Are Genes that Selfish?

It's been a while since I've read a good book. Suspense, mystery, action, comedy these genres fill my shelves. School textbooks are on my desk. Now with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it has me placing it somewhere in between. Now I'm eager to see who cracks open the famous Religion vs. Science debate in class. Though, from what was taught for almost a year now, I've learned more in just a few minutes of reading.

Richard Dawkins describes exceptionally well and interesting about the infamous subject of genes which many high-schoolers seem to avoid. "Survival of the fittest" just makes it the more exciting, seeing you can relate it to those movies or games where it's just killing and moving on to learning that penguins push their families and friends off cliffs for their own safety.

Stopping at chapter 2: The Replicator, it had many of my classmates questioning the author's, and Darwin's, reasoning over how could a mistake create perfection. "But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect."(page 16) There was bound to be a mistakes. If the Replicator was out there making millions of copies of itself, you wouldn't expect it to be 100% correct all the time. Not even the bible can handle writing the exact same thing hundreds of times without making mistranslations. "I suppose the scholars of the septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for 'young woman' into the Greek word for 'virgin', coming up with the prophecy: 'Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son...'"
Something can't become better without learning, or in this case adapting, from its own mistakes. Basically mistakes are what give evolution a reason: create a easier and safer life for the next generation. This is all part of Darwin's natural selection.
Therefore, genes are perfecting themselves for a better survival machine, us.