In Chapter 1, Dawkins starts by revealing his own hubris and comparing himself to Darwin. In Dawkins opinion, his theory of evolution picks up where Darwin’s left off. Dawkins admires Darwin’s theory but believes it can be pushed further to explain more than it has. In On The Origin of Species, Darwin writes that complex organisms evolved from simple ones, eventually leading to humans. Dawkins argues that this logic explains how intelligent being came about, defining intelligent beings as a being who is aware of its own existence. Rather than explaining evolution from the population or species perspective, Dawkins uses Darwin’s theory to explain evolution from an individual perspective by claiming that all organisms are machinery for the gene, which is the true unit of evolution. This unit of selection is selfish, thereby earning the name the selfish gene. These means that what looks like altruism at the population or species level, is actually just self-preservation on behalf of the genes.