The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Humans have been studied over a period of long time in order to understand our process to do things and what thoughts go into that process. Human nature varies and is unpredictable, it has been studied for so long over the past few centuries that one thing is for certain; the building blocks of it is essentially the same to every human being. One of the fundamentals of human nature is the selfish gene and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins “show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law that I am calling gene selfishness” (Dawkins 6). For those who want to understand Dawkins’ theory about the selfish gene, one must be somewhat accustomed with Charles Darwin and his ideas about evolution, which should not be hard because it has been taught to us since middle school. Darwin’s theory of evolution is the fundamental blocks of Dawkins’ idea on the selfish gene. It’s a safe assumption to say that Darwin would have understood Dawkins’ theory and have agreed with it based on the fact that it is essentially Darwin’s theory. Dawkins intended for the book to be read by three groups of people describing them as, “the layman, the expert and the student,” (Dawkins xxi). He wanted to entice them to understand that while there are two ways to look at natural selection, gene and individual, he was going to concentrate on social behavior. In order to do that he has broken down the book into eight main parts that consists of: the concepts of altruistic and selfish behavior, genetic definition of self-interest, deceit, sex ratio theory, evolution of aggressive behavior, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism, and natural selection of sex differences.

With the usage of analogies an...

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...xception to that; he was able to write a science book that I was able to learn everything he was trying teach. The Selfish Gene was such an intellectual and quirky book that consisted of all the things need to produce the outcome of readers who were taking in all the information that they have learned and were able to make sense of what was being told.

The boundaries set by our society has hinder human nature which is thought by many to be animalistic and dark implicating that a powerful motivating factor of human nature is to seek gratification and evade misery. Therefore without all the boundaries and rules that society has placed on us, we would pursue whatever our hearts craved and ignore others and the repercussions that are actions have on other individuals.

Works Cited

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.