widespread and heated debate. Written in part as a response, The Extended Phenotype gave a deeper clarification of the central concept of the gene as the unit of selection; but it did much more besides.
In it, Dawkins extended the gene's eye view to argue that the genes that sit within an organism have an influence that reaches out beyond the visible traits in that body - the phenotype - to the wider environment, which can include other individuals.
So, for instance, the genes of the beaver drive it to gather twigs to produce the substantial physical structure of a dam; and the genes of the cuckoo chick produce effects that manipulate the behaviour of the host bird, making it nurture the intruder as one of its own. This notion of the extended phenotype has proved to be highly influential in the way we understand evolution and the natural world.
It represents a key scientific contribution to evolutionary biology, and it continues to play an important role in research in the life sciences. The Extended Phenotype is a conceptually deep book that forms important reading for biologists and students. But Dawkins' clear exposition is accessible to all who are prepared to put in a little effort.
Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think. Covering all species from yeast to humans, this is the first book to tell the story of selfish genetic elements that act narrowly to advance their own replication at the expense of the larger organism.
Choose the important thing ideas inside the e book with this brief summary. Over 3. Molecular replicators are made from lengthy chains of smaller building-block molecules in the same manner that a phrase is made up of a string of letters. The primary replicator routinely had a competitive edge over all the different molecules within the primordial soup because they could not replicate themselves, and subsequently the replicators have become more numerous than every other sort of molecule.
Those two principles — a population in which ability varies and an surroundings of restrained sources — are the primary requirements for the system we recognize as evolution.
As time went on, similar mistakes in copying resulted in new high quality traits, inclusive of the capacity to interrupt other replicators and use their constructing blocks for replication: the primary carnivores.
Through the introduction of latest variations, and the survival of the replicators with the maximum beneficial blessings, greater complex existence forms emerged, in the end ensuing in the type of organisms we see today. Get a copy of this summary and learn about the book.
It is also a companion volume to McCrum's very successful Best Novels published by Galileo in A collection of essays discussing human behaviour and the institutions of capitalism. The essays are non-technical and can be used by students of all disciplines interested in capitalism and in economic behaviour.
They often present unconventional views of the topics they discuss. Those containing unconventional views discuss self-interested behaviour, selfish gene theory, the meaning and social function of private ownership, the externality problem, the nature of the firm, and the rise of capitalism. The essays offer a useful supplementary reading source for courses in business, economics, and law that deal with human behaviour in the marketplace and with capitalism, ownership, markets, and firms.
An entirely different approach to one of the most controversial theories in the world. The Selfish Gene is a reformulation of the theory of natural selection developed by Charles Darwin. This classic is focused on the nature of altruism and selfishness that creatures have. Despite that any living creature is focused on his well-being, the study reveals that they have a natural sense of altruism as well. Many creatures have a tendency of sacrificing themselves for their loved ones' safety.
Note: This summary is wholly written and published by Readtrepreneur. It is not affiliated with the original author in any way "Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
An incredibly complex topic developed perfectly so any person interested in reading it can enjoy and learn a lot from the book. Richard Dawkins reveals many things we didn't know about Charles Darwin's natural selection theory. The Selfish Gene is an extremely informative book which will teach you a lot about the most primal side of any living creature. The Time for Thinking is Over! Time for Action! Why Choose Us, Readtrepreneur? Born to parents who were enthusiastic naturalists, and linked through his wider family to a clutch of accomplished scientists, Richard Dawkins was bound to have biology in his genes.
But what were the influences that shaped his life? And who inspired him to become the pioneering scientist and public thinker now famous and infamous to some around the world?
Skip to content. The Selfish Gene. The Selfish Gene Book Review:. The Solitary Self. The Solitary Self Book Review:. The Extended Selfish Gene. Prisoners of Reason. Author : S. Prisoners of Reason Book Review:. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth liv- ing is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.
A similar tendency to shoot the messenger is displayed by other crit- ics who have objected to what the r see as the disagreeable social, political or economic implications of The Selfish Gene.
The coincidence of fashionable theory with political events is messi- er than that. I do believe though, that when the history of the move to the right of the late comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the more contradictory attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, igth century com- petitive and xenophobic human nature into power.
The 'Sussex don' was the late John Maynard Smith, admired by Steven Rose and me alike, and he replied characteristically in a letter to New Scientist: 'What should we have done, fiddled the equations? Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes.
The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale. Unlike the Second Edition of , this Anniversary Edition adds no new material except this Introduction, and some extracts from re- views chosen by my three-times Editor and champion, Latha Menon.
Nobody but Latha could have filled the shoes of Michael Rodgers, K-selected Editor Extraordinary, whose indomitable belief in this book was the booster rocket of its first edition's trajectory. This edition does, however—and it is a source of particular joy to me—restore the original Foreword by Robert Trivers. I have men- tioned Bill Hamilton as one of the four intellectual heroes of the book.
Bob Trivers is another. His ideas dominate large parts of Chapters 9, 10 and 12, and the whole of Chapter 8. Not only is his Foreword a beautifully crafted introduction to the book: unusually, he chose the medium to announce to the world a brilliant new idea, his theory of the evolution of self-deception.
I am most grateful to him for giving permission for the original Foreword to grace this Anniversary Edition. This is paradoxical, but not in the obvious way. It is not one of those books that was reviled as revolutionary when published, then steadily won converts until it ended up so orthodox that we now wonder what the fuss was about.
Quite the contrary. From the outset the reviews were gratifyingly favourable and it was not seen, initially, as a controversial book. Its reputation for contentiousness took years to grow until, by now, it is widely regarded as a work of radical extremism. But over the very same years as the book's reputation for extremism has escalated, its actual content has seemed less and less extreme, more and more the common currency. The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in.
It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene's-eye view of nature.
It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory. In the opening pages of The Extended Phenotype I explained this using the metaphor of the Necker cube. This is a two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper, but it is perceived as a transparent, three-dimensional cube. Stare at it for a few seconds and it will change to face in a different direction.
Carry on staring and it will flip back to the original cube. Both cubes are equally compatible with the two-dimensional data on the retina, so the brain happily alternates between them.
Neither is more correct than the other. If properly understood they are equivalent; two views of the same truth. You can flip from one to the other and it will still be the same nee-Darwinism. I now think that this metaphor was too cautious. Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.
The Necker cube model is misleading because it suggests that the twexways of seeing are equally good. To be sure, the metaphor gets it partly right: 'angles', unlike theories, cannot be judged by experiment; we cannot resort to our familiar criteria of verification and falsification. But a change of vision can, at its best, achieve something loftier than a theory.
It can usher in a whole climate of thinking, in which many exciting and testable theories are born, and unimagined facts laid bare. The Necker cube metaphor misses this completely. It captures the idea of a flip in vision, but fails to do justice to its value.
What we are talking about is not a flip to an equivalent view but, in extreme cases, a transfiguration. I hasten to disclaim any such status for my own modest contribu- tions. Nevertheless, it is for this kind of reason that I prefer not to make a clear separation between science and its 'popularization'.
Expounding ideas that have hitherto appeared only in the technical literature is a difficult art. It requires insightful new twists of language and revealing metaphors. If you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing. And a new way of seeing, as I have just argued, can in its own right make an original contribution to science. Einstein himself was no mean popularizer, and I've often suspected that his vivid metaphors did more than just help the rest of us.
Didn't they also fuel his creative genius? The gene's-eye view of Darwinism is implicit in the writings of R. Fisher and the other great pioneers of neo-Darwinism in the early thirties, but was made explicit by W.
Hamilton and G. Williams in the sixties. For me their insight had a visionary quality. But I found their expressions of it too laconic, not full-throated enough.
I was convinced that an amplified and developed version could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain. I would write a book extolling the gene's-eye view of evolution. I began the book in when power-cuts resulting from industrial strife interrupted my laboratory research. The blackouts unfortunately from one point of view ended after a mere two chapters, and I shelved the project until I had a sabbatical leave in I now see that it was one of those mysterious periods in which new ideas are hovering in the air.
I wrote The Selfish Gene in something resembling a fever of excitement. When Oxford University Press approached me for a second edition they insisted that a conventional, comprehensive, page by page revision was inappropriate. There are some books that, from their conception, are obviously destined for a string of editions, and The Selfish Gene was not one of them.
The first edition borrowed a youthful quality from the times in which it was written. There was a whiffof revolution abroad, a streak of Wordsworth's blissful dawn. A pity to change a child of those times, fatten it with new facts or wrinkle it with complications and cautions. So, the original text should stand, warts, sexist pronouns and all. Notes at the end would cover corrections, responses and developments. And there should be entirely new chapters, on subjects whose novelty in their own time would carry forward the mood of revolutionary dawn.
The result was Chapters 12 and For these I took my inspiration from the two books in the field that have most excited me during the intervening years: Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, because it seems to offer some sort of hope for our future; and my own The ExtendedPhenotypebecause for me it dominated those years and because—for what that is worth—it is probably the finest thing I shall ever write. This was a fifty-minute documentary on game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation, produced by Jeremy Taylor.
The making of this film, and another, The Blind Watchmaker, by the same producer, gave me a new respect for his profession. At their best, Horizon producers some of their programmes can be seen in America, often repackaged under the name Nova turn themselves into advanced scholarly experts on the subject in hand.
Chapter 12 owes more than just its tide to my experience of working closely with Jeremy Taylor and the Horizon team, and I am grateful. Apparently some senior scientists claim joint authorship of a paper when all that they have contributed is bench space, grant money and an editorial read- through of the manuscript. For all I know, entire scientific repu- tations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty.
Perhaps journal editors should require signed testimony of what each author contributed. But that is by the way. My reason for raising the matter here is to make a contrast. Helena Cronin has done so much to improve every line—every word—that she should, but for her adamant refusal, be named as joint author of all the new portions of this book. I am deeply grateful to her, and sorry that my acknowledg- ment must be limited to this.
I also thank Mark Ridley, Marian Dawkins and Alan Grafen for advice and for constructive criticism of particular sections. To an evolutionist this cannot be so. There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection. Within each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so that the inheritable traits genes of the reproductively successful become more numerous in the next generation.
This is natural selec- tion: the non-random differential reproduction of genes. Natural selection has built us, and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our own identities. Although Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection is central to the study of social behavior especially when wedded to Mendel's genetics , it has been very widely neglected.
Whole indus- tries have grown up in the social sciences dedicated to the construc- tion of a pre-Darwinian and pre-Mendelian view of the social and psychological world.
Even within biology the neglect and misuse of Darwinian theory has been astonishing. Whatever the reasons for this strange development, there is evidence that it is coming to an end.
The great work of Darwin and Mendel has been extended by a growing number of workers, most notably by R. Fisher, W D. Hamilton, G. Williams, and J. Maynard Smith. Now, for the first time, this important body of social theory based on natural selection is presented in a simple and popular form by Richard Dawkins. One by one Dawkins takes up the major themes of the new work in social theory: the concepts of altruistic and selfish behavior, the genetical definition of self-interest, the evolution of aggressive behav- ior, kinship theory including parent-offspring relations and the evolution of the social insects , sex ratio theory, reciprocal altruism, deceit, and the natural selection of sex differences.
With a confidence that comes from mastering the underlying theory, Dawkins unfolds the new work with admirable clarity and style.
Broadly educated in bio- logy, he gives the reader a taste of its rich and fascinating literature. Dawkins also takes pains to make clear the logic of his arguments, so that the read- er, by applying the logic given, can extend the arguments and even take on Dawkins himself.
The arguments themselves extend in many directions. For example, if as Dawkins argues deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-decep- tion, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to be- tray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.
Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution. The recent progress in social theory has been substantial enough to have generated a minor flurry of counter-revolutionary activity.
It has been alleged, for example, that the recent progress is, in fact, part of a cyclical conspiracy to impede social advancement by making such advancement appear to be genetically impossible. Similar feeble thoughts have been strung together to produce the impression that Darwinian social theory is reactionary in its political implications. This is very far from the truth. The genetic equality of the sexes is, for the first time, clearly established by Fisher and Hamilton.
Theory and quantitative data from the social insects demonstrate that there is no inherent tendency for parents to dominate their offspring or vice versa. And the concepts of parental investment and female choice provide an objective and unbiased basis for viewing sex differences, a considerable advance over popular efforts to root women's powers and rights in the functionless swamp of biological identity.
In short, Dar- winian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships which, when more fully comprehended by ourselves, should revitalize our political understanding and provide the intellectual support for a science and medicine of psychology. In the process it should also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliche or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel about the truth.
We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.
One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others. Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. First the general reader, the layman. For him I have avoided technical jargon almost totally, and where I have had to use specialized words I have defined them.
I now wonder why we don't censor most of our jargon from learned journals too. I have assumed that the layman has no special knowledge, but I have not assumed that he is stupid. Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies. I have worked hard to try to popularize some subtle and complicated ideas in non-mathematical language, without losing their essence. I do not know how far I have succeeded in this, nor how far I have succeeded in another of my ambitions: to try to make the book as entertaining and gripping as its subject matter deserves.
I have long felt that biology ought to seem as exciting as a mystery story, for a mystery story is exactly what biology is. I do not dare to hope that I have conveyed more than a tiny fraction of the excitement which the subject has to offer. My second imaginary reader was the expert. He has been a harsh critic, sharply drawing in his breath at some of my analogies and figures of speech.
His favourite phrases are 'with the exception of; 'but on the other hand'; and 'ugh'. I listened to him attentively, and even completely rewrote one chapter entirely for his benefit, but in the end I have had to tell the story my way. The expert will still not be totally happy with the way I put things.
Yet my greatest hope is that even he will find something new here; a new way of looking at familiar ideas perhaps; even stimulation of new ideas of his own. If this is too high an aspiration, may I at least hope that the book will entertain him on a train? If he still has not made up his mind what field he wants to be an expert in, I hope to encourage him to give my own field of zoology a second glance.
There is a better reason for studying zoology than its possible 'usefulness', and the general likeableness of animals. This reason is that we animals are the most complicated and perfectly-designed pieces of machinery in the known universe. Put it like that, and it is hard to see why anybody studies anything else! For the student who has already committed himself to zoology, I hope my book may have some educational value.
He is having to work through the original papers and technical books on which my treatment is based. If he finds the original sources hard to digest, perhaps my non-mathematical interpretation may help, as an introduction and adjunct. There are obvious dangers in trying to appeal to three different kinds of reader. I can only say that I have been very conscious of these dangers, but that they seemed to be outweighed by the advantages of the attempt.
I am an ethologist, and this is a book about animal behaviour. My debt to the ethological tradition in which I was trained will be obvious. In particular, Niko Tinbergen does not realize the extent of his influence on me during the twelve years I worked under him at Oxford. The phrase 'survival machine', though not actually his own, might well be.
But ethology has recently been invigorated by an invasion of fresh ideas from sources not conventionally regarded as ethological. This book is largely based on these new ideas. Their originators are acknowledged in the appropriate places in the text; the dominant figures are G. Williams, J. Maynard Smith, W. Hamilton, and R. Imaginary readers may serve as targets for pious hopes and aspirations, but they are of less practical use than real readers and critics.
I am addicted to revising, and Marian Dawkins has been subjected to countless drafts and redrafts of every page. Her considerable knowledge of the biological literature and her under- standing of theoretical issues, together with her ceaseless encour- agement and moral support, have been essential to me.
He knows more about the subject than I do, and he has been generous and unstinting with his advice and suggestions. Glenys Thomson and Walter Bodmer criticized my handling of genetic topics kindly but firmly. I fear that my revision may still not fully satisfy them, but I hope they will find it somewhat improved. I am most grateful for their time and patience. John Dawkins exercised an unerring eye for misleading phraseology, and made excellent constructive suggestions for re-wording.
I could not have wished for a more suitable 'intelligent layman' than Maxwell Stamp. His perceptive spotting of an important general flaw in the style of the first draft did much for the final version. Pat Searle and Stephanie Verhoeven not only typed with skill, but encouraged me by seeming to do so with enjoyment. Finally, I wish to thank Michael Rodgers of Oxford University Press who, in addition to helpfully criticizing the manu- script, worked far beyond the call of duty in attending to all aspects of the production of this book.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, hi order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet? His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.
Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to supersti- tion when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. Simpson put it thus: 'The pouit I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.
Zoology is still a minority subject hi universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance.
Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change hi time. In any case, this book is not intended as a general advocacy of Darwinism. Instead, it will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. Apart from its academic interest, the human importance of this subject is obvious.
The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species or the group rather than the good of the individual or the gene. It is ironic that Ashley Montagu should criticize Lorenz as a 'direct descendant of the "nature red in tooth and claw" thinkers of the nineteenth century As I understand Lorenz's view of evolution, he would be very much at one with Montagu in rejecting the implications of Tennyson's famous phrase.
Unlike both of them, I think 'nature red in tooth and claw' sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably. Before beginning on my argument itself, I want to explain briefly what sort of an argument it is, and what sort of an argument it is not.
If we were told that a man had lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was. We might expect that he would have qualities such as toughness, a quick trigger finger, and the ability to attract loyal friends. These would not be infallible deduc- tions, but you can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chi- cago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entities us to expect certain qualities in our genes.
I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live.
But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true. This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us under- stand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. As a corollary to these remarks about teaching, it is a fallacy— incidentally a very common one—to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable.
Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down. Some would say that culture is so important that genes, whether selfish or not, are virtually irrelevant to the understanding of human nature.
Others would disagree. It all depends where you stand in the debate over 'nature versus nurture' as determinants of human attributes. Naturally I have an opinion on this, but I am not going to express it, except insofar as it is implicit in the view of culture that I shall present in the final chapter.
If genes really turn out to be totally irrelevant to the determination of modern human behaviour, if we really are unique among animals in this respect, it is, at the very least, still interesting to inquire about the rule to which we have so recently become the exception. And if our species is not so exceptional as we might like to think, it is even more important that we should study the rule.
The third thing this book is not is a descriptive account of the detailed behaviour of man or of any other particular animal species. I shall not be saying: 'If you look at the behaviour of baboons you will find it to be selfish; therefore the chances are that human behaviour is selfish also'. The logic of my 'Chicago gangster' argument is quite different. It is this. Humans and baboons have evolved by natural selection.
If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. Therefore we must expect that when we go and look at the behaviour of baboons, humans, and all other living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is wrong, if we observe that human behaviour is truly altruistic, then we shall be faced with something puzzling, something that needs explaining.
Before going any further, we need a definition. An entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity's welfare at the expense of its own.
Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect. One of the surprising consequences of the modern version of the Darwinian theory is that apparently trivial tiny influences on survival probability can have a major impact on evolution. This is because of the enormous time available for such influences to make themselves felt.
It is important to realize that the above definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not concerned here with the psychology of motives. I am not going to argue about whether people who behave altruistically are 'really' doing it for secret or subconscious selfish motives. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, and maybe we can never know, but in any case that is not what this book is about. My definition is concerned only with whether the effect of an act is to lower or raise the survival prospects of the presumed altruist and the survival prospects of the presumed beneficiary.
It is a very complicated business to demonstrate the effects of behaviour on long-term survival prospects. In practice, when we apply the definition to real behaviour, we must qualify it with the word 'apparently'. An apparently altruistic act is one that looks, superficially, as if it must tend to make the altruist more likely however slightly to die, and the recipient more likely to survive. It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
I am going to give some examples of apparently selfish and apparently altruistic behaviour. It is difficult to suppress subjective habits of thought when we are dealing with our own species, so I shall choose examples from other animals instead.
First some miscel- laneous examples of selfish behaviour by individual animals. Blackheaded gulls nest in large colonies, the nests being only a few feet apart. When the chicks first hatch out they are small and defenceless and easy to swallow. It is quite common for a gull to wait until a neighbour's back is turned, perhaps while it is away fishing, and then pounce on one of the neighbour's chicks and swallow it whole.
It thereby obtains a good nutritious meal, without having to go to the trouble of catching a fish, and without having to leave its own nest unprotected. More well known is the macabre cannibalism of female praying mantises. Mantises are large carnivorous insects. They normally eat smaller insects such as flies, but they will attack almost anything that moves. When they mate, the male cautiously creeps up on the female, mounts her, and copulates.
If the female gets the chance, she will eat him, beginning by biting his head off, either as the male is approaching, or immediately after he mounts, or after they separate. It might seem most sensible for her to wait until copulation is over before she starts to eat him. But the loss of the head does not seem to throw the rest of the male's body off its sexual stride.
Indeed, since the insect head is the seat of some inhibitory nerve centres, it is possible that the female improves the male's sexual performance by eating his head. The primary one is that she obtains a good meal. The word 'selfish' may seem an understatement for such extreme cases as cannibalism, although these fit well with our definition.
Perhaps we can sympathize more directly with the reported cowardly behaviour of emperor penguins in the Antarctic. They have been seen standing on the brink of the water, hesitating before diving in, because of the danger of being eaten by seals. If only one of them would dive in, the rest would know whedier there was a seal there or not.
Naturally nobody wants to be the guinea pig, so they wait, and sometimes even try to push each other in. Now for some examples of apparently altruistic behaviour. The stinging behaviour of worker bees is a very effective defence against honey robbers. But the bees who do the stinging are kamikaze fighters. In the act of stinging, vital internal organs are usually torn out of the body, and the bee dies soon afterwards.
Her suicide mission may have saved the colony's vital food stocks, but she herself is not around to reap the benefits. By our definition this is an altruistic behavioural act. Remember that we are not talking about conscious motives.
They may or may not be present, both here and in the selfishness examples, but they are irrelevant to our definition. Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them.
Many small birds, when they see a flying predator such as a hawk, give a characteristic 'alarm call', upon which the whole flock takes appropriate evasive action.
There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particu- larly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk, but it nevertheless seems, at least at first sight, to qualify as an altruistic act by our definition.
The commonest and most conspicuous acts of animal altruism are done by parents, especially mothers, towards their children. They may incubate them, either in nests or in their own bodies, feed them at enormous cost to themselves, and take great risks in protecting them from predators.
To take just one particular example, many ground-nesting birds perform a so-called 'distraction display' when a predator such as a fox approaches. The parent bird limps away from the nest, holding out one wing as though it were broken.
The predator, sensing easy prey, is lured away from the nest containing the chicks. Finally the parent bird gives up its pretence and leaps into the air just in time to escape the fox's jaws. It has probably saved the life of its nestlings, but at some risk to itself. I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization. These stories are simply intended as illustrations of what I mean by altruistic and selfish behaviour at the level of individuals.
This book will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law that I am calling gene selfishness.
But first I must deal with a particular erroneous explanation for altruism, because it is widely known, and even widely taught in schools. It is easy to see how this idea got its start in biology.
Much of an animal's life is devoted to reproduction, and most of the acts of altruistic self- sacrifice that are observed in nature are performed by parents towards their young. It requires only a slight over-stretching of logic to deduce that the 'function' of reproduction is 'to' perpetuate the species.
From this it is but a further short false step to conclude diat animals will in general behave in such a way as to favour the perpetuation of the species. Altruism towards fellow members of the species seems to follow. This line of thought can be put into vaguely Darwinian terms. Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the 'fittest'.
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