He actually thinks if Darwin were alive long enough to know about genes, Darwin would think this too. Darwin also calls it “survival of the fittest.” Dawkins, though, thinks that genes (and not species) are evolving through natural selection. This process is called natural selection. Since organisms were competing for finite resources (such as food), those individual organisms best suited to their environments won out and survived to reproduce, passing their traits on to succeeding generations. Evolutionists claim that the world’s biodiversity exists because the natural world became more complex over time (evolved) through small changes in the way organisms interacted with their environments (adaptations). In his “Preface to the Second Edition” of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins says he is writing for three kinds of people: the general reader (for whom he has avoided technical language), the scientific expert (who might see something in his story that they perhaps overlooked in their more technical way of looking at things), and the student (who might find the book helpful in breaking down technical theories into everyday language).ĭawkins begins (in “Why Are People?”) by saying that Charles Darwin offered the first coherent account of why we are here-why we exist-when he formulated the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species. He thinks this is as strange as “science fiction” but it’s actually the truth. He thinks this is quite a radical view, because it implies that we humans are “lumbering robots,” programmed by our genes to help them-the genes-survive. He also thinks there is no gene for altruism (selfless or kind behavior). He believes that evolution happens to genes, not species. Richard Dawkins-the author of The Selfish Gene-is the sole voice of its story.

The selfish gene 1976