The Selfish Gene

First published by Oxford University Press in 1976, The Selfish Gene is Richard Dawkins's exposition of the gene-centred view of evolution. Its argument is that natural selection acts on replicators — the persistent units of heritable information — and that plants, animals and people are best understood as the vehicles those replicators build, use and discard in order to keep copying themselves.

Working outward from that premise, Dawkins takes on behaviours that had long looked like puzzles for Darwinism. Successive chapters deal with aggression and why animals so rarely fight to the death, with genetic self-interest among relatives, with family planning and the conflict between parents and offspring, with the different reproductive interests of males and females, and with the conditions under which cooperation between unrelated individuals can be stable. The final chapter steps outside biology altogether to propose the meme — a unit of cultural transmission that replicates by imitation, and which has since escaped the book into ordinary speech.

Written for the non-specialist while arguing a position biologists were still contesting, it became one of the most widely read and most argued-over science books of the century — a million-copy bestseller translated into more than twenty-five languages. Later editions carry Dawkins's own prefaces, Robert Trivers's 1976 foreword, and an epilogue revisiting the ideas four decades on.