The Selfish Gene

Cover
THE SELFISH GENE
Copyright
Contents
INTRODUCTION TO 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
1. WHY ARE PEOPLE?
2. THE REPLICATORS
3. IMMORTAL COILS
4. THE GENE MACHINE
5. AGGRESSION
6. GENESMANSHIP
7. FAMILY PLANNING
8. BATTLE OF THE GENERATIONS
9. BATTLE OF THE SEXES
10. YOU SCRATCH MY BACK, I’LL RIDE ON YOURS
11. MEMES
12. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST
13. THE LONG REACH OF THE GENE
EPILOGUE TO 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
ENDNOTES
	CHAPTER 1: Why are people?
		p. 1 . . . all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless . . .
		p. 3 I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.
		p. 7 . . . it is possible that the female improves the male’s sexual performanceby eating his head.
		p. 14 . . . the fundamental unit of selection is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene . . .
	CHAPTER 2: The replicators
		p. 18 The simplified account I shall give [of the origin of life] is probably not too far from the truth.
		p. 21 ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive . . . ’
		p. 25 Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots . . .
	CHAPTER 3: Immortal coils
		p. 30 . . . impossible to disentangle the contribution of one gene from that of another.
		p. 36 The definition I want to use comes from G. C. Williams.
		p. 43 . . . the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit . . .
		p. 51 Another theory, due to Sir Peter Medawar . . .
		p. 55 What is the good of sex?
		p. 57 . . . the surplus DNA is . . . a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger . . . (see also p. 237)
	CHAPTER 4: The gene machine
		p. 63 Brains may be regarded as analogous in function to computers.
		p. 68 There is a civilization 200 light-years away, in the constellation of Andromeda.
		p. 71 . . . strategies and tricks of the living trade . . .
		p. 76 Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.
		p. 78 A gene for altruistic behaviour . . .
		p. 79 Hygienic bees
		p. 81 This is the behaviour that can be broadly labelled communication.
	CHAPTER 5: Aggression: stability and the selfish machine
		p. 90 . . . evolutionarily stable strategy . . .
		p. 97 . . . retaliator emerges as evolutionarily stable.
		p. 98 Unfortunately, we know too little at present to assign realistic numbers to the costs and benefits of various outcomes in nature.
		p. 104 The neatest demonstration I know of this form of behavioural asymmetry . . .
		p. 106 Paradoxical ESS
		p. 106 . . . a kind of dominance hierarchy [in crickets] . . .
		p. 109 . . . the ESS concept as one of the most important advances inevolutionary theory since Darwin.
		p. 113 Progressive evolution may be not so much a steady upward climb as a series of discrete steps from stable plateau to stable plateau.
	CHAPTER 6: Genesmanship
		p. 117 . . . I have never been able to understand why they have been so neglected . . .
		p. 117 . . . I shall assume that we are talking about genes that are rare . . .
		p. 121 . . . armadillos . . . it would be well worth somebody’s while going out to South America to have a look.
		p. 122 Kin selection is emphatically not a special case of group selection.
		p. 122 He deliberately excludes offspring: they don’t count as kin!
		p. 124 But what a complicated calculation . . .
		p. 128 . . . we have to think how animals might actually go about estimating who their close relations are . . . We know who our relations are because we are told . . .
		p. 129 . . . the injurious effects of recessive genes which appear with inbreeding. (For some reason many anthropologists do not like thisexplanation.)
		p. 134 Since [cuckoo hosts] are not in danger of being parasitized by members of their own species . . .
		p. 136 Kin selection in lions
		p. 137 If C is my identical twin . . .
		p. 138 . . . social anthropologists might have interesting things to say.
	CHAPTER 7: Family planning
		p. 142 Wynne-Edwards . . . has been mainly responsible for promulgating the idea of group selection.
	CHAPTER 8: Battle of the generations
		p. 160 R. L. Trivers, in 1972, neatly solved the problem . . .
		p. 175 According to him the parent will always win.
	CHAPTER 9: Battle of the Sexes
		p. 182 . . . how much more severe must be the conflict between mates, who are not related to each other?
		p. 184 . . . the number of children a male can have is virtually unlimited. Female exploitation begins here.
		p. 196 Let us take Maynard Smith’s method of analysing aggressive contests, and apply it to sex.
		p. 198 . . . it can be shown that really there would be no oscillation. The system would converge to a stable state.
		p. 202 . . . cases of paternal devotion . . . common among fish. Why?
		p. 206 . . . a kind of unstable, runaway process.
		p. 207 . . . [Zahavi’s] . . . maddeningly contrary ‘handicap principle’
	CHAPTER 10: You scratch my back, I’ll ride on yours
		p. 225 . . . it seems to be only in the social insects that [the evolution of sterile workers] has actually happened.
		p. 228 . . . a hymenopteran female is more closely related to her sisters than she is to her offspring.
		p. 230 They found a rather convincingly close fit to the 3: 1 female to male ratio predicted . . .
		p. 242 If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad.
	CHAPTER 11: Memes: the new replicators
		p. 248 I would put my money on one fundamental principle . . . all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
		p. 249 Meme
		p. 249 . . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.
		p. 252 ‘Auld Lang Syne’
		p. 252 If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successive years in scientific journals.
		p. 255 The computers in which memes live are human brains.
		p. 257 Blind faith can justify anything.
		p. 260 We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX AND KEY TO BIBLIOGRAPHY
EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS