Contagious Metaphor by Mitchell Peta;

Author:Mitchell, Peta;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Selfish genes, selfish memes

In 1976, Dawkins published his acclaimed and influential first book, The Selfish Gene. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Dawkins had published a number of academic articles in the field of ethology, but The Selfish Gene marked his first real foray into writing for a broader, crossover audience. Dawkins’s hope for The Selfish Gene, a desire he expresses in the preface to the first edition, was that it would make biology as ‘exciting as a mystery story, for a mystery story is exactly what biology is’ (1976, p. ix). As such, he suggests, the book ‘should be read almost as though it were science fiction’, even though it is definitively a work of ‘science’ (1976, p. ix). In writing his crossover book, Dawkins states that he imagined three readers whom he would need to satisfy: the general reader, the expert and the student. Of these three, it is the expert reader that Dawkins is most tentative about having satisfied:

The expert will still not be totally happy with the way I put things. Yet my greatest hope is that even he [sic] will find something new here; a 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? (Dawkins 1976, p. x)

Ostensibly, The Selfish Gene is devoted to debunking the theory of ‘group selection’, a theory based on the reassuring (but erroneous, Dawkins is quick to point out) notion that individual members of a group, a population or a species ‘are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group’ (Dawkins 1976, p. 8). Group selection theory holds that this, in turn, can give the altruistically minded group a distinct evolutionary advantage over a ‘selfish’ one, leading to a world ‘populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals’ (1976, p. 8). Against this outdated position, which he argues ‘contravene[s] orthodox Darwinian theory’ (1976, p. 9), Dawkins proposes a theory of gene selection. More specifically, he proposes a ‘fundamental law [of] gene selfishness’, one that he suggests can explain both the phenomenon of selfishness and that of altruism (1976, p. 7). In his gene-centred view of evolution, Dawkins characterizes genes as ‘selfish replicators’, existing only to make copies (though not always exact) of themselves. Humans, he says, are simply the selfish genes’ ‘survival machines’ (1976, p. 21).

In the 35 years since its publication, The Selfish Gene has become a classic of popular science and an exemplar of the genre. As Soraya de Chadarevian notes in her thirtieth-anniversary essay on the publishing history of The Selfish Gene, by 2006 the book had ‘sold over a million copies’ and had been ‘translated into over 20 languages’ (2007, pp. 31–2). Further, biologist Alan Grafen makes strong claims for the book’s direct and lasting influence on his field, arguing that he is ‘convinced that The Selfish Gene brought about a silent and almost immediate revolution in biology’ (2006, p.

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