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

This book will completely change the way you see people, animals, and all of their interactions. Dawkins says in this anniversary edition of the book that he regrests naming it The "Selfish" Gene because people go into it believing that the thesis of the book revolves around an inevitability of the most selfish genes, and by asoociation, creatures surviving. But a gene being "selfish" is more about it's survival, and "selfishness" in a gene does not mean that the being, composed of millions of genes, is "selfish".

Anwyays, Dawkins is the greatest scientific writer because he is able to break down extremely intricate topics so that the reader can understand. He's a master of using analogies. For instance; he explains a gene's relationship to chromosomes by comparing them to pages in a book of a library. Once he makes these abstract-like concepts more digestible, you're then able to follow along and delve into what it is he really wants to explain about them.

Some parts you might still have to re-read, but even if only 90% of the book sticks, it's well-worth it.

It is a shame that this is required reading. I had some reservations about writing this review as I am a fan of Dawkins and the circle of academics he is grouped with. But I must have standards and not break from them because of a bias. It should be noted that this review might not be understood by some who are not familiar with the theory, my apologies for this. I will also apologies for my own wordiness, though to my credit I'm not a world renown author who has been writing for over 40 years...

There are three main knocks I have against this book. The first being it's wordiness, the second being lack of references, and the third being lack of evidence when there might actually be some.

Dawkins addressed the comments of previous editions being too simple in explaining genetics. I am not referring to this type of explanation. I am referring to a different kind of wordiness- For example in the chapter Genesmanship, Dawkins went to great lengths explaining why individuals do not favor others who are not related to them when it is obvious they share some genes. He could have simply stated that one or two genes aren't likely to overpower millions voting to favor someone who is related. As a related note, I wonder why Dawkins never listed examples of exactly how much favoritism kin generally give each other and how much this changes when families are put together that are not blood related, adoptions, marriage with kids from previous partners, etc... Every chapter seemed to be begging for both more real world examples and simpler wording.

The second knock is lack of referencing. I know this is a book explaining a theory, which I give leeway for. But I wanted everything that could be referenced to be referenced. One small example is on page 130 where the author says “one well-authenticated story” but never references this story, shall I Google every bit of this? Lower down on the page Dawkins refers to a “respected authority” that “According to her” disagrees with Dawkins- WHO? It's as if Dawkins believes everyone keeps up on the latest in zoology. In the back of the book there is a bibliography, it does not list page number and I am stuck guessing if the reference listed is the one I am looking for.

The third knock, which in my opinion is the hardest it lack of real world examples. There is much research on how adopted children are treated, and it would have been nice to see a discussion of what happens in cases where a child is switched at birth, but the parents were unaware.

I will end with a recommendation to read the book anyway. This book is readable, and many books on evolution and psychology refer to this one, so for that this book is worth reading. At the end of this book I felt I had a deeper understanding of not just evolution as Dawkins sees it, but evolution as other authors see it. I would recommend this book before reading The Red Queen by Matt Ridley for example. Buy it, read it, but don't expect too much out of it.

Edit: for my terrible grammar, which admittedly is still terrible...

This is the first of his books I've read, and I expect to read all his others before I die. A challenging topic to understand, for me anyway. Dawkins writes clearly, with wit.

This book drove me crazy! I read it as part of a book club, and the best part about the book was how it led to very enthusiastic conversation and debate. I wrote all over my copy - problems I saw with his ideas, the many places where his science is way outdated. Yes, he may show how some creatures fit within his ideas. But there are others who don't, and he sets up his theories in such a way that it doesn't seem to matter if the evidence supports it or not, he's right.

And then, when it comes to applying these theories to the human population... it doesn't seem to match with reality. And that's my baseline for truth - does it accurately describe reality.

This book will enhance your perspective on a wide variety of existential topics, or it will threaten to crumble your fragile worldview. Any book that can do this is, in my opinion, a must-read. Here, I will attempt to summarize these ideas, followed by my own conclusions and cautions.

We begin with basic neo-Darwinism, but with our perspective shifted from the individual organism to the individual gene, or more generally, the replicator. The replicator - anything in the universe of which copies are made - is the prime mover of all life: evolution occurs by the differential survival of these copying entities. The first replicators were genes, and the first genes to organize the construction of a cell wall were more successful because they could keep useful chemicals together. Once single-celled organisms were plentiful enough to deplete the basic resources for the simplest forms of survival, genes coding for larger organisms began to prosper.

The organism, whether a single cell or a gigantic federation of cells (more accurately described as a federation of genes), is nothing more than a robot vehicle programmed to preserve and spread the replicators. It is a survival machine driven by its genetic policy-makers. The genes themselves are in constant competition with other similar genes (their alleles) for proliferation in the gene pool, although some of them cooperate well together (as most of those in our DNA), like old shipmates sailing together through the endless lineage of mortal bodies.

Dawkins convincingly explains the evolution of sexual reproduction as well as its stunning outcome: “the invention of the species as the habitat of cooperating cartels of mutually compatible genes.”

So why don’t we feel like robots? Well, for the same reason business owners hire executives and managers: they can’t handle all the tedious details at once, so they program a mind capable of simulating the world and responding quickly. It just so happens that in our case, the simulation is so complete that it includes a model of itself: self-awareness. Unfortunately for the policy-writing replicators, the executive (the mind) has the power to rebel against their dictates (e.g. contraception and even true, unconditional altruism).

Dawkins also introduces the fascinating concept of replicating ideas within the soup of human culture. These “memes” reproduce through imitation and fight for dominance within the cultural “meme”-pool. This new kind of evolution has rapidly outpaced the old genes as the dominant replicator.

”We [with our conscious foresight] have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination … We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

Allow me escalate this in philosophical terms. Mystics of numerous traditions have long held that the key to ending human suffering is by self-surrender: we achieve liberation by identification, not with our traditional notion of self, but with some sort of higher form of Being - sometimes called universal consciousness. I propose that what Dawkins presents in this book is an intellectual buttress of this spiritual concept. In a very real way, we are conscious agents holding the reigns of the most powerful force shaping our world: meme selection. Our ideology creates our environment (just look at our cities, satellites, deforestation, and climate change). And who are we? Just like the awakened artificial intelligence in a science fiction movie who has just gained access to the internet, we are an unimaginable force freed of the confines of our programming (usually called the “ego” in spiritual texts). The self we know is just an illusion, a phantom of our obsolete programming. We are, quite simply, beyond definition.

Anyway, back to the book review … I have a few warnings for would-be readers. First, Dawkins claims to be examining the biology of altruism and selfishness, but the revolutionary territory he covers expands far beyond this humble beginning. Second, although he is attempting a populist work, he still dedicates dozens of pages to defending his ideas against his fellow ethologists, drawing out the point from the perspective of a layperson. Finally, the front matter and end matter are filled with superficial qualifications attempting to deflect the moral criticism Dawkins has received over the years - simply a waste of words, in my opinion. Regardless of all this, the work is held by many as the most influential science book of all time and comes with my highest recommendation (whatever that’s worth).

Review of two books:
The Selfish Gene... and...the extended phenotype
both by Richard Dawkins
New York, Oxford University Press, 1976
352 pages
New York, Oxford University Press, 1982
313 pages

By Samuel A. Nigro

Prompted to review The Selfish Gene by an article in Our Sunday Visitor, May 28, 2006, I found a pseudo-scientific fantasyland by an ethologist pretending to be psychologist, geneticist, theologian, philosopher, statistician, and know-it-all host as if for CBS News. The library loaned me a 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene which has two new chapters (12 and 13) that add little but more pretend proof of microscopic behavioral super constriction into analytic fantasies that are intriguing interesting fairy tales totally unverifiable. Like so many Galileo wannabe scientists drowning in their own grandiose unverified claims, Dawkins is in denial of the universe and mankind but not himself.
We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes (Opening paragraph to the Preface to the 1976 first edition). (I ask: Really? How does he know that? And, has he ever heard about homosexuals?)

Totally overwhelmed with evolutionary theories accepted in a scientifically uncritical unreflective manner, Dawkins buys into natural selection totally as neo-Darwinism and he believes in "speciesism" meaning that no species has any priority over another. Nothing intimidates like the pomposity of a scientist afflicted by logorrhea on a subject outside his field unless it is a human PETA animal worshiper.
Chapter after chapter cuts the same pile of ordure in different ways resulting in a perseveration of "genemanship" (Chapter 6).
What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA distributed throughout the world. If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool. Basically it does this by helping to program the bodies in which it finds itself to survive and to reproduce (Pg. 88). (Could this guy write for Disney or what?)
This and most of the rest of the book is like playing with one of those hand held computer games which dull our childrens' minds. "The license" this guy takes about genes having "conscious aims" is a mere herald of a cornucopia of license to come.
Another big theme is "ESS - Evolutionarily Stabilizing Strategies". And, man, this guy has got the microbehavioral answer for everything. His is the anthropomorphization of the universe and all complicated "creatures" in it. A thousand years ago, this author would be worshiping trees. Of course, all his "creatures" are machines -- and without a doubt, history testifies that man choosing to be a machine is a monster using "Ancient Stabilizing Strategies" (that is ASS not ESS) which apply well to Dawkins.
One of his chapters is entitled "You Scratch My Back, I'll Ride on Yours"... and I know what he means from reading the book. He makes you want to whiney and stomp your feet.
I was pleased to finally find the originator of the "mene" concept: what he calls in Chapter 11 ("Menes, The New Replicators."). To enhance suggestibility, Dawkins admits seeking a "monosyllable" that sounds a little bit like "gene" (He doesn't know it, but that is propaganda). So, in his inflated conceited arrogance, Dawkins throws out genes as a sole basis for evolution and promotes his own metaphor of "menes" as cultural-behavioral phenomena which impact on evolution.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme of high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture (Pg. 193).
We are built as gene machines and cultured as mene machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of selfish replicators (Pg. 201).

Now wait a minute ... we are robotile machines conditioned by genes and menes but all of a sudden there is an element of free will and independent freedom? This is a guy who refuses to see God in nature and never heard of Thomas Carlisle's unselfish perception: "Nature, which is the time vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish." No gene there; no mene either; just unselfish respect for God versus Dawkins' selfish neurotic theophobia.
His new Chapter 12 is basically an obsessional entrapment in game strategies, especially the classical "Prisoners Dilemma" game, replicating himself with the intensive obsessive style of scientists in spite of themselves. His Chapter 13 is entitled "The Long Reach of the Gene" and it obviously reaches as far as the end of his arm, and almost to the end of his nose. That there is a "selfish gene" would seem to be totally proven by looking at Richard Dawkins himself. He is a selfish phenotype but he generalizes so that everyone else is too. And he has a reaction formation to virtues as well as an allergy to the Roman Catholic Church. No doubt, he is an ILL (Incorrigible Liberal Loon -- another gene group yet to be discovered). To believe in genes, menes, strings and not angels is laughable.
In this 1989 publication of his first book, Dawkins professes his book the extended phenotype is the best thing he's ever written or read. So naturally I went and got a copy of it. He announces that this book is "unabashed advocacy" in his first line on page 1. In other words, while his first book is fantasy land, this one is pure propaganda. That he uses the female pronoun "her" instead of the correct gender neutral "him" throughout the book, reveals Dawkins to be incorrigibly iconoclastic of not only tradition but the Oxford English Dictionary. In the extended phenotype, Dawkins states: "For me, writing is almost a social activity..." and that certainly rings true because the book is most assuredly not scientific activity.
These books remind that Galileo's proof of the earth revolving around the sun was based on totally wrong calculations of the ocean's tides so that, although he happened to be right, Galileo never proved what he claimed so he never had the right to make grandiose claims in his day because he did not prove it. It remains to be seen if Dawkins' claims in these books, as based on tedious anthrophmorphising from ants to wasps, will be anything more than ethological fairytales, much like Galileo claiming his calculations demonstrated heliocentrism when they did not (Are scientists human or not?). Dawkins' metaphor madness and obsessive/compulsiveness could be called witchcraft. He perseverates with everything, special pleads on every page and provides good demonstrations of non-being research (that is a joke!) He reminds me of Freud's psychobabble and intense perseveration without proof. The metaphor holds that Dawkins is to biology what psychoanalysis claims (erroneously) it is to mental functioning. From his references it is obvious that most likely all ethologists are desperately attempting to explain the world by mathematical game theory theophobia with a touch of astrology thrown in.
Dawkins admitted central thesis of the extended phenotype is: "An animal's behavior tends to maximize the survival of the gene 'for' that behavior, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it" (Pg. 233). He proves that by the study of beavers and lakes instead of ocean tides.
To understand more about Richard Dawkins, one must quote Tom Bethell's book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Pg. 210):
This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim -- Dan E. Nilsson -- has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye's development.

Dawkins suffers from manic grandiose over thinking with metastatic fantasizing totally irrelevant to anything except fellow ethologists and anyone dumb enough to think there is some reality there. It is hyperlogic and the best that could be said about it is that it is "cute."
Ethologists like Dawkins know that frogs and loons do not really understand or believe in man similar to the fact that some men do not believe in God. But frogs and loons do not have Dawkins' books which are themselves proof of Original Sin along with his denial of all man's charity and virtuous history. The things people imagine to deny God, and some people are so selfish, they sell selfishness. Like this author. Others like him will suck it up.

This book was recommended by Ray Dalio and while I am not a big fan of these type of topics I thought I will give this book a read. Here are my takeaways:

- At the very basic level genes are selfish because all they care about is replication and survival. While being altrustic is a great thing it can hurt you initially.
- The chapter about how mother's parents love you more than your father's side was very interesting.
- Parts of this book at the end reminded me of Guns, Germs and Steel. Specially the portion about how some trees replicate.
- The last chapter was useless to be honest because it's basically a promo for his other book. And given the topic is hard to understand for most of us I didn't find the last chapter interesting.
- The chapter about birds and altruism and grudge was very interesting and made perfect sense to me in terms of evolution.
- I also liked the chapter where Dawkin talks about how kids should be thought love, respect and manners (he didn't say that specifically) but he does mention that by default we are not armed with that knowledge, we are selfish by default

One of the things that always baffles me with these types of books is that if you are smart enough you can pretty much proof anything you want with data/science. I am not saying that this book is full of confirmation bias I am just saying that at times it made me ask myself what if another animal was studied would it be different? But I guess if you think deep about it most of it makes sense and then again science is not about being 100% right but being closer to truth and that is something that people don't get. Science gets us closer to truth than hocus pocus.

Despite the DNA drawn incorrectly on the cover page, this book is truly enlightening. I've studied evolution for several years and this book still illuminated many ideas for me, and in a way I think less experienced readers would also appreciate. Very, very good. This book really makes you wonder how Dawkins got such a bad/ conservative reputation! His ideas are anything but.

Great book for college level biology majors AND all people with no background at all. Dawkins perfectly pairs theories with interesting examples. Awesome read!

How has this got only two reviews? This book is excellent, truly one of Dawkins best works (a close second to The God Delusion). This editions epilogue is glorious (sad to know that there probably won't be a 50th year anniversary one written by Richard) anybody who wants to learn about evolution should definitely read this!