The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene explains the process of evolution in biology using genes as its basic unit, showing how they manifest in the form of organisms, what they do to ensure their own survival, how they program our brains, which strategies have worked best throughout history and what makes humans so special in this context.

Because genes are selfish, a lot of the relationships among organisms in nature end up being so-called zero-sum games: there’s always one clear winner and one clear loser. When a hawk chases a dove, either the dove ends up getting eaten or the hawk starves.

In a non-zero-sum game though, both parties can team up against a third party (which can be nature itself, for example) to create a win-win situation. For example, if you and your friend are clients at the same bank, and the bank makes an individual offer to both of you for a great set of stock tips, but wants to charge $5,000, then just one of you could take the offer and you split the cost, instead of paying $5,000 each for the same set of tips.

Sometimes this kind of thinking pays off in nature too. For example, ants “milk” little insects called aphids, because the sweet secretions they produce are nourishing. In exchange, aphids benefit from having strong fighters like the ants around to protect them. The ants even take baby aphids in custody inside their ant hills to raise and protect them from predators.

While the selfish motives of the genes of each species stay the same, mutual altruism leads to the best result.

Humans are special. We’ve evolved far beyond the instinctive survival-thinking our genes originally drove us towards. For example, something as complex and various as human culture (which includes things like language, religion, fashion, art, customs, diet, etc.) can’t possibly be the result of genes striving for survival. Instead, culture can be seen as a spin-off, separate from biology, created by humans, that relies on the same evolutionary principles. Just like the gene is the basic element of biological evolution, a meme is the basic element of culture. Since genes can be copied across organisms, they’re near-immortal, and memes are the same – the smallest unit of culture that has a chance of being immortal – for example a certain melody, a powerful idea, or a video. Memes also compete, in their case for human attention and memory. If a meme is forgotten, it dies, so like genes, memes cooperate to form complex entities, similar to organisms. For example, the Catholic Church is a huge set of memes, such as certain ideas, rituals, behaviors, clothes and architectural styles, all centered around the meme of God.…