[Toastmaster speech] the Selfish Gene
In this speech, I will talk about a book I’ve been reading recently. It’s the selfish gene written by Richard Dawkins. The book was extremely popular at its time, 1970th, and caused major revolutions in biology.
In this speech, I will
- First talk about some selfish behaviors in human and animals, and explain how selfish genes survive over time.
- Mention some altruistic (or non-selfish) behaviors and explain why it doesn’t contradict with genes being selfish.
- Conclude the talk with some take away messages.
The materials of this book is fairly controversial, I don’t claim to taking a position between whether human nature is selfish or selfless, or between evolutionary biology, intelligent design or creationism. I would rather talk about the viewpoints in this book in an objective way.
Let’s first go back to many years ago, when men still lived on hunting animals and picking fruits. Assume you walk home and pass by a hut. There is plenty of food in the hut. You know you will not be caught if you steal. Are you going to be selfish and steal or are you going to be a good guy? Suppose there is man # 1 who wants to be honest and man # 2 who steals all the food and brings them home. During bad days, when neither man #1 or man #2 catches any fish or rabbit, man # 1 may not have enough food to feed his family and they all die. Man # 2 also struggles, but given the extra food, he has a higher chance to survive and reproduce. His genes may have higher chance of survival.
Another example is emperor penguin. Often we see large groups of penguins on TV standing near a cliff. They want to dive into the water to eat fish but no one wants to risk being eaten by a seal. So these penguins simply stand there and wait. Some of them may fall from the cliff either by accident or after be pushed by others. There is no sacrifice for the benefit of others in this story. Both humans and penguins exhibit selfish behaviors and being selfish may increase the chance of survival.
But there are selfless or altruistic behaviors in society. We have heard such stories again and again that parents would sacrifice themselves in order to save their child, during floods, fires, car accidents and so on. These stories are very moving and make us believe in love and human nature again.
Altruistic behaviors appear not only in us but also in animals, especially bees and ants. A worker bee is a female bee that cannot reproduce. It has a stinger which can be used to protect against attackers like birds. However, after it uses the stinger, it dies soon since its organs are pulled out too. The worker bee would rather get herself killed to protect the hive, then how do we explain if genes are selfish? It all makes perfect sense if we look at it from the gene’s point of view. A gene is not a single physical unit of DNA; it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed over the world. Half of our genes come from our father and the other half from our mother. A gene might help its own body to survive, but also replicas of itself that are in other bodies. In the worker bee example, the worker bee cannot reproduce, thus the only way for its genes to survive is to make sure the queen bee reproduces, and baby bees grow up. That could be the origin of altruistic behavior among family members, and even people look alike. We die within a century, but our genes are passed down from generation to generation. We may simply be survival machines of our genes.
So we have talked about both selfish behaviors and altruistic behaviors. This is a popular science book, enlightening and enjoyable at the same time. It states that we have selfish genes in our body. This is inevitable due to evolution. But as humans, we have the brainpower. We do not need to follow every instruction from our genes. Instead, we can go against our instincts, help friends who are in need, donate for strangers who are struggling with basic needs, and make the world a place not entirely controlled by selfish genes.
