RICHARD DAWKINS

The impact of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) was such that people now trade stories about their first encounter with it, much as they do about other momentous events. For me, it was nearly three decades ago. Strolling the narrow streets along the Arno, I turned into my favourite libreria – a dusty Florentine mousehole sheltering a small but select group of books tended by the ancient Luigi, a gruff but kindly bibliophile. Greeting me with his customary “Buongiorno, Professore!”, Luigi bestirred himself from his chair, brushing his beloved tomcat Orsino from an ample lap. “I have some new books in English for you to see.” I sighed, realizing that there was only a small chance that among them I would find anything on the massacre of Huguenots at Wassy in 1562, my special interest at the time. As I scanned the books in their cardboard box, one of them caught my eye: a slim volume with a garish Dalí-esque cover, called The Selfish Gene. “That’s odd”, I said to myself. “I’ve been working on genes all my life, but I’ve never come across a selfish one.” I started to read the first chapter, which was intriguingly titled “Why are people?”: Intelligent life first comes of age when it works out the reasons for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?”I was hooked. It was thus, for a paltry 3,000 lira, that I came to own Richard Dawkins’s first book.This – like a hundred other Selfish Gene stories – is not strictly true. The reality of my first encounter with the book was much more prosaic: I was ordered to read it in graduate school. But one part of my pretentious fantasy is not exaggerated: the impact of the first sentences of The Selfish Gene. For those sentences embody Dawkins’s entire appeal: the deep thought, the stylish expression, and the sheer self-assurance that lets you know from the outset that you are in the hands of a master. For this is no ordinary science book. Yes, it is about evolutionary biology, but its message, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, still resonates deeply after thirty years. It is a brilliant exposition of how natural selection works, laying out in clear and compelling detail, for both scientists and lay readers, the process that produced all of life’s diversity. Using the metaphor of genes as selfish entities, whose “motivation” is simply to copy themselves at the expense of other genes, Dawkins describes a tale of competition – of nature red in tooth and claw – but in which genes are the combatants, fighting their battles by co-opting the bodies of their carriers. It is nothing less than the story of what made us who we are.The Selfish Gene has also been immensely controversial. Understandably, people don’t like to see themselves as marionettes dancing on strings of DNA, however brilliantly described: Now they [the genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.Indeed, as Dawkins notes in the new introduction to this thirtieth anniversary edition of the book, this bleak picture of evolution, and its implications for human behaviour, has driven some to depression and even thoughts of suicide. It has also aroused the ire of those who believe that the selfish-gene view promotes extreme genetic determinism and negates free will. But, with well over a million copies sold in twenty languages, The Selfish Gene remains as popular as ever. As well as a new introduction, the anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene includes the original foreword by the evolutionist Robert Trivers (omitted in the second edition), and excerpts from some major reviews by evolutionists. The reasons for its popularity and influence are also explored in a fine collection of essays issued simultaneously by Oxford University Press: Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think, edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, two of Dawkins’s former students. The collection includes twenty-four contributions from a variety of writers and scholars, including the novelist Philip Pullman, Richard Harries (Bishop of Oxford), the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the linguist Steven Pinker and the biologist John Krebs. Their essays cover not just exegesis of The Selfish Gene, but also Dawkins’s general contributions to biology and its philosophy. The section on Dawkins and religion, though tangential to The Selfish Gene, is well worth reading given his vehement hostility to theistic belief.While such festschrifts are usually deadly dull, designed to flatter rather than enlighten, this is a delightful exception, containing a number of thought-provoking essays that go far beyond mere appreciation of Dawkins’s book. They are in fact essential in understanding the book’s influence. The simultaneous publication of both volumes allows us to re-examine the impact of The Selfish Gene. How well has it aged? Is it still important? And did Dawkins really change the way we think?First, we need to understand what The Selfish Gene was about, for even its subject has been widely misunderstood. This is largely because the book’s title led people into two errors. The first was to believe that genes themselves are selfish. This is nonsense, of course, for genes are simply mindless molecules. What Dawkins actually showed was that, under natural selection, genes behave as if they were actors having selfish motivations. Such metaphors are not uncommon in science. Physicists, for example, show that when light bends through a prism it acts as if it were selecting the shortest path, though of course light cannot know in advance which path is shortest. But the metaphor of the selfish gene runs far deeper, for it instantly makes clear how natural selection operates and also helps us to predict how it would work in complex situations, as when different individuals have conflicting genetic interests. This, in turn, helps us to understand how a “blind process” can create complex organisms and behaviours – an understanding desperately needed as creationism (and its denial of natural selection) periodically resurfaces. And Dawkins’s metaphor was just as useful to scientists as to laymen. As Alan Grafen notes, “A generation of biologists learnt about natural selection from The Selfish Gene”.The second misunderstanding of Dawkins’s book was the notion that selfish genes must inevitably produce selfish behaviour. In reality, it describes how, to attain their selfish ends, genes can cooperate with each other (as Dawkins explains, the book might as well have been called “The Cooperative Gene”) and can produce social behaviours in animals. To do this, Dawkins begins by describing how natural selection works to build bodies and behaviours, which he does with characteristically brilliant use of metaphors, comparing genes variously to books in a library, cards in a deck and oarsmen in a scull. The widespread but mistaken idea that natural selection furthers “the good of the species” is disposed of handily, as Dawkins shows that selection acts on genes and usually (but not always) creates what is good for the vessel carrying those genes: the individual. Indeed, selfish genes can produce results that are disastrous for the species, such as overcrowding and extinction.But how can natural selection explain social behaviours, including cooperation and apparent altruism? If genes are selfish, and natural selection favours those conferring the greatest benefits to their carriers (measured as relative reproductive success), why should cooperation be so widespread? Lions hunt in groups, baboons groom each other, and mothers and fathers collaborate in raising young. Moreover, some animals risk their lives for others in apparent displays of altruism. In some bird species, for example, an individual will produce an “alarm call” when a hawk flies overhead, risking its own life to alert other members of its group. These are complex issues, first analysed (in arcane scientific journals) by famous evolutionists like Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith, George Williams and William Hamilton. But with his gift for explaining without dumbing down the science, Dawkins takes on ideas such as “kin selection” (selection based on shared genes, which allows selfish genes to create behaviours that benefit relatives likely to be carrying the same genes), and “reciprocal altruism” (“you scratch my back . . .”), which is not true altruism, but a form of mutualism that benefits both individuals. According to evolutionary theory, true altruism, in which individuals sacrifice more than they benefit, cannot evolve, and shouldn’t be seen in nonhuman animals. (It isn’t.) A separate chapter deals with everyone’s favourite topic, the battle of the sexes. After showing how the existence of sex itself remains an evolutionary mystery (why would selfish genes want to be diluted with those coming from another sex?), Dawkins unravels the delicate dance of courtship and child rearing, in which males first try to impress females, but then desert them after they have mated. For a mother, this conflict is never-ending, for the selfish genes of her young try to extract more care from her than she wants to supply, as in battles over weaning. Dawkins’s tour de force, then, was to mine the ore of technical genetic theory from scattered scientific journals and forge it into a powerful, unified conceptual structure – the gene’s eye view – that was coherent, comprehensible to everyone and an inspiration for further work. The selfish-gene perspective, filtering back into biology, helped to clarify many problems once considered baffling. Dawkins’s synthesis is accompanied by many of his own original ideas and suggestions. One, for example, mentioned in the essay by John Krebs, was an offhand remark that revolutionized the study of animal communication. Dawkins suggested that the function of this communication was not so much to transmit one’s own desires as to manipulate the behaviour of others. Indeed, how else could it be if communication derives from selfish genes? This idea has become part of the dogma of behavioural biology.It is not the public alone, then, that accounts for the million-plus sales. Straddling the boundary between popular science bestseller and scientific treatise, The Selfish Gene has infused all modern discourse on evolution and natural selection, by layman and scientist alike. This fact, combined with its incomparable prose style, makes the book a masterpiece. It is one of the two books on evolution I would recommend to anyone aspiring to be broadly educated (the other, of course, is Darwin’s Origin of Species). But science moves on, so how have the book’s arguments fared in the past three decades? Although there have been squabbles about whether the gene or the carrier of the gene (the individual) is the object “selected”, most evolutionists have come down on the side of the gene. (In fact, evolution is now usually defined as “changes in frequencies of genes”.) And there is widespread acceptance that bodies and behaviours are largely Dawkins’s “lumbering robots”, with most features evolved to serve the constituent genes. Dawkins’s second book, The Extended Phenotype (which he considers his finest intellectual achievement), extends the gene-centric view beyond bodies to all that results from gene-driven behaviours. This book, too, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand evolution. A few ideas in The Selfish Gene have not aged well. In particular, one theory proposed by Dawkins has definitely been a scientific flop, despite its perennial popularity. This is the theory of memes. In Chapter 11, Dawkins suggested that genes were not the only things that could evolve by selection. Human culture itself, he surmised, could be seen as the evolving result of selection among “memes”, which he defined as “units of cultural transmission”. Memes include ideas, slogans, songs, inventions, religious beliefs – anything that can be communicated between humans through learning or imitation. Dawkins supposed that memes differed in their rates of spread, and that human culture is a compilation of memes that “replicated” faster than their competitors. This faster replication was presumed to rest on properties that made some memes more “copy-friendly”. As an example, Dawkins used the idea of God, which he saw as a meme whose power and endurance rested on its being a “superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence”. “Memetics”, as the study of memes is called, is supposed to explain things like why Christianity spread faster than Judaism, and why the music of Mozart endures while that of Salieri languishes.It is important to add that in this book and his subsequent writings, Dawkins has consistently maintained that memetics was meant not as an all-encompassing theory of human culture, but only as a way of showing that selection was not limited to genes alone. As he noted in 2004, in Slate, “My enthusiasm for it was never, ever as a contribution to the study of human culture . . . . It was always intended to be a way of dramatizing the idea that a Darwinian replicator doesn’t have to be a gene”.Yet, despite these caveats, the world has eagerly adopted memes. There is a Journal of Memetics, memes surface constantly in scholarly discourse as well as on the internet, and memes form the basis of many recent books (for example, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, which seeks to explain religion largely in terms of memes, and Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, which explains everything in terms of memes). But memetics is also fraught with problems, in both theory and practice. Many of these problems are discussed in the essay volume, where they form a recurring critical theme. Among them are the differences between genes and memes that make comparisons between them risky. Memes, unlike genes, are hard to define or recognize (is the King James Bible a meme, or only some of its chapters or even verses?). Unlike genes, memes are not replicated faithfully (people change and combine ideas and fashions as they pass them on). Not all culture is changed by imitation (many wars are fought not by people who share their leaders’ ideas, but by involuntary conscripts, and some religions are not chosen but simply forced upon people by their rulers). And as Marek Kohn points out, Dawkins himself suggested that the function of communication is not the replication of one’s ideas, but the manipulation of other people’s actions. Even the mechanism of cultural transmission, then, works against memetics. The biggest problem with memetics, however, is not mentioned in these essays. It is that, in practice, the discipline consists of post-facto explanations of why one meme had a higher “spreadability” than another, so that it becomes largely an exercise in tautology. Memes are not, as their proponents often claim, disembodied objects having innate fitnesses. Rather, they are products of human minds, and their spread (or lack thereof) depends on human psychology. If you want to explain why Christianity replaced Roman religion, you get nowhere by claiming that Christ was a better meme than Jove. Trying to understand cultural evolution without concentrating on the reasons why people adopt some notions but not others misses the very reason why culture evolves. And once you have considered those reasons, of what use are memes? This is why, amid the noise from memeticists, the biologist Robert Aunger concludes in his essay that . . . no significant body of empirical research has grown up around the meme concept . . . nor has memetics made empirically testable propositions or generated much in the way of experimental or observational data. In fact the memetic literature remains devoted almost exclusively to theoretical antagonisms, internecine battles, and scholastic elucidations of prior writings on memes. This is typically the sign of a science in search of a subject matter.Surely, given his caveats about the scope of memetics, Dawkins must agree with this. Yet, despite his reservations, he continues to show paternal pride in memes. In his introduction to Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1998), for instance, he points out that an internet search yields thousands of references to memes, as well as many meme chat groups. And he adds with obvious pleasure that “meme” is an official entry in The Oxford English Dictionary. Dawkins’s ambivalence towards memes is not hard to understand. It is difficult to disown an idea, however problematic, if it has helped to make you a celebrity. But intellectual courage demands that you admit when your ideas do not add up – and might be expected in someone like Dawkins, who has shown immense courage in standing up before the world as a vocal opponent of religion. It is time for him to detach himself from the herd of people who have taken memes far more seriously than he intended, and to reprove these advocates for their excesses.Finally, what of free will? The Selfish Gene has led many people to worry that we may indeed be robots controlled by genomes that evolved in our savannah-dwelling ancestors. Do we have any scope for free will? If evolutionary psychology has its say, the answer would be “not very much”. In one of the collection’s best essays, Ullica Segerstråle, a sociologist of science, shows how The Selfish Gene was one of the founding documents of evolutionary psychology, the discipline that sees human behaviour as largely genetically determined (the essay on family behaviour by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson typifies this view). Dawkins realized early on how depressing genetic determinism can be, and has always maintained that, of all species, only humans can wilfully overcome their genetic heritage. While true altruism cannot be produced by genes, humans might reason their way towards niceness. Dawkins raised this possibility at the end of the first edition of The Selfish Gene: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators”. And on page three, he urges, “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish”. But what does it mean to say that we can overcome our genetic tendencies? After all, our brain, where free will supposedly arises, is also an evolved organ: selfish genes “built us, body and mind”. Dawkins obviously believes that evolution built us a brain capable of allowing behavioural flexibility, and we can use it to consciously override our genes to teach virtuous behaviour. Well, we can teach, but can we learn? It may not be so easy to overcome genetically hard-wired behaviours such as greed, xenophobia and sexual desire. After all, in our monogamous society, where fidelity is preached constantly, rates of adultery hover around 50 per cent. Dawkins has never expressed an opinion about whether we have free will, and he has also been notably silent about evolutionary psychology and its excesses. While he is under no obligation to address such things, many of us would like to know exactly how he reconciles human freedom with genetic determinism. I suspect that, like me, he is conflicted.But that one wants further enlightenment from Dawkins only proves how immensely influential and provocative he has been. And whatever the darker implications of his work, they are more than offset by the luminosity of his prose, and by his infectious awe before a natural process that created the stunning diversity of life. Philip Pullman sums it up in his wonderful essay on Dawkins’s writing: He is a coiner of memorable phrases; he is a ferocious and implacable opponent of those who water the dark roots of superstition. But mainly he celebrates. He is a storyteller whose tale is true, and it’s a tale of the inexhaustible wonder of the physical world, and of ourselves and of our origins.