Review of The Selfish Gene (1976)
Richard Dawkins (writer).
Read in the 30th anniversy edition.
Peter Kropotkin mentions a cuckoo in Mutual Aid (1902), but only as a sign of spring. Dawkins, with the advantage of another three quarters of a century of research, zooms in on the cuckoo as an example to explain brood parasitism. Where Kropotkin wrote only about cooperation, Dawkins understands the tradeoff at play.
In 2006, Dawkins wrote that he should have named this book The Immortal Gene on the advice of a publisher. Because he didn’t, there is a popular misconception that the book is about selfishness as a character trait. It does not justify selfish behaviour, although Dawkins himself exhibited plenty of that in his later life. Instead, it’s about identifying the unit of natural selection. Dawkins popularized, but did not invent, the idea that natural selection operates on genes, so that genes develop as if they themselves were selfish. If a gene somehow increases the probability that it will be replicated, then it isn’t necessarily important what it does to the organism it codes for. Nowadays, genes that are bad for their organism are called selfish genetic elements, or selfish genes for short.
Where Kropotkin was vague, Dawkins is specific. He explains altruism, including why the cuckoo’s victims are altruistic despite the existence of parasites like the cuckoo. In their interaction, evolution pits a cooperative mechanism, which is more efficient than a solitary life, against the exploitation of the free labour generated by that mechanism. If you want to understand life and memes on Earth or anywhere, it’s a good read.
References here: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979), The Ghost in the Shell (1989), “On Completing Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1994), The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007), “Feels Good Man” (2020).