The Selfish Gene

We’ve been told that humans are born selfish. 

That deep down, we’re competitors driven by the need to get ahead, to win. When we’re kind, it’s supposedly just ‘strategy.’ When we’re good, it’s only because we’ve stifled our instincts. Because, after all, nothing comes for free. Even the most noble causes can be traced back to not-so-rightious intentions.

This pessimistic idea about human nature was strongly reinforced by Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which resonated with an increasingly individualistic late-20th-century culture. 

Dawkins linked his views to evolutionary psychology of how ancient survival pressures shaped our mental and social traits. According to his theory, prehistoric humans lived in a harsh, cutthroat world where success meant fighting for food, territory, and mates. Competitive and aggressive behavior then, supposedly gave rise to traits such as warfare, racism, and domination. 

Yet this foundational idea that early human life was a desperate struggle, is seriously flawed. Let's think about it this way - in prehistoric times, the world’s population was a fraction of what it is today. Around 15,000 years ago, Europe had, give or take, 29 thousand people, and the global population barely exceeded half a million. These small bands of hunter-gatherers lived by hunting and foraging, moving across vast landscapes. With so few people and so much space, there wasn’t much reason to fight over territory or resources. Instead, cooperation and sharing weren’t just moral ideals, they were necessary for survival.

These types of bands are often described as extremely egalitarian. No one hoards wealth, no one dominates others, and everyone is expected to share what they have. Among the people of southern Africa, even hunting is designed to keep egos in check. They swap arrows before the hunt, and when an animal is killed, the credit goes not to the hunter but to whoever owns the arrow. If someone becomes too controlling or arrogant, the others quietly exclude them from the group. Women in these communities often have independence - they choose their own partners and decide what work they do. These societies lived in this way for tens of thousands of years. Cooperation, fairness, and mutual respect weren’t exceptions, they were the norm. So what changed?

Well, it may have been the rise of agriculture and permanent settlement. Farming allowed more people to live together, but it also introduced ownership, hierarchy, and power struggles. As we began to claim land and possessions, we began to claim dominance too. Out of that came social inequality. In other words, selfishness and aggression aren’t ancient instincts, they’re relatively new habits, born of a changing world. 

Animals work this way too - when their environments are disrupted, they become more violent. And maybe that’s what happened to us. We lost the harmony of small, balanced groups, and built systems that rewarded competition over community. So inevitably, we changed too.

We paint human nature as a constant battle to outdo others, that in order to thrive in everything from economics to education, we must put ourselves first. And yet, when disaster strikes, when tragedy hits, when someone is in need, humans come together. We see people helping strangers, raising funds for causes, and communities standing strong after crises. Despite our ‘selfish gene,” we are remarkably capable of empathy.

The good news is, if cooperation and kindness sustained our ancestors for most of human history, those qualities never truly disappeared. They’re part of who we are at our core and we are just as much able of these qualities then as we are now.