Richard Dawkins admits The Selfish Gene might have been better called The Immortal Gene
The Selfish Gene is mostly about how cooperation and altruism evolve, yet its title convinced many people it championed greed. Richard Dawkins later conceded his editor Tom Maschler had suggested The Immortal Gene instead, and complained that too many critics judged the 1976 book by its cover alone.
Dawkins built on George Williams, who argued in 1966 that selection works on genes rather than groups, and on W. D. Hamilton's work on kin selection. The core shift is one of viewpoint. Instead of asking what helps an animal or a species, ask what helps a gene copy itself. Seen that way, bodies are survival machines built by replicators, and helping relatives makes sense because they carry many of the same genes. Sacrificing yourself to save ten close kin can leave more copies of a helping gene than it costs.
Game theory runs through the book. Borrowing John Maynard Smith's evolutionarily stable strategy, Dawkins pits aggressive hawks against posturing doves and shows that the stable outcome is a mixture, even though a population of pure doves would do better on average, a neat demonstration that natural selection has no interest in what benefits the species as a whole. Elsewhere he explains why sex ratios settle at half and half even among elephant seals, where 4 percent of males account for 88 percent of matings, and why springboks leap high in front of predators to advertise that chasing them is pointless.
Its most famous legacy came in the final chapter. Looking for a cultural counterpart to the gene, Dawkins shortened the Greek-derived mimeme to a single syllable that sounds like gene and rhymes with cream: meme. A whole field, memetics, later grew around the idea.
The book became a bestseller and remains widely read. Maynard Smith noted that although written for the public it made an original contribution to biology, and novelist Ian McEwan credited it with transforming how evolution was taught. Critics such as psychologist Nicky Hayes countered that it leaned on convenient animal examples and oversimplified how genes relate to the organisms carrying them.
Source: The Selfish Gene
