The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins sets out a way of reading evolution from the point of view of the gene. Natural selection, he argues, acts on replicators, the lasting units of inherited information. Plants, animals and people are the vehicles those replicators build, use and discard so that copies of themselves keep being made.

From that starting point the book works through behaviours that had long troubled Darwinian thinking. One chapter asks why animals so seldom fight to the death. Another looks at the self-interest genes show toward relatives.

Further chapters cover family planning and the conflict between parents and offspring, and the different reproductive interests of males and females. A later one asks when unrelated individuals can cooperate in a stable way.

The last chapter leaves biology behind and proposes the meme, a unit of culture that spreads by imitation. The word has since slipped out of the book and into everyday speech.

This is popular science non-fiction for readers without a biology background, and it argues a position that biologists were still disputing when it appeared. Oxford University Press first issued it in 1976. Later editions add Dawkins's own prefaces, Robert Trivers's foreword from 1976, and an epilogue revisiting the ideas four decades on.