The Selfish Gene

"Dawkins' marvelous books — words from these books are entering the English language."

"I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it. In my book, The Secret of Our Success , I actually say that this is a great place to start, but of course, modern evolutionary theory has gone way beyond some of these ideas. “It lays out a particular way of thinking where you think about genes from the genes’ eye view” Cultural evolution—or what Dawkins described as mimetic evolution or memes—creates the second system of inheritance that feeds back and drives genetic evolution. So you have to think of these as only partially separate inheritance systems in which one can feed back and drive the other. You should also think of genetic evolution as building the machinery for acquiring culture. That’s a way in which we can use our understanding of genetic evolution to inform how we think about culture and cultural evolution. The book was synthesising a bunch of ideas that had been developed by a variety of researchers, in particular William Hamilton and Robert Trivers, on how we can think about evolutionary processes to explain things like cooperation and altruism, which has been a long-running puzzle. It lays out a particular way of thinking where you think about genes from the genes’ eye view. You think about what is good for the gene, and that allows you to solve a bunch of puzzles about altruism, about why people would help those who have copies of those same genes. But, it turned out, that was just one among a number of different ways of looking at genetic evolution. Another way is to partition, to think about different groups competing and the genetic composition of those different groups, and that can be useful for certain kinds of problems. So there are at least three different ways to think about genetic evolution, which are useful for solving different kinds of evolutionary problems. I put it on the list because it was inspirational to me, though I like to think we now have an enriched way of looking at things that goes beyond what we did in the 70s. It’s a popular book, so it’s written to be digestible to readers who don’t have a biological background. When I first read that book, I didn’t have one."

"That’s the one book on this list that I read not having met the author. I met him later and we’ve become fast friends and had tremendous discussions. I’ve learned a lot from him, and I think he’s learned a lot from me. When it came out, I asked a prominent evolutionary theorist and philosopher of biology about the book, and he dismissed it as a trade book potboiler. Pop science; not worth reading. I believed him, and I postponed reading it. Doug Hofstadter urged me to read it when we were working on The Mind’s I . I read it and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. Imagine if I hadn’t read this book.’ It’s been that important to me. Ever since then, I have thought, ‘I’m not going to ding a book without reading it.’ There are many books I’m sure are baloney that I don’t bother reading. But I’m not going to tell people that the books were baloney. I’m going to take my chances. In a way, yes; in a way, no. My dissertation had ‘evolution’ right in the title. My insight was that learning is evolution in the brain. Later, I learned it’s been the insight of lots of people. Darwin had a version of it, as did other philosophers and neuroscientists, including J. Z. Young, William Calvin, and John Dewey. The idea that learning is evolution in the brain is a winner. It is now becoming clearer and clearer how much of a winner it is. I tied myself to the mast of that idea in my dissertation, and in “Content and Consciousness.” It’s been at the heart of my work ever since. Dawkins filled in all the delicious details that I didn’t understand well. I was very naïve. I had never taken a course in evolutionary biology; I’d read some stuff. Dawkins filled in a lot of gaps. He sent me to the literature once I got to know him. That’s been an extremely fruitful part of my life. The principled ignorance of evolution is still an embarrassing bit of ignorance in philosophy. I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently and all the rest of the books on my list deal with this. The philosophers have taken comprehension for granted. They have, since Descartes, taken a first-person point of view. ‘I understand my thoughts: they’re my thoughts. I may mis-express them, but I am the source and the home of understanding. My understanding could not be better if I’m careful.’ “The topics that philosophy deals with are not like Euclid’s geometry” Descartes’s notion of clear and distinct ideas is the single worst idea to beset philosophy in the last millennium. You don’t know how your thoughts come to you. You are not authoritative about what you mean by what you say. You are not miraculous in your capacity to comprehend. You are only circumstantially better equipped than others to determine what your own words mean. You often betray what’s in your mind by your Freudian slips and your mistakes. You have to abandon that first-person authority view of understanding. Descartes recognized that if he couldn’t trust his clear and distinct ideas, there was nowhere to go. The only way he could see out of that was by having the deus ex machina of bringing in a non-deceiving God who would not let him be wrong about his clear and distinct ideas. Give me a break! Maybe Descartes didn’t fully believe it; maybe he did that to pacify the Jesuits. My one historical scholarship paper is called “Descartes’s Argument from Design.” It looks at the argument in Meditation 3, which was a good argument until Darwin came along. This is the argument for the existence of God based on ‘my idea of God is so wonderful that there must be a God that created it, because it couldn’t be my own creation.’ So he can assign God the role of intelligent creator. Darwin really did destroy the only respectable—and I think it was respectable—argument for the existence of God. ‘Look at the wonders of nature. Look at the brilliant design, right down to the ribosomes and the motor proteins.’ This is ravishingly effective, efficient, beautiful design. No question. Darwin showed how you can get all that design without the creative intelligence. You can get it from natural selection. That wiped out the best reason for believing in God. Yes. One of my favorite philosophical texts is Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion . I used it for many years. I read it as a freshman and fell in love with it. It looms large in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea . I call it Hume’s close encounter. He got that close to getting the whole Darwinian picture. He was on the right track. He said some wonderfully prescient things and that’s why he’s my favorite philosopher."

"This is really extremely famous and I think rightly so – The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins: I love that book. When you look at theories in physics, they are really phrased very precisely with mathematical formulae, and if you are trying to make a prediction of a physical system you can do this extremely well with very high precision. So, for example, if you want to know where Mars will be in 10,000 years’ time, then our laws of physics are so accurate that actually you can really do that to an extremely good precision. However, when you look at more complicated things like biology and you want to say: well, can I look at a species and say what’s going to happen in terms of evolution in 10,000 years, then of course it’s very difficult, and I don’t think anyone has a clue how to make this more mathematical. But the first time I saw how far you can go, and I was really surprised, was with The Selfish Gene. Because the theory of evolution seems to a physicist much less rigorous than any theory that we have in physics – it just doesn’t have the power to predict things in the same way. You’ve got these two basic principles – the random mutation of the genetic material, and then the subsequent deliberate selection by the environment of whether the resulting individual survives or doesn’t survive these genetic modifications. Dawkins’s book was the first time that someone tried to make the theory very mathematical, and explain it fully, and tried to make predictions based on it. He’s saying, how far can I go down in terms of simplicity, and try to explain everything in the biological world just in terms of very simple units – in this case, of course, this would be genes. Dawkins’s approach, just the way he writes, is extremely nice and I think he’s the best popular science writer. No one else really compares. It made me think that you could ultimately apply physics to biology and really reduce it even more, because you know once you reduce biological behaviour to genetics, then of course you now are working with genetics and molecules, and that’s the subject of chemistry, which itself is based on quantum physics. So, in a way, you’ve got this beautiful pyramid of explanations: starting from quantum physics, then explaining basic chemical laws based on quantum physics and then from chemistry you try to explain genetics and then more complicated living organisms. Somehow the whole fits this nice scientific logic."