What's a "selfish gene"? 

Yesterday you had 60 thousand subscribers, today you have 117 thousand. Your channel is growing like a population of herbivores in an endless field of vegetation.

I have no clue why the narrator is talking about jeans in this video. But I like it.

*"In the long term, competition is **_only_** between Jeans"*

This guy is going to get big, I’m calling it now

Ever since I started watching your videos, I always thought that they could (and should!) be used in classrooms everywhere. To the point, illustrative, without sidetracking, curiosity-sparking and ELI5-compatible. Then, 5:30. "What a bunch of d****, right?" - Welp, sorry teachers. You're on your own again.

Gonna say it now you are going to blow up in the next few weeks, watched only one video but your subjects, animation and educational value is awesome! Definetely subscribed, love these kind of channels When I first wrote this comment 5 days ago you had 34k subs, now when I’m editing this you have 234k subs! Guess I was right :D

Richard Dawkins himself has stated multiple times in interviews that the title choice of his famous bestseller was not really clever because it led many people to judge the work by the title alone and infer that Dawkins was supporting a nihilistic view of evolution. Actually, a big portion of the book deals with game theory and the evolutionary basis for altruism. Perhaps a better title would have been "The gene centered view of evolution". By the way, this hypotesis seems to have been finally vindicated by the discovery of transposable elements and parasitic DNA

I have the stupid Gene I had to watch this 3 times to understand this video

2:10 I was about to go full opposition before you explained how complicated genetics and epigenetics actually are

2:09 - 2:27 I know this is an old meme, but I gotta. “Well, that escalated quickly...”

Thanks to this video, instead of saying "that guy's a selfish bastard", I can now say "That bastard has carrier-focused genes".

You hit something that is very rare until know: video animations that cover topics away from maths, physics etc. The combination of coding such videos and topics from biology is very good. Looking forward to see many more videos.

3blue1brown of biology !!!

0:57 NO! Green blob. NO!!! NO! Dont try, you dont gonna fly, your arms are too tiny. Your are not a bird! Bad blob. Bad!

4:15 these blobs had NO business being so cute

I learned more about genes in this 5 minute video than an entire year in science class

YOU come into MY house and call my genes SELFISH!?

Christmas came early this year! Nice video as always

Congrats on a million subs! I love every video. Even knowing so much of this is such a nice refresher and reinforcement!

I can tell this channel is going to be a new favorite of mine. Great video!!

I think your videos touch some very interesting topics. I like to take a look at dog genetics and how breeding has been affecting our dogs, not only on health, but mostly their behavior. And how dog breeds from different countries/continents have different traits even though they are same 'breed'. And basically the most important thing is to see the parenting genealogy and their main traits, etc. But their genes usually hit a certain amount of dead end because the breeding for looks get things complicated. Having a video about how the english bulldog genes are doomed, would be very interesting.

You killed it... Again!

4:19 Trading with villagers in a nutshell

I'm so happy to have found your channel, please keep it up!

Alright, I've just fallen in love with your content! Lovely animation!

This channel gonna blow up for sure!

Great as always! Thank you for making these videos!

These are great for learning many different related topics. Thanks!

Dude... I love this guy, man, if you are reading this, I love the way you explain the most complicated concepts in a simple phrase that gives you the main idea Also, I think this kind of knowledge should be given to the a lot of people, so as someone who doesn't speak English as a native language, I think it would be a good idea to translate your content to other languages as Spanish or French, I am just saying hahah

Great video, can't wait for the next one!

This channel looks really promising. I'm looking forward for the next episodes!

I love your philosophy of uploading rarely, but when uploading, uploading the greatest Videos I have ever seen. Keep up the good work!

Found this channel today. It's awesome

I wish you were about when I was studying game theory in Uni! It’s amazing how many benefits Evolutionary Biology can have for other fields!

This channel better blow up! Behave is on my reading list - I love Sapolsky's lectures!

This is the most subbed to channel per video and views but it makes sense since you make exellent videos

1:41 Primer: What is a Gene? Me: Jeans are a type of pants.

I wonder what it would be like to run a 10k years simulations with hundreds of species,preys and predators in an environment the size of madagascar lets say, and watch what happens

Love this!!! I wish I had this through high school. I wish you would keep doing this

i feel like all of this math and the thinking process in each video is so hopeful. i feel like Primer wants to see the world flourish. its been a while since ive seen intelligence used for something as positive as this. I hope this channel becomes widespread but doesnt lose that trait.

As someone with a (dated) background in evolutionary biology, I knew of Dawkins' ideas, but never went into the details of it, or even read his book. Your succinct summary here really puts things into perspective! I'm looking forward to hearing more!

Just discovering this channel ; Excellent !! Stunning Videos ! Hope you'll keep going :-) Congrats from a french in Indonesia ...

keep this up man these videos are incredible.

Please persevere with your channel... you’re going to be big! This channel is informative & concise

Dopamine increased to maximum level !

I’m only a 10 year old and I could under stand this, he is real good at explaining, I don’t under stand some words but I do under stand what he’s talking about

Learned so much from this video and others in the series. The owl music from Zelda is such a nice touch.. he always taught me lots as a kid!

Dude your videos are hecking awesome!

I love this deep dive into how all this stuff works! I tried simulating gene-level kin selection once (simply using the actual genetic overlap as a weight for the fitness function to accumulate the fitness of each individual as a weighted sum of the fitness of *all* the individua). The algorithm was unfortunately very slow and I bet I could have made it faster, but it worked quite nicely. Doing something like that for an open, continuous simulation where the creatures don't actually have access to the DNA would probably be more difficult. Perhaps you could, like, add a certain trait dependence into the Genome, wherein, say, a the relative distance between two creature's colors (although I'd go with more than three dimensions. That would be harder to actually visualize of course) can trigger behavior changes such as "stay close", "follow", "stay away", "feed", "eat", "fight", "mate", .... If actually visualizing the presence of specific markers isn't so important, one very easy way to go might be to have each of them have a random bit string as ID/part of their genome, and the overlap in bits is the proximal similarity. Would be interesting to see if anything special develops then, or that stuff gets completely ignored.

1:22 mutations on one-parent organism (and also on every other) can happen when one string of DNA is multiplying into other, but mistake happens, they are so often that for example human (and most other organisms) have system that "repairs" DNA when mutation happens, tho it dont always work.

I don't know how your vids popped up on my recommended vids - but I'm stoked that they did :D

These videos are amazing, thank you so much :)

Really fantastic channel, congrats! I am guessing your future videos will talk about kin selection and multi-level selection, I can't wait! If I may suggest a topic that blew my mind when I learned about it: *the evolution of sexual reproduction*. It is a great example of how selection does not always occur at the level of individuals, but sometimes (rarely) also at higher levels (group or species). If a mutation gives rise to a female able to reproduce asexually (aka parthenogenesis), then her reproductive advantage (x2, no need to create males) means that her offsprings will quickly outcompete all other members of the species. However, after a few thousand years, the species will eventually die out, lacking the necessary diversity to adapt to change (such as parasites). So although the mutation is beneficial in the short term and at the individual & group level, it turns out to be catastrophic in the long run, at the species level. Species that happen to have mechanisms that prevent parthenogenesis are more likely to survive. Mammals are pretty good at this apparently, since there is no known parthenogenetic mammal species. Again, wonderful job, looking forward to your next videos!

*I’m more invested in these animated blobs lives than my own*

I really like this series. I hope a new one comes out soon!!

You guys are the best thing in the world. It's almost 5AM rn and I'm learning about the selfish gene. Wowza's

you need to upload more and this channel will blow up

The best explanation for genetics.

Great videos dude! You just got a new subscriber! Keep up the great work!!

Here before 1m subs, you’re so close!!! Also your videos teach me more than 2 semesters in school

Love these. Can't wait for more blobs.

1:56 I laughed so hard I had to pause the video. Great work, keep it up!

these are nice and easy to digest. also the visuals are cute; the blob critters are adorable. :3 u got urself a sub!

The 'iterated prisoner's dilemma' video from 'This place' is fantastic for understanding how mutually beneficial and even self hurting beneficial can thrive.

"Give peas a chance." roflcopter (perfect engagement easteregg.)

you need more subs

I have a tech class based on simulations like yours! You’ve helped me passed my classes, thank you!

Just discovered your videos, watched through them all. Commenting to aid the algorithm

I'm an altruist and I've never related so much to this in my life.

I learned nothing from this or the other couple of videos I've seen of yours... To be fair, I am a biologist who wrote my thesis in genetics. I'm mostly here because these videos are really well made and I'm contemplating if I can steal them for the class room if I get that teaching position I'm hoping for, as I doubt I can do a better job explaining this myself. Great work mate.

Great video again :) Congratulations!

Superb channel, keep it up!

4:20 the cheating strategy doesn't work because the number of cheaters will increase over generation and will be left with few individuals that help others.

Can anyone explain this? My mind is blown rn

excellent stuff, man!

Amazingly beautiful content right here.

No Billy gene joke ? Meh :(

JEANS are the unit of natural selection

Oh my god I nearly spit out my drink when he said that at the end. I was so not expecting that

When you mentioned that reciprocal altruism should, in theory, be beaten out by strategies that take advantage of it and offer nothing in return, I couldn't help but be reminded of some repeated prisoner's dilemma algorithm competitions, wherein the most successful were those that employed reciprocal altruism until cheated.

What did the biologist say to the other biologist who didn't wear pants? *get some genes* ba dum tss

People actually believe "selfish gene" means "selfish individuals"?

YOUR VIDEOS ARE AWESOME

Just amazing! Fun and informative! :)

Hey, great series of videos! Definitely great material for teaching! I'm going to recommend your videos to my peers if they need to teach evolution, I think that it is a great step-by-step exploration of some of its principles and shows to the young biologists who hate math that it is actually useful to think in mathematical terms and they should not dismiss it (I swear, even simple math is sometimes hard for some of the undergraduate students I encounter) I'd like to ask you about something, though: You clearly insist in this video that the gene is the unit of selection. I understand why you do it for educational purposes here and I know that you know that there are other aspects to selection and that the "selfish" gene is only part of the story. I have focused on neuro-ethology these past years so I'm not studying selection so much anymore and I'm fuzzy on the details of the different sub-theories, but there is an argument for the individuals being the units of selection, isn't there? Genes never exist on their own, only in association with others, in viable "packages". As you say, there are interactions between genes so that the same gene might result in a different version of a trait (to keep it simple like in your video) when associated with a different set of other genes. PLUS, wether a gene has a positive impact on fitness depends on the environment it and its associated "package" is placed in (I know, I'm jumping ahead of this particular video...). We could say that wether a gene is replicated or not depends if the creature survives or not, so either the whole "package" survives in that specific combination, or none of those copies survive. Now since creatures actually don't replicate, but combine their genes in their offspring, this is not really true on the population level, but it means that the gene can't be the ONLY unit of selection. The "package"/creature is too to some extent. What I want to say, is that it seems to me like that notion of a single "unit" of selection is a pretty big oversimplification and that, in reality, the selection happens on multiple levels at once: the gene, the individual, the social network, etc... I was just wondering what your take on this is and I think a sort of overview video towards the end of your series to explain that it is not as simple and that there are multiple, sometimes conflicting, selective forces at play, might be a really good thing. Cheers!

This should be used in classrooms everywhere would I have understood this without this video NOPE these Re very informative enjoyable videos keep up the good work! ❤❤❤

i like your clear view and explanation

This video is great, a very accurate and interactive simplifications of the book from dawkins, You guys should read it, its a masterpiece.

These are such great videos. The simulations and slowly building each argument helps paint the concepts the American education system expects you to retain after being bombarded with. My only criticism would be to go a bit slower on the equations parts, and break down how each variable interacts with each other more.

the thumbnail is looking good, great job!

I love these types of videos!!! You should either produce more videos or use ur altruistic gene to shout-out other youtube channels doing similar simulation work! So they can get more credit and be more likely to reproduce more of this content!!

These are wonderful

holy shit... this channel is actually pretty damn cool. loved it.

Biology was my favorite class in high school and this is fun for me to watch

Phenomenal video ❤️

Thank you!

I've read Dawkins selfish gene book I've studied even more on this subject yet still I can't resist watching this

Your videos are seriously good!!! Please do more, it will pay off! Advertise yourself better and it will flyyyyyy

cool, like your whole series on evolution! Did not hear of genes as the unit of natural selection, cool. Will definitely buy "The Selfish Gene". ( I've always thought selfish was meant in the social way, lol!)

Terrific content. I'm little broke to be a patreon supporter at the moment. Maybe in a few months. :) All the very best!