Chapter Chapter-by-Chapter Anaylsis of The Selfish Gene (1989 edition) - Study Guide by Richard Dawkins

He describes how the survival machines have evolved nerve cells (or neurones) and brains to control and co-ordinate the contractions of muscles. They have also become equipped with sense organs, to translate patterns of physical events in the outside world into the pulse codes of the neurones, and memory, so that this timing of muscle contractions can be influenced by events both in the immediate past and distant past. All of these functions are ultimately under the control of the brain.

The relevance of all this for the topic of gene selfishness is to explain how animal behaviour, both altruistic and selfish, is ultimately under the control of the genes, albeit indirectly. By dictating the way survival machines and their nervous systems are built, genes exert ultimate power over behaviour, but the moment- to-moment decisions about what to do next are taken by the nervous system. "Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives". The genes do not control their survival machines directly in the way that fingers control puppet strings because of time-lags. As Dawkins puts it:

"Genes work by controlling protein synthesis. This is a powerful way of manipulating the world, but it is slow. It takes months of patiently pulling protein strings to build an embryo. The whole point about behaviour, on the other hand, is that it is fast. It works on a time-scale not of months but of seconds and fractions of seconds…Genes don’t have reaction-times like that."

Therefore, the best thing that genes can do is to build a fast executive computer, in advance, and program it with rules and "advice" that will help it cope with as many eventualities as they can "anticipate". One way genes have dealt with this problem of having to anticipate the unpredictable environments they are placed in, is to build into their survival machines a capacity for learning. In this way, genes have programmed their survival machines to ensure that they stand the best possible chance of surviving and reproducing. As Dawkins sums it up (p62):

"The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival."

Aggression: stability and the selfish machine

When considering aggression in animals, it is important to remember that the individual is a selfish machine programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole. Every individual is trying to survive as best it can, which leads to competition between individuals for the resources necessary for a successful life. This may lead you to believe that murdering your competitors would be favoured by natural selection because, by eliminating someone who may use up resources that would have been beneficial to you, you are ensuring that there are more available to you and therefore your chances of surviving are improved. However, this is not necessarily the case as there are always costs for such behaviour as well as the benefits. These may include things as simple as time and energy spent murdering your competitors, or it may include more serious costs such as risk of death in the fight.

Therefore, animals engage in a serious fight if the benefit of doing so outweighs the costs of potential injuries. Otherwise, if the resource is not considered so important to them, or the cost to them is too high, they may adopt behaviour such as threatening and bluffing or not initiating a fight at all.

Maynard Smith used Game Theory to explain why animals "choose" the fighting strategy that they do. He defines a "strategy" as a pre-programmed behavioural policy, for example: "Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him, if he retaliates run away" and he introduces the concept of the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). This is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy. Therefore, this is the strategy that will persist in a population because every individual is trying to maximise his own success and the ESS will be the strategy that will do this for all individuals as it cannot be bettered by any deviant individual.

When applying this theory to aggression, Maynard Smith uses a simple hypothetical case where there are two sorts of fighting strategies in a population, named "Hawk" and "Dove". Hawks always fight to