The Selfish Gene

So here's a book. A book! And a nonfiction book at that. Hell, it's the second-oldest book in my backlog! Checking a lot of boxes today, yessir. This is a pretty famous one for popular science, as it's Richard Dawkins' first book and the one in which he developed or at least popularized the gene-centric view of evolution.

It's got a misleading title, so let's start there. This isn't about a gene for selfish behavior. Rather, on the contrary, it's about the idea that each gene "cares" more about its own propagation through a population and future generations than it does about whether or not its own "host" lives or dies; in that sense, it is "selfish," willing to sacrifice the particular creature it inhabits in order to allow more copies of itself to survive. Basically, it's a biologically consistent rationale for altruistic behavior, like when mothers sacrifice themselves for their young, or how brothers are more loyal to one another than cousins, who are more loyal than distant cousins, and so on. You might as well call the book "The Selfless Gene" - or as one of Dawkins' contemporaries suggested, "The Immortal Gene."

Take, for example, when a bird gives off an alarm call to indicate that a predator is nearby. This individual bird is putting itself at a slightly higher risk of being killed, but it's drastically lowering the flock's overall chance of losing a member. Thus the gene for this sort of altruistic behavior, as much as it exists, is more likely to survive than a gene for selfish behavior would in a similar population.

The meat of Dawkins' theory is played out in nonzero sum games and computer simulations, which I enjoyed a lot. "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is a win-win, assuming it takes more effort to scratch your own back than someone else's back. Of course, the biggest win would be to have someone scratch your back without you returning the favor. Dawkins plays out all kinds of simulations to find the ideal stable population models with different simple behavior patterns (strategies) like "cheater" (never returns a favor) and "sucker" (always returns a favor) and "forgiving" (stiffs a cheater once or twice, but then resumes trusting) and "grudge-holder" (never returns a favor to someone who's cheated him in the past) and "wild card" (either scratches or doesn't scratch at random). This is all just an expansion of prisoner's dilemma game theory, and what Dawkins found was that stable strategy distributions will have most individuals acting altruistically and fairly, with a few cheaters in the mix - mostly mirrors reality, no?

There's also plenty of "relatedness" math at play that sounds like the trolley problem - is it better to sacrifice one of your own children, or two of your own brothers? - with entire chapters related to the subtle ongoing power balance between children and parents, hosts and parasites, and males and females of the same species.

The book was written in 1976 (though my own edition is from 1989 with a small expansion) and it still holds up after more than forty years (or almost thirty), albeit with a few very dated computer analogies and some very old fashioned language and perspectives in the "Battle of the Sexes" chapter.

The book's not without its detractors, whose rebuttals mostly focus on how the book doesn't give enough credit to the many other factors responsible for evolution - environmental factors, inter-species and intra-species competition, gene expression, and so on - but I didn't take the book to be a be-all, end-all take on evolution boiled down to 260 pages. That would be a crazy thing to do!

Oh, and lastly, and how did I almost forget this - memes! Right here in this book, Richard Dawkins invented the term "meme" to serve as a behavioral analogue to a gene. A gene mutates and propagates down through future generations; a meme spreads through populations too, with the best memes outlasting the worst ones in their own "survival of the fittest" competition. For instance, there is nothing "genetic" about the idea that priests should be celibate - how could such a gene propagate through children? But the "meme" that priests shouldn't have sex - a rule, a law, a custom, a practice - is one that we've collectively and consistently found sensible enough to continue to propagate. On the other hand, a meme like, I dunno, disco music? That meme boomed and then almost disappeared, like an algae bloom that has immediate short-term success but burns out just as quickly. The forms of disco that flourish today are bastardized, mutated forms, like R&B. (This is my own example; Dawkins wrote this in the 1970s, before disco even was a meme, let alone a dead one.) But that's Dawkins' point - that some memes are trends while others are mainstays, and some are these long unchallenged traditions that will struggle to adapt to radical changes (look at social views on gay marriage, for instance). Hell, even the idea of what a "meme" is has mutated from what I've just described to "a recurring JPEG or GIF on the Internet." Ha!

But yeah - great book. Dense reading, but easy reading - it;s a slow 260 pages, but it's also only 260 pages. And I should really read more of Dawkins' stuff in the future, having already enjoyed (even more than this) The Ancestor's Tale back in college.