The Selfish Gene Quotes & Sayings

I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles. — Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction. — Pope Benedict XVI

[...] let us note that a so-called "Sociobiologist" - this word is a whole project by itself - pushed the ingeniosity to the point of replacing matter by "genes", whose egoist selfishness, combined with ant and bee instincts, would have managed to constitute not only bodies but also conscience and at the end, human intelligence, miraculously able to dissert on the genes that amusingly created it. — Frithjof Schuon

I am so excited this year getting to play the 85th Anniversary Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Everyone knows on Thanksgiving morning to get up, turn on the TV and watch the parade, so to be an actual participant is going to be fun and I'm looking forward to it. I am gonna have to put on my deer hunting gear, though, to stay warm! — Rodney Atkins

If you meet me on the street you should hurry on without a backward glance, and later when you climb into bed beside a happy girl with simple thoughts and stroke her perfect hair with fingers that are still shaky from our near-miss, you can whisper that you had a brush with death today, darling, and somehow lived. — Julie Johnson

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies. — Richard Dawkins

Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies. — Richard Dawkins

I think it's best to pick a biographical subject who lives to a ripe old age. Older people tend to relax and speak their minds. They're dropping some of the masks that they've been wearing. There's a candor. — David McCullough

The sad thing is most people have to check with someone before they do the things that make them happy. We're all passing through; the least we can do is be happy, and the only way to do that is by being selfish. — Gene Simmons

I work with a couple charities called Serving Those Who Serve and Rebuilding Together. Both are supportive of veterans when they come home. — Jessica Biel

Perhaps we should rejoice that people's emotions aren't designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one's group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That's why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group's, the outcomes are some of the history's worst atrocities. — Steven Pinker

It was a kindness that was hard to understand ... and the most selfishness she's ever shown. — Bisco Hatori

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he's done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest ... ... and he can't believe in himself because the world's whipped him so! — Lorraine Hansberry

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history. — Richard Dawkins

Ideology is the arrogance of the finite subject who speaks as if he were the ultimate legislator, as if she had been appointed the final judge. The best prevention against the inveiglement of ideology is the practice of reading, in which the calculable well-formedness of various logics is constantly being fractured by a pervasive textuality. — Wlad Godzich

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes. — Richard Dawkins

The public wouldn't like the perfect umpire in every game. It would kill off baseball's greatest alibi - 'We was robbed.' — Billy Evans

No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. — Richard Dawkins

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. — Steven Pinker

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12 — Richard Dawkins

Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction. — Abhijit Naskar

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that. — Charles Jencks

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products. — Michael Pollan

Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes." That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe. — Steven Pinker

The Selfish Gene - he set off decades of debate by declaring: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. — James Gleick

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness. — Richard Dawkins

It shouldn't surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model - based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot) - would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model - based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent — Derrick Jensen

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. — Limor Shifman

I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we're also all capable of a sudden magnanimity. — Jim Broadbent

I always liked parties. You meet people; you can have fun. — Zsa Zsa Gabor

The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene. — Richard Dawkins

I want to make love to you, and if you don't stop me now, that's exactly what's going to happen. — Rachel Gibson

I'm too sexy for a grocery store. John Carter Quinn — Leigh James

There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message - Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene. — Amit Ray

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that. — Richard Dawkins