Book reviews - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
★★★★★
Why review a modern classic?
To call Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene a success is almost comically understated. It has gone through countless editions and been translated into numerous languages. It has generated a torrent of professional and amateur reviews, provoked enduring debate and controversy, and inspired everything from wikipedia entries to YouTube explainers—including a full animated playlist summarizing each of its 13 chapters. With so much commentary already out there, it’s reasonable to ask: why add yet another review?
I have two answers—appropriately enough, one selfish and one altruistic.
The selfish reason is that I write reviews primarily for myself, as a kind of aide-memoire. Human memory is famously fickle, and the act of reviewing forces me to distill what I’ve learned, what struck me as valuable (or not), and what’s worth revisiting. When some future version of me wonders what he remembers of The Selfish Gene—and whether it deserves a reread—he can turn to the impressions of his younger, likely much dimmer self. It’s a sort of external CPU, and jokes aside, one whose judgments he’ll probably still understand, and maybe even agree with.
The altruistic reason is that reviews can be useful to others—especially those with similar tastes, values, or intellectual curiosity—trying to decide whether a book is worth their time.
With that in mind, this review won’t dwell on the book’s detailed contents, which are readily available elsewhere. Instead, I’ll begin with a brief summary of its central ideas, followed by a more subjective account of what I found interesting, valuable, or surprising in The Selfish Gene.
In a nutshell
Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene presents a gene-centered view of evolution. Instead of seeing evolution as primarily acting on organisms or species, Dawkins argues that natural selection operates at the level of genes, which use organisms as “survival machines” to propagate themselves. Genes that are better at replicating tend to increase in frequency over generations, not because they benefit the group or the species, but because they outcompete rival genes. This perspective helps explain not only straightforward behaviors like survival and reproduction, but also seemingly paradoxical phenomena like altruism. For instance, kin selection shows how genes can promote self-sacrificing behaviors if they benefit close relatives who are likely to share the same genes.
Throughout the book, Dawkins emphasizes that calling genes “selfish” is a metaphor: it does not mean genes have intentions, but that their effects can be modeled as if they strive to replicate. He explores concepts like replicators and vehicles, memes as cultural analogs of genes, and evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) in the context of game theory. By the end, Dawkins turns to human behavior and morality, acknowledging that although we are shaped by selfish genes, we are not bound to obey them. Instead, through conscious reflection and culture, humans can rebel against their genetic programming and choose values that transcend purely evolutionary imperatives.
Selfish Thoughts
This is the second book I’ve read by Richard Dawkins—the first being The Greatest Show on Earth, which I picked up over a decade ago. I don’t usually read much biology—popular or otherwise—and my scientific tastes tend to lean more toward mathematics (obviously!) and the least useful, most abstract corners of physics. Still, I think every cultured person should have a grasp of the basics of all scientific knowledge. And besides, Dawkins is a sharp and entertaining writer, which certainly helps.
I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the central thesis of The Selfish Gene: as an English teacher for adults, I’ve put together at least a couple of listening tasks using Dawkins videos (and my earlier read came from the school library). Even so, I was struck by how self-evident and uncontroversial the book’s arguments felt. I suspect this is largely because I already share many of Dawkins’s background assumptions—and because I’ve absorbed a number of those ideas, memetically speaking, from books and thinkers that were directly inspired by or adjacent to The Selfish Gene. Some of these beliefs include:
That the natural world, including life and mind, can be explained without recourse to supernatural forces.
That science offers a uniquely powerful lens through which to understand ourselves and the world.
That truth matters more than comfort, and we should follow evidence wherever it leads, even if the result is disillusionment.
That human beings are not the center of the universe, but a contingent product of blind evolutionary processes.
That reason, skepticism, and clarity of thought are intellectual virtues to be cultivated and defended.
That culture, like biology, evolves—sometimes in irrational ways—and can be studied and criticized accordingly.
That it is possible—and desirable—for humans to transcend their biological programming through reflection, culture, and deliberation.
The book seems to have been quite controversial when it was first published. Dawkins attributes much of the backlash to a misunderstanding of the title, along with the social and intellectual anxieties that tend to flare up whenever evolutionary theory is extended to human behavior and differences. These anxieties are not baseless—we’re still living in the long shadow of Social Darwinism and its consequences in the 19th and early 20th centuries—but they can clearly be taken too far, as in the case of Lysenkoism: the Soviet rejection of genetics as a “bourgeois and fascist pseudoscience.”
When it comes to altruism, there’s a deeper, more enduring tension that harks back to traditional religious objections to atheism—namely, the idea that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted.” This continues to haunt many humanists, who, often uneasily, feel the need to defend the existence of objective moral truths in a godless universe. From that perspective, biological explanations of altruism present a genuine challenge: they offer a simpler, more parsimonious account of how altruistic behavior could have emerged, not only in humans but across the living world—without invoking any transcendent moral order.
Personally, I have no issue with this view. Like Dawkins, I would argue that self-interest—whether at the level of the individual or the gene—poses no inherent problem. On the contrary, it provides a foundational basis for a rational, self-interested ethics, in which individuals seek to maximize their own flourishing and, secondarily (and instrumentally), that of their group. This line of thought, once refined and formalized, leads naturally toward a contractualist tradition that stretches from Thomas Hobbes to David Gauthier. But even if one finds this insufficient or unappealing, there’s nothing to prevent humans from using reason and imagination to articulate alternative, more benevolent ethical systems—even in the absence of any objective moral foundation. Mathematicians learned to live with the unsettling implications of incompleteness in the early 20th century; philosophers and humanists can learn to cope with moral uncertainty just as well.
