Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Selfish Gene with a note of reference.

Arthur Cain, late professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a ‘young man’s book’. He was deliberately quoting a commentator on A. J. Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic.

Why not call it The Immortal Gene?
Immortal was an ‘up’ word, the immortality of genetic information was a central theme of the book, and ‘immortal gene’ had almost the same intriguing ring as ‘selfish gene’ (neither of us, I think, noticed the resonance with Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant).

Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can see that ‘The Selfish Gene’ on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

Austin Burt and Robert Trivets (2006) Genes in Conflict: the biology of selfish genetic elements (Harvard University Press) arrived too late for inclusion in the first printing of this Edition. It will undoubtedly become the definitive reference work on this important subject.

Peter Atkins, in his wonderful book Creation Revisited, uses a similar personification when considering the refraction of a light beam, passing into a medium of higher refractive index which slows it down. The beam behaves as if trying to minimize the time taken to travel to an end point. Atkins imagines it as a lifeguard on a
beach racing to rescue a drowning swimmer. Should he head straight for the swimmer? No, because he can run faster than he can swim and would be wise to increase the dry-land proportion of his travel time. Should he run to a point on the beach directly opposite his target, thereby minimizing his swimming time? Better, but still not the best. Calculation (if he had time to do it) would disclose to the lifeguard an optimum intermediate angle, yielding the ideal combination of fast running followed by inevitably slower swimming. Atkins concludes: 

That is exactly the behavior of light passing into a denser medium.

A gene is being favored in natural selection if the aggregate of its replicas forms an increasing fraction of the total gene pool. We are going to be concerned supposed to affect the social behavior of their bearers, so let us try to make the argument more vivid by attributing to the genes, temporarily, intelligence and a certain freedom of choice. Imagine that a gene is considering the problem of increasing the number of its replicas, and imagine that it can choose between . . .

A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism.

For these (chapters 12 & 13) I took my inspiration from the two books in the field that have most excited me during the intervening years: Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, because it seems to offer some sort of hope for our future; and my own The Extended Phenotype because for me it dominated those years and because —for what that is worth —it is probably the finest thing I shall ever write.

Robert Axlerod’s The Evolution of Cooperation makes use of ESS theory . . . one of my (two new) chapters, ‘Nice guys finish first,’ is largely devoted to explaining Axelrod’s work.

Apart from its academic interest, the human importance of this subject is obvious. It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity. These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz’s On Aggression, Ardrey’s The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works.

As I understand Lorenz’s view of evolution, he would very much be at one with Montagu in rejecting the implications of Tennyson’s famous phrase. Unlike both of them, I think ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.

Full Text of  "Nullfield Biology Teacher's Guide 1"

Successive generations of zoology students are surprised, when they come up from school, to find that it is not the orthodox point of view. For this they are hardly to be blamed, for in the Nullfield Biology Teachers’ Guide, written for advanced level biology schoolteachers in Britain, we find the following: ‘In higher animals, behavior may take the form of individual suicide to ensure the survival of the species.’ The anonymous author of this guide is blissfully ignorant of the fact that he has said something controversial.

There are many theories of the origin of life. Rather than labour through them in The Selfish Gene I chose just one to illustrate the main idea. But I wouldn’t wish to give the impression that this was the only serious candidate, or even the best one. Indeed, in The Blind Watchmaker, I deliberately chose a different one for the same purpose, A. G. Cairns-Smith’s clay theory.

There is no gene ‘for’ such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene. Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts . . .

Another theory, due to Sir Peter Medawar, is a good example of evolutionary thinking in terms of gene selection.

What is the good of sex? . . . To me, the most exciting new idea is W. D. Hamilton’s parasite theory theory, which has been explained in non-technical language by Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin The Redundant Male.

S. J. Gould, in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, has made the provocative (to me!) claim that, despite the historical origins of the idea of the selfish DNA, ‘The theories of selfish genes and selfish DNA could not be more different in the structures of explanation that nurture them.’ I find his reasoning wrong but interesting, which, incidentally, he has been kind enough to tell me, is how he usually finds mine.

It is still something of a sensation when a titled player is beaten by a computer, but not, perhaps, for much longer. The most dangerous metal monster so far to challenge the human brain is the quaintly named ‘Deep Thought’, no doubt in homage to Douglas Adams.

A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot is an exciting story, and, like all good science fiction, it has some interesting scientific points lying behind it.

Fred Hoyle is an eminent astronomer and the author of my favorite of all science fiction stories, The Black Cloud.

In his book, The Inner Eye, Humphrey makes a convincing case that highly social animals like us and chimpanzees have to become expert psychologists. Brains have to juggle with, and simulate, many aspects of the world. But most aspects of the world are pretty simple in comparison to brains themselves. A social animal lives in a world of others, a world of potential mates, rivals, partners, and enemies. To survive and prosper in such a world, you have to become good at predicting what these other individuals are going to do next. Predicting what is going to happen in the inanimate world is a piece of cake compared with predicting what is going to happen in the social world.

The ESS way of thinking has become more widespread among biologists now than when this chapter (5) was written. Maynard Smith himself has summarized developments up to 1982 in his book Evolution and the Theory of Games.

I expressed the hope that E. O. Wilson would change his definition of kin selection in future writings, so as to include as to include offspring as ‘kin.’ I am happy to report that, in his On Human Nature, the offending phrase, ‘other than offspring,’ has indeed—I am not claiming any credit for this!—been omitted.

In passing it needs to be remarked that the epistemological problems presented by a lack of linguistic support for calculating r, coefficients of relationship, amount to a serious defect in the theory of kin selection. Fractions are of very rare occurrence in the world’s languages, appearing in Indo-European and in the archaic civilizations of the Near and Far East, but they are generally lacking among the so-called primitive peoples. Hunters and gathers generally do not have counting systems beyond one, two, and three. I refrain from comment on the even greater problem of how animals are supposed to figure out how that r [ego, first cousins] = 1/8.

all good kumrads you can tell
By their altruistic smell

e. e. Cummings

The general consensus of theoretical biologists at present is that credible models cannot be devised, by which the slow March of group selection could overtake the much faster spread of selfish genes that bring grains in individual fitness. I therefore accept their opinion.

The idea of animals pretending to be several animals at once has been suggested in another context by J.R. Kerbs, and is named the Beau Geste Effect after the novel in which a similar tactic was used by a unit of the French Foreign Legion.

I recommend it (Robert Trivers’s book - Social Evolution), not only for its content but for its style: clear-thinking, academically correct but with just enough anthropomorphic irresponsibility to tease the pompous, and spiced with personal autobiographical asides.

(Chapter 9 - Battle of the Sexes)

Two books that go more thoroughly into the evolution of human sex differences are Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s Sex, Evolution, and Behavior, and Donald Symon’s The Evolution of Human Sexuality.