The Theory of the Selfish Gene Applied to the Human Population

Abstract

In a study drawing from both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, evidence and argument is assembled in support of the comprehensive application of selfish gene theory to the human population. With a focus on genes giving rise to characteristically-human cooperation (“cooperative genes”) involving language and theory of mind, one may situate a whole range of patterned behaviour—including celibacy and even slavery—otherwise seeming to present insuperable difficulties. Crucially, the behaviour which tends to propagate the cooperative genes may be “at cost” to the genes of some who may be party to the cooperation itself. Explanatory insights are provided by Trivers’ parent-offspring conflict theory, Lack’s principle, and Hamilton’s kin selection mechanism. A primary observation is that cooperation using language and theory of mind is itself interdependent with full human conceptualization of a world of objects and of themselves as embodied beings. Human capacities inhering in, or arising out of, the ability to cooperate are also responsible for a vitally important long-term process, the domestication of animals and plants. The approach illuminates the difference between animal and human sexual behaviour, and the emergence of kinship systems. Again, recent patterns of population growth become much more explicable. It is argued that the gene is the single controlling replicator; the notion of the meme as a second independent replicator is flawed.