Few phrases in science have caught the imagination of laymen and professionals alike the way “selfish genes” has done. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines” (p. They have come a long way, those replicators. Early on in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins relates this crucial insight as follows: “They are in you and me they created us, body and mind and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. As a consequence, the ultimate beneficiary of selection is the gene. Whereas individual organisms are temporary occurrences-present in one generation, gone in the next-genes are potentially immortal and their structure is passed on from generation to generation. Under this view of life, the fundamental unit of selection is the gene. Hamilton, the most ambitious form of the gene’s-eye view was spelled out in two later books: George Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976). Fisher, as well as the social evolution models of W. D.

Tracing its origins to the emergence of population genetics during the modern synthesis of the 1930s, especially to the writings of R. A. Selfish gene theory, or the gene’s-eye view of evolution, however, offers a radically different picture of evolution by natural selection. It is individuals that vary in phenotype, individuals that struggle to survive environmental pressures and compete over access to mates, and individuals that vary in fitness according to phenotype. In its original formulation, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was based upon individual organisms.

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