The Selfish Gene
Dawkins's gene-centred view of evolution and the introduction of the meme
Tradition: Modern evolutionary biology / philosophical naturalism
Genes are the units of selection — and bodies are vehicles by which genes propagate themselves
The Selfish Gene is the most-read work of late-twentieth-century popular science and one of the central statements of the gene-centred view of evolution. Dawkins argues that the units of natural selection are genes, not organisms or species: bodies and the rest of organism-level biology are "vehicles" by which gene-replicators propagate themselves across generations. The work introduces the concept of the meme — cultural replicators that evolve under analogous selection pressures — and develops the evolutionary-biological framework that has shaped sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and the philosophical-naturalist worldview of the past five decades. The 2006 thirtieth-anniversary edition includes Dawkins's extensive reflections on the book's reception.
Author
Editions cited
- The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford, 2006)
- The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976; 2nd ed. 1989)
School Embodiments
The Selfish Gene is one of the most influential modern statements of biological naturalism. Every later evolutionary-philosophical discussion engages it.
"We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." (Selfish Gene, Preface)
The treatment of genes (and memes) as replicating information units is one of the principal modern sources of information-theoretic ontology — the worldview in which reality is fundamentally informational.
"A gene is a unit of information that codes for a specific function." (Selfish Gene, paraphrasing)
A complicated relationship: critical realists engage Dawkins's reductionism critically while sharing the broad commitment to real causal mechanisms underlying evolutionary phenomena.
"Genes really are particles." (Selfish Gene ch. 3, paraphrasing)
Robust scientific realism: genes are real, evolutionary processes are real causal mechanisms, scientific theory tracks real features of biology.
"Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun." (Selfish Gene, opening)
Modern analytic philosophy of biology (Sober, Kitcher, Godfrey-Smith) engages the Selfish Gene as one of the principal contemporary evolutionary-philosophical positions.
"The selfish gene's eye view." (Selfish Gene, methodological formula)
The meme concept and the broader information-theoretic biology have shaped transhumanist and posthumanist philosophy.
"Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain." (Selfish Gene ch. 11)
Dawkins's working scientific realism — tested by predictive success — is pragmatic-realist in temperament.
"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes." (Selfish Gene ch. 1)
The information-theoretic biology of the Selfish Gene has been read alongside simulation-theoretic positions as a contemporary informational metaphysics of life.
"Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information." (Dawkins, River Out of Eden — formula consonant with the Selfish Gene's ontology)
The book's reception has been read as philosophically nihilistic by critics (Mary Midgley, Stephen Jay Gould); Dawkins has resisted this reading vigorously.
"Universe has no design, no purpose, no good, no evil." (Dawkins, River Out of Eden — formula often quoted against the Selfish Gene)
Internal Tensions
The Selfish Gene's "selfish" rhetoric is often misread as endorsing ethical egoism; Dawkins responds in the 2006 introduction and elsewhere that the title refers to genes, not organisms, and that the book argues against ethical egoism. The relation between gene-level selection and higher-level phenomena (group selection, multi-level selection) has been the central debate in evolutionary biology since 1976.
I. Time
Real evolutionary time — billions of years of gene-level selection. Linear and unidirectional.
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II. Space
Standard physical space; not theorised philosophically.
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III. Matter
Real, substantival. Genes are physical molecules (DNA segments). Conserved at the standard biological level.
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IV. Observer
The Dawkinsian observer is the embodied human animal — plural, active, with no metaphysical agency. Moral authority is reason.
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V. Energy
Standard thermodynamic-biological energetics. Irreversibly entropic at the local level.
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VI. Information
Genes are units of information; information is substantival, discrete, conserved across generations (with variation). Personal information not conserved across death.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Selfish Gene resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 9 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
4 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.