The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition (Oxford Landmark Science) 4th Edition

Listed as number 10 on The Guardian’s “100 best nonfiction books of all time”, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene explores a “gene’s-eye view of evolution” in a re-imagining of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. He explains his thesis concisely in the first chapter:“I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity. To some biologists this may sound at first like an extreme view. I hope when they see in what sense I mean it they will agree that it is, in substance, orthodox, even if it is expressed in an unfamiliar way.”This book is also the origin of our current English word meme, for better or for worse. While I typically use “meme” to refer to image files shared on social media platforms, usually with text typed over the image, the actual word refers to: “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. Not every common word in our tongue has a definite point of origin, so it’s a minor pleasure of mine to read a book that is known to have originated a new word. (My first experience with this was reading Isaac Asimov’s short stories that contained the first usages of the word “robotics”.)What I Liked Least About ItMy primary difficulty with this book was not a fault of the author, but rather my own lack of scientific knowledge, especially in the field of biology. Consider that my high school biology course was taught by an elderly Christian woman who stated early that she wouldn’t teach evolution because she didn’t believe in it, and my college biology course was taught by a licensed minister in a denomination that denies evolution’s existence. So I knew next-to-nothing about evolution until the past few years when I began to read about it in earnest. Many of the concepts Dawkins uses in this book leapt over my head at first, and some required multiple re-readings of many sentences and paragraphs.However, Dawkins’ writing style is clear, and most terms are explained as he introduces them.Another downside was the placement of the footnotes, which might have been the fault of the publisher rather than the author. These notes were added in a later edition, marked in the original text with asterisks, and found in the back of the book. Most of them dealt with new information that had arisen since the original publication and so were enlightening and helpful, but their placement in the back of the book means the reader regularly has to flip to the back to find the note that accompanies the just-found asterisk. I would have greatly preferred to find the notes at the bottom of each applicable page. (I do understand the arguments against such a placement, especially since a few of the notes were lengthy.)What I Liked Most About ItDespite regular accusations from the anti-science crowd that “science is a religion” or that evolution is a matter of “faith”, I found no leaps of faith or baseless assertions in this book (or in any other science-related book I’ve read recently). Where something is unknown, the author said it’s unknown. If something is assumed, he said it is assumed, and explained why it’s assumed. For example:“The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened... We do not know what chemical raw materials were abundant on earth before the coming of life, but among the plausible possibilities are water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia...”This kind of language is exactly why I like science. It uses terms like “as far as we know”, “to the best of our knowledge”, “recent studies have shown”, “with a few exceptions, which I will mention below”, and so on. When contrasted with the firm language of religion (“absolute”, “always”, and “every”), it shows that science is a quest for knowledge rather than an assertion of it. Science tends to recognize what it doesn’t yet know; in fact, what isn’t known is the very reason for the existence of science.I also liked the ideas presented, because they make sense, intuitively, given the knowledge of genetics and DNA that science has uncovered. The idea that natural selection works on genes — rather than individuals, groups, or species — is logically sound.“Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.”The idea that individuals are complex “survival machines” built by genes to ensure future replication is powerful and humbling, yet surprisingly difficult to dispute. It does what a good scientific theory should; it explains observed phenomenon.“Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us — from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator — molecules called DNA — but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a survival machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.”It Should Be NotedThe theory proposed, described, and defended by Dawkins in this book is not entirely his own, as he hurries to mention in his book. The gene-centered view of evolution first began to arise not long after DNA was first correctly described in the late 1950s, and was pioneered by scientists George C. Williams and John Maynard Smith in the 1960s. But, as Robert Trivers (another scientist) wrote in the forward to The Selfish Gene, it was Dawkins’ book that “for the first time... presented [this theory] in a simple and popular form”.This idea is also not without its detractors. There are notable scientists who disagree with the central tenets of Dawkins’ views, among them famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (now deceased) — one of two men responsible for the punctuated equilibrium theory. Gould believed natural selection worked on several levels, but learned toward the species as being the fundamental unit of selection. He also argued against the acceptance of the idea that many behaviors are genetically determined.My own view (which is relevant here, since this is my book review) is that they’re probably both right. My view doesn’t arise from any scientific knowledge — my lack of which I have already mentioned — but purely from my observational experience that two-sided arguments are often artificial, that both sides often contain enough truth to be valid. It would surprise me if scientists as a whole someday determined that natural selection only works on the genetic level or only worked at the species level (or only at any other level: group-selection, kin-selection, individual selection, etc.) While one level or another might turn out to be more important than the others (and that most important level could easily turn out to be the genetic level), it stands to reason that the other levels carry weight as well.Dawkins and Gould are probably both right on the determinism argument as well. Based on my own experiences with addictive behavior (not to mention many studies published in the decades since Gould and Dawkins disagreed) shows that genetic determinism must play at least some part in many behaviors. At least, I am currently convinced of this. But also clear is that behavior is often influenced by our views and beliefs, and our views and beliefs are changeable, so it stands to reason that some of our behavior is not genetically determined. (I am using “reason” here in the sense of “common sense”, which I recognize is often shown to be incorrect; intuition is not always right — take for example that it’s “common sense” that the Sun moves while the Earth does not, something that was eventually disproved.)ConclusionI would recommend this book to anyone interested in science in general, though I would advise first building a rudimentary knowledge of biology and evolutionary theory. As already mentioned, my own shortcomings in these areas made it difficult to understand parts of this book.

Given the sloppy research and broad proclamations in Dawkins' more recent books (a tendency I'm tempted to attribute to arrogance, for a variety of reasons I shall not get into here), it is something of a shock to go back and read his older work, which, despite being a work of 'popular science,' is rigorous in its logic and actually contributed a great deal to changing the modern understanding of how evolution works in the long haul. People could debate all day about which of his books are the 'best,' but certainly nothing more provocative and influential has issued forth from his pen than his first work, The Selfish Gene. Even a cursory glance through the negative reviews here will serve as a testament to the power of its ideas: this book forces us to rethink so many of our fundamental assumptions about life, the universe, and everything (rest in peace, Douglas Adams!). Many people on here find the implications of the ideas on display here frightening, and perhaps even dangerous. This is to be expected: it provoked much wonderment and thought in me, a staunch atheist. I can't imagine how alien the world of the selfish gene must seem to the religious temperament. But I digress. Many of the positive reviews are VERY positive, and this is a cherished book for many people. My point here is, first, that the ideas introduced here are important, and, second, they're introduced very well.It would be impossible for me to do justice to the ideas contained in this book, and so I won't even bother. But the fundamental argument and worldview of this book is worth discussing briefly, if superficially. When this book was published in the late seventies, naive ideas about evolution, such as group selection theory, were wide-spread, and so a distorted image of what Darwinism really amounted to was continually encountered. Enter Richard Dawkins, who argued that our conventional understanding of life was upside-down: rather than thinking of evolution as groups of organisms or even individual organisms using genes to replicate themselves, perhaps genes were using individual organisms to replicate themselves. That is, Dawkins argued that the primary unit of selection was not the group, or even the individual, but the gene itself, in the long run. Genes are not the tools organisms use to make copies of themselves; rather, replicating molecules build increasingly efficient vehicles for delivering themselves through the generations in any given environment, and this process of increasing efficiency is called evolution. This ultimately reduces organisms from the main actors in the play of life to mere "survival machines" (Dawkins' term) being indirectly manipulated by their genes.It is obvious that this stabs at the core of the uneasiness and fright some people feel when they are engaging this work: according to Dawkins, we are robots, or puppets. Dawkins uses both metaphors in this work to describe organisms, but the one he really runs with is the metaphor of organisms as robots. Needless to say, people don't like being classified as "gigantic lumbering robots." For the religious, the objection is obvious: they believe humans to be animals with souls. But even many secularists have raised their eyebrows as the oft-quoted passages comparing organisms to robots. But, as Dawkins notes, robots are not necessarily the clumsy, mindless clods of old science-fiction shows, and if we are puppets, he says, we can at least understand our strings. Needless to say he goes out of his way to disassociate himself from genetic determinism or the establishing of any kind of morality: Dawkins is not here to preach, but to present a conceptual framework for understanding the mysteries of evolution.The central metaphor of the book, however, is that of the eponymous selfish gene. Of course, genes are microscopic molecules and thus can't be consciously selfish, but they act AS IF they were. So anthropomorphic language runs throughout the work. While Dawkins often introduces extended metaphors, he never lets them run wild and take over the work. In the case of the selfish gene, selfishness is defined in a purely behavioral manner, so there are no real problems introduced by this. The selfish gene exploits every available opportunity to replicate more efficiently and spread throughout the local gene pool.As said before, I'm not going to relay the various arguments in this book, but I do want to give potential readers a basic outline of this book, so that they understand that scope of the material discussed here:Chapters 1 - 3 discuss basic stuff in biology, from a certain theory about the origin of life (he intentionally uses different origin theories in each of his books, due to our lack of knowledge in that area) to basic discussions on cell biology and the function of DNA. Chapter 4 sets up selfish gene theory through a basic discussion of what 'behavior' is. Chapter 5 discusses animal aggression and its relationship to such concepts as dominance hierarchies and ESSs (Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, an application of game theory expanded upon in a later chapter). Chapter 6 explores how individual altruism (a strange observation in the cut-throat world of Darwinian ruthlessness) can be explained through gene selfishness. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss kin selection, with 8 focusing squarely on parent-offspring relations. Chapter 9 talks about sexual selection and exploitation. Chapter 10 focuses on reciprocal altruism. Chapter 11, the final chapter in the original edition, introduces the now famous ideas of cultural replicators, or memes. In the book's second edition in 1989 Dawkins tacked on two chapters to the end, which, I think, are also two of the best. Chapter 12 takes a closer look at game theory and how it relates to our understanding of evolution. And chapter 13 reproduces in abbreviated form the central argument of his second work, The Extended Phenotype, which argues that the effects of genes can ultimately be described as influencing things outside of the individual organism as well, if very indirectly (of course, as Dawkins points out, the genetic influence on the organism is itself indirect, if to a much lesser extent).I hope that this review might serve its purpose of giving undecided customers some hint as to the richness and breadth of scope in this work. I hope everyone reads this book. Now, it isn't perfect: Dawkins has edited almost nothing from this work, leaving it virtually untouched, so that what you read in the first eleven chapters in 2010 was all there in 1976 as well. What this inevitably means is that some of Dawkins' speculations have been shown to be false over time. Most of these errors were pointed out in the voluminous end-notes added in the second addition of the work (Dawkins never failed to point it out when he is wrong about something, which is something I can really respect-- here is a thinker with integrity), although some, such as the correct function of surplus DNA, were only discovered recently, so that they escaped mention in this book. It is fairly easy to get up-to-date on all this, and there are no shortage of people who love to point out where exactly Dawkins is wrong on something. So be sure to supplement this book with some minor research if you care about keeping your understanding current. Also, the chapter on memes is admittedly sketchy (although many see more value in the idea than I do), and some sections of this work, especially when he is discussion the origins of life, are contentious. Keep this in mind. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a more important and readable introduction to both Darwinism and selfish gene theory than this.This third edition of the work, released in 2006, doesn't really add anything to the central text, like the huge overhaul of the second edition, but it restores all previous introductions, forewords, and prefaces, and adds a new one for this 30th anniversary edition. Also included are extracts from reviews of the work. This is really like an Ultimate Edition of The Selfish Gene, and if you've never read before, I advise you to read it now. At worst, it'll give you some interesting ideas to chew on. At best, it'll give you a whole new perspective on life. Read it.

While this book is highly celebrated, it comes off as pretentious a lot. Hard to read if you’re not an atheist. The man is brilliant though.