Unlike most popular science books, The Selfish Gene is only partly synoptic; much of its argument is, I believe, quite original. One of Dawkins’s most original chapters deserves particular comment. He applies the mechanisms of selection and self-preservation to culture, and comes up with the notion of a ‘meme’; an idea or a fashion which propagates because it contains within it the means of reproduction. On the simplest level, people once started wearing baseball caps back to front because they were convinced that it was intimately connected to sophistication and, probably, sexual desirability. On a larger level, religions spread effectively when they contain the injunction both to bring up your children in faith and to evangelise — Christianity and Islam being much more successful religions, numerically than non-evangelising faiths — and to invent rewards which can’t be disproved. It’s a brilliant idea, and one which, I guess, has directly or indirectly influenced the thinking of millions of actors in our culture. Left-leaning dons were once fond of saying that Mrs Thatcher’s 1980s were a triumph of the selfish gene culture; a more thoughtful analysis might, indeed, prove that the ideology which transformed the world of 1980 into the world of 1990 was through the use of meme theory. Those freedoms spread because, as Mrs Thatcher saw very well, it was in their nature to do so.
Along with the 30th anniversary reissue of the book, Oxford is simultaneously publishing a festschrift of responses to the book, from professional colleagues as well as philosophers, a beyond-parody bishop and Philip Pullman, immediately proving that Dawkins’s world view is not, as is sometimes carelessly said, lacking in imaginative nutrition. It’s an interesting series of essays, but, I have to say, it does unintentionally demonstrate that Dawkins’s subject is not necessarily that easy to understand. Reading Dawkins after the contributions of a number of his colleagues, one has to conclude that he writes about it much better than anyone else.
If we are not to sink into the intellectual dark ages, there is no other bulwark than the truth, which The Selfish Gene overwhelmingly embodies. With that on the bookshelves, I suppose we need to worry a little less when we read the terrifying finding that 45 per cent of Americans in a recent poll believe that God created life on earth at some point in the last 10,000 years. Truth may not always seem a sufficient defence against determined, wicked ignorance; but it is some consolation to have it so easily and convincingly available as in this great book.
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