ic traits and facts, and animal behavior determines the evolution of a species. Accordingly, evolution is predicated of gene behavior, which is also survival behavior. In two chapters, "Immortal Coils" and "Battle of the Sexes," Dawkins discusses patterns of interactions between males and females in a way that stresses the impulse toward sex as a long-term predictor of species and gene survival (in the first chapter) and the strategies of each sex in fostering survival (in the second), all with a view toward revealing ESS, or evolutionary stable strategy (144).
The argument of "Immortal Coils" is that sex is an agency for genetic survival but also that genes that survive essentially become an attribute of future sex--and continued survival of the genes. Dawkins cautions against circular arguments throughout the book, but the fact is that genetic survival is a result of the success of what he calls "replicators," which, when they reproduce, "are good at building survival machines, genes that are skilled in the art of controlling embryonic development" (24). The logic of the argument is that to the degree embryonic development occurs in ways that encourage sex, the surviving genes would perforce replicate. Thus it can be (logically) said that sex is an agent of genetic survival, and any naturally selected surviving gene that is a product of sex, in turn, "survives through a large number of successive individual bodies"--that engage in sex and so determine genetic survival.
Dawkins explains that sex "mixes up" the genes and that the genetic products of sex activity are called the gene pool. Natural selection, which is the result of surviving genes, emerges out of the pool, which is why Dawkins describes the gene as the "fundamental unit of natural selection" (33).
Natural selection is in its most general form means the differential survival of entities. Some entities live and others die but, in order for this selective death
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