The Selfish Gene Quotes
"Our genes made us. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines."
"This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science."
"Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?"
"The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in."
"A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered."
"The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title."
"Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature."
"The DNA instructions have been assembled by natural selection."
"Genes are the replicators and we are their survival machines."
"A population is not a discrete enough entity to be a unit of natural selection."
"The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies."
"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting."
"What I am doing is emphasizing the potential near-immortality of a gene."
"The individual body seems discrete enough while it lasts."
"At the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good."
"Every individual uses his conscious foresight, and is able to see that it is in his own long-term interests to obey the rules of the pact."
"Price-fixing can survive for quite long periods, but eventually, an individual gives in to the temptation to make a quick killing by cutting his prices."
"An ESS can be achieved in which all individuals have the same probability of behaving like a hawk or like a dove."
"The hawk and dove story is a 'model', something that helps us to understand things that do happen in nature."
"A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove."
"In a population of retaliators, no other strategy would invade, since there is no other strategy that does better than retaliator itself."
"The poker face is evolutionarily stable. Surrender, when it finally comes, will be sudden and unpredictable."
"In symmetric contests, hawks and doves are assumed to be equally strong, to have an equal amount to gain from winning."
"Territorial 'defence' may simply be an ESS which arises because of the asymmetry in time of arrival."
"Altruistic behaviour is so frequently reported in troops of monkeys and schools of whales."
"It is an obvious fact that wild animal populations do not grow at the astronomical rates of which they are theoretically capable."
"Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile."
"Any given species tends to have a rather fixed clutch-size or litter-size: no animal has an infinite number of children."
"The disagreement is over why birth-rates are regulated: by what process of natural selection has family-planning evolved?"
"Many animals devote a great deal of time and energy to apparently defending an area of ground which naturalists call a territory."
"Winning a territory is therefore, like winning a ticket or licence to breed."
"High-ranking individuals are more likely to breed than low-ranking individuals."
"Perhaps the most startling of Wynne-Edwards's ideas is that of epideictic behaviour."
"The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known."
"Contraception is sometimes attacked as 'unnatural'. So it is, very unnatural."
"A business man should never say 'I have already invested so much in the Concorde airliner (for instance) that I cannot afford to scrap it now.' He should always ask instead whether it would pay him in the future, to cut his losses, and abandon the project now."
"Similarly, it is no use a female forcing a male to invest heavily in her in the hope that this, on its own, will deter the male from subsequently deserting."
"If there are loose females in the population, prepared to welcome males who have deserted their wives, then it could pay a male to desert his wife, no matter how much he has already invested in her children."
"The cost of rearing one child, the cost of all its food, all the time spent looking after it, and all the risks taken on its behalf, is -20 units."
"Imagine we have a population in which all the females are coy, and all the males are faithful. It is an ideal monogamous society."
"Any tendency for members of either sex to deviate from their appropriate stable ratio will be penalized by a consequent change in the ratio of strategies of the other sex, which is, in turn, to the disadvantage of the original deviant."
"In these circumstances the domestic-bliss strategy for females really does seem to work. We do not have to think in terms of a conspiracy of coy females. Coyness can actually pay a female's selfish genes."
"Any male who can pass himself off as a good loyal domestic type, but who in reality is concealing a strong tendency towards desertion and unfaithfulness, could have a great advantage."
"Males have more to gain from dishonesty than females, and we must expect that, even in those species where males show considerable parental altruism, they will usually tend to do a bit less work than the females."
"A female who selects an old male is not necessarily going to have more descendants than a rival female who chooses a young one who shows some other evidence of good genes."
"Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours by imitation, in an analogous way to human language."
"New song forms have been shown to arise variously by change of pitch of a note, repetition of a note, the elision of notes and the combination of parts of other existing songs."
"The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet."
"We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."
"Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically."
"The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal."
"All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities."
"I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme."
"Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
"For an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution."
"The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe."
"The fact that they replicate, together with certain further conditions means, willy nilly, that they will tend towards the evolution of qualities which, in the special sense of this book, can be called selfish."
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators."
"The appearance of the new form was an abrupt event and the product was quite stable over a period of years."
"We do not have to look for conventional biological survival values of traits like religion, music, and ritual dancing, though these may also be present."
"It does not take long to reach negligible proportions."
"Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away."