19th century

The nineteenth century enters The Selfish Gene as the source of a memorable image for nature’s severity: “nature red in tooth and claw.” Richard Dawkins adopts the phrase to characterize modern natural selection, while insisting that an evolutionary explanation is not a prescription for human conduct.

The phrase and its argumentative role

Dawkins contrasts his view with interpretations that reject the implications of Tennyson’s famous phrase. He argues that “nature red in tooth and claw” aptly sums up the modern understanding of natural selection. Its force in the argument is descriptive: organisms and the genes that persist through them have done so in a competitive world, and survival is not evidence that nature is benevolent.

That framing prepares the book’s account of selfishness and altruism. Dawkins argues that successful genes are expected to show “ruthless selfishness,” usually producing selfish behavior in individual animals. Under special and limited circumstances, however, a gene may best promote its own persistence by producing behavior that appears altruistic at the individual level. The apparent contradiction between a harsh natural world and animal cooperation is therefore a problem for evolutionary explanation, not proof that selection works for the good of a species.

A nineteenth-century image, not a moral rule

The phrase also helps Dawkins mark his distance from the claim that evolutionary theory should teach people how to behave. He explicitly says that describing how traits evolved is not advocating a morality based on evolution. A human society governed simply by universal ruthless selfishness would be, in his view, a nasty society to live in; he presents the book’s implications as a warning, not an ideal.

His conclusion turns the bleak image toward a human responsibility. Biology, he argues, offers little help to people who wish to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good. Humans should therefore teach generosity and altruism, and understand what their selfish genes are “up to,” in order to have a chance of resisting their effects. The nineteenth-century phrase names the severity of the natural process; it does not settle what human beings ought to make of it.