Taking Selfishness Seriously

In 1976, Richard Dawkins claimed in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene that we can’t expect humans to be anything but selfish: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

…One of Dawkins’s fans was Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who pulled off the largest accounting and corporate fraud ever, resulting in shareholders losing $74 billion. Skilling said his favorite book was Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which was in the evolutionary spirit of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Even though Darwin was by all accounts a kindhearted man, his theory ultimately inspired some controversial philosophical and political positions, such as social Darwinism and eugenics. Social Darwinism. The late-nineteenth-century English professor Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” because he saw natural selection as “red in tooth and claw,” a brutal description of the competition for scant resources. He didn’t value protecting the weak. If more weak people died, more beautiful, healthy, strong, and smart people could thrive. Spencer believed this would improve the condition of humanity over time.