Individuals Add Up

In Chapter Ten of Richard Dawkins’, The Selfish Gene, the reader is exposed to new understandings of the relationship between an individual and his community. Dawkins begins by explaining the selfish need of individual animals to get in the middle of their herd in order to reduce the “domain of danger by trying to position himself in a gap between other individuals” (168). I find it interesting how the thought of “its not going to be me” completely summarizes this selfish behavior. The scientific explanation Dawkins gives the reader to understand an animal’s behavior may seem too harsh, too scientific, but it makes complete sense. The effect Dawkins’ words have on a reader may be difficult due to the innate need of our hearts and minds to find feeling and morality behind these theories, but they are cold yet logical explanation of the events. It is our tendency to look for a softer explanation of things, the animals may be accompanying each other, they may be looking for food together, or maybe they simply like each other. The author repeatedly shows how this mentality is erroneous and misleading. It is our selfish genes which make us have selfish actions.

After going through a numerous quantity of examples Dawkins shows that “members of different species often have much to offer each other because they can bring different ‘skills’ to the partnership” (181). Within a species or between different species of animals, there is a constant necessity to lie on each other’s shoulders in order to survive. This interdependence can also be seen in our human, modern world as we can observe in the article, Nobel Prize For Chemistry Of Life, by Victoria Gill. The BBC News article talks about the recent award to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath from the Laboratories in Cambridge (UK), Yale University (US) and Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel). The article shows how this year’s Nobel prize in Chemistry “is to be shared equally between the three scientists, who all contributed to revealing the ribosome's huge and complex molecular structure in detail.” (BBC News) International research in different fields is absolutely necessary for our scientific, medical, economic, social and political development. It is special to see how three different individuals from different backgrounds can work together and share such an important award as are the Nobels in the science field. This works as a perfect example of how, the “mighty, developed” humans can also share that animal tendency of working with each other selfishly in order to survive or in this case win a prize.