The selfish man was despised by his colleagues.

In 1976, the biologist Richard Dawkins identified the unit of Darwinian selection as the selfish gene.

It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today.

Israel s current leaders, and a segment of Israeli society, are trapped in an idiosyncratic logic of fear and self centeredness.

To be sure, the selfish gene needs to be altruistic insofar as its survival depends on the survival of the kinship group.

At the same time they denounced the selfishness of political parties, which so often exploit vulnerable groups in order to win votes at election time they also found it regrettable that the speakers had not stressed more strongly the need to reinforce the power and presence of women in politics.

First, from the rational egoist point of view, it is rational to contribute to a pension scheme now, even though this is detrimental to one's present interests (which are to spend the money now).

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene , as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads Internet memes are a subset of this general meme concept specific to the culture and environment of the Internet.

So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self centered situation of, how happy am I, where you're always dissatisfied as Mick Jagger told us. You never get any satisfaction that way.

Republican John McCain believes that it presents a test of foresight, of political courage, and of the unselfish concern that one generation owes to the next, while Democrat Barack Obama calls it one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.

Homo economicus, the rationally acting egoist who populates economists models, has recently attracted criticism as well, because all too often he does not represent the real behavior of individuals. Behavioral experiments have shown conclusively the limited predictive value of this artificial construct.

And, although Dawkins later regretted calling his gene selfish (he says that immortal would have been better), his choice of adjective was certainly best adapted to maximizing sales of his book at that particular time.

But I am afraid that something more than stupidity (though less than plain evil) is at work here. Israel s current leaders, and a segment of Israeli society, are trapped in an idiosyncratic logic of fear and self centeredness.