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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
The last non-fiction book I'd read was Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond which tells the story of human civilization from when we first evolved on Africa to the modern day.
I followed that up with The Selfish Gene, which starts with guesses about the so-called primordial soup of hundreds of millions of years ago and ends its story with every living thing we have today. Clearly, I read these books in the wrong order.
Of course, it also provides some perspective: I had originally thought that Guns, Germs, and Steel was a brief summary; but Dawkins covers vastly more ground than Diamond did in fewer pages. So, naturally, The Selfish Gene is not a detailed history. Instead, it's a popular-science level in-depth* description of the basic principles of natural selection.
I certainly had a lot of it wrong**. So I'm grateful that Dawkins starts at the very beginning and slowly builds up his theory step by step and example by example. With something of a math background, I particularly appreciated the sections on game theory and evolutionarily-stable-strategies.
Every chapter has a similar ebb and flow. They start out with basic principles and contrived examples and slowly build up to more complicated cases and real-world scientific examples. This is a good: you know what to expect in each chapter. And if a chapter starts bogging down as Dawkins gets more complex, you know that you'll get a break when the next one starts. It's nice.
I checked Wikipedia before writing this review: the absence of a "Criticisms" section for this book leads me to believe that the contents of this book is still the orthodox and accepted theory of how natural selection works. Assuming that's true, this is probably one of those rare books that everyone needs to read. Even though I know far less about this stuff than even a Freshman biology student, I know far more about the origins of all the species around me (including my own!) than I did before I started reading this book. While I don't expect to be able to apply any selfish gene principles at the office tomorrow, I suspect that being able to place so much into this larger context will be beneficial to my understanding of the world: I'll probably be benefiting from this book for the rest of my life.
The executive summary:
If Diamond answered the question "Who are we?", Dawkins masterfully explains "Why are we here?". The answer ("Because our ancestors' genes survived.") may not be particularly satisfying on a spiritual or philosophical level for some. But the fact (as Dawkins goes to great pains to point out) that we appear to be uniquely capable of asking and answering that question in the first place gives us a power that's essentially brand new on the earth: We can change our world for the better. We can work together to rise above the petty demands of our selfish genes.
Heavy stuff.
*At least, as in-depth as it's probably possible for a pop-sci book to be.
**This is not even a little surprising if you consider my education where the answer to just about any question was "A wizard God did it".
I followed that up with The Selfish Gene, which starts with guesses about the so-called primordial soup of hundreds of millions of years ago and ends its story with every living thing we have today. Clearly, I read these books in the wrong order.
Of course, it also provides some perspective: I had originally thought that Guns, Germs, and Steel was a brief summary; but Dawkins covers vastly more ground than Diamond did in fewer pages. So, naturally, The Selfish Gene is not a detailed history. Instead, it's a popular-science level in-depth* description of the basic principles of natural selection.
I certainly had a lot of it wrong**. So I'm grateful that Dawkins starts at the very beginning and slowly builds up his theory step by step and example by example. With something of a math background, I particularly appreciated the sections on game theory and evolutionarily-stable-strategies.
Every chapter has a similar ebb and flow. They start out with basic principles and contrived examples and slowly build up to more complicated cases and real-world scientific examples. This is a good: you know what to expect in each chapter. And if a chapter starts bogging down as Dawkins gets more complex, you know that you'll get a break when the next one starts. It's nice.
I checked Wikipedia before writing this review: the absence of a "Criticisms" section for this book leads me to believe that the contents of this book is still the orthodox and accepted theory of how natural selection works. Assuming that's true, this is probably one of those rare books that everyone needs to read. Even though I know far less about this stuff than even a Freshman biology student, I know far more about the origins of all the species around me (including my own!) than I did before I started reading this book. While I don't expect to be able to apply any selfish gene principles at the office tomorrow, I suspect that being able to place so much into this larger context will be beneficial to my understanding of the world: I'll probably be benefiting from this book for the rest of my life.
The executive summary:
If Diamond answered the question "Who are we?", Dawkins masterfully explains "Why are we here?". The answer ("Because our ancestors' genes survived.") may not be particularly satisfying on a spiritual or philosophical level for some. But the fact (as Dawkins goes to great pains to point out) that we appear to be uniquely capable of asking and answering that question in the first place gives us a power that's essentially brand new on the earth: We can change our world for the better. We can work together to rise above the petty demands of our selfish genes.
Heavy stuff.
*At least, as in-depth as it's probably possible for a pop-sci book to be.
**This is not even a little surprising if you consider my education where the answer to just about any question was "
challenging
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Nach Richard Dawkins´ vor über 30 Jahren entworfener und heute noch immer provozierender These steuern und dirigieren unsere von Generation zu Generation weitergegebenen Gene uns, um sich selbst zu erhalten. Alle biologischen Organismen dienen somit vor allem dem Überleben und der Unsterblichkeit der Erbanlagen und sind letztlich nur die 'Einweg-Behälter' der 'egoistischen' Gene. Sind wir Menschen also unserem Gen-Schicksal hilflos ausgeliefert? Dawkins bestreitet dies und macht uns Hoffnung: Seiner Meinung nach sind wir nämlich die einzige Spezies mit der Chance, gegen ihr genetisches Schicksal anzukämpfen.
Dies ist mein drittes Buch von Dawkins und sicher nicht mein letztes. Ich mag den Schreibstil des Evolutionsbiologen und Star-Atheisten sehr. Stellenweise waren in diesem Werk für meinen Geschmack die Erläuterungen etwas zu ausschweifend und teilweise redundant, allerdings möchte der Wissenschaftler sicher verstanden sein, daher ist das völlig in Ordnung. Schnecken, Tauben, Putzfische, Saugwürmer, und vieles mehr werden zur Erläuterung der Theorien herangezogen. Eine Empfehlung für Freunde der populärwissenschaftlichen Literatur.
Dies ist mein drittes Buch von Dawkins und sicher nicht mein letztes. Ich mag den Schreibstil des Evolutionsbiologen und Star-Atheisten sehr. Stellenweise waren in diesem Werk für meinen Geschmack die Erläuterungen etwas zu ausschweifend und teilweise redundant, allerdings möchte der Wissenschaftler sicher verstanden sein, daher ist das völlig in Ordnung. Schnecken, Tauben, Putzfische, Saugwürmer, und vieles mehr werden zur Erläuterung der Theorien herangezogen. Eine Empfehlung für Freunde der populärwissenschaftlichen Literatur.
What is the fundamental, basic unit of life in our world? Is it each individual in a species? the species as a whole? groups of species that share real estate together? an entire continent, or even the planet itself? In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins argues that the basic unit is the gene, and that natural selection has been ruled by the ways in which genes seek to perpetuate themselves, generation after generation (that’s the “selfish” aspect—not that there is a gene which causes selfishness in anyone; I would have preferred his other title option, The Immortal Gene). Dawkins applies logic to case study after case study from science, building his case that none of us is really an individual in any basic, meaningful sense; rather, each of us is a collection of genes that keep themselves (and in the process, us) going. We don’t need to be these individual collections of genes at all—it’s just the most efficient means natural selection arrived at for keeping the genes going. It sounds like an enormous topic, and it is. But watching Dawkins wrestle with question after question is very entertaining and illuminating.
What makes Dawkins so readable here is the combination of his distinctive writing voice and his infectious enthusiasm and delight for learning about the natural world. Books like The Selfish Gene and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell in the 1970s opened the way for so many other “science books for us non-scientists” that have come out since. They show that science is never merely a bunch of facts to memorize in class, but instead is always a story that’s unfolding day by day.
The story that Dawkins constructs is extremely compelling—regarding everything in the world but humans. When it comes to applying the same principles and equations to humanity, the story is more complicated and less convincing. Dawkins sometimes suggests that there is no real distinction between humanity and any other species, yet he struggles to use the logic of natural selection to explain humans in the same way that it explains everything else. This difficulty is partly because we’re so close to the subject matter, and so it’s harder to see objectively. But it’s also largely because of the nagging fact of consciousness. We think, we analyze, we seem to know ourselves and our environment in ways that no other species does. We can sense the frustration of trying to include humans in the selfish gene discussion when Dawkins writes,
Though it ultimately doesn’t harm the general flow of The Selfish Gene , this issue of human consciousness, and the question of where exactly we fit into all this, is occasionally troubling. The wonder of Dawkins’s argument, really, is that he can bring us around to his point of view that what “matters” in natural selection is not an individual in a species but the genes within that individual. Still, though: we don’t ourselves intuitively feel that we are fundamentally our genes rather than our whole-person consciousness, do we? Within Dawkins’s very neat, tidy explanation of life on our world, this is the one tension that doesn’t quite go away. We are different: how and why and when did that happen?
Whether or not humanity fits nicely into this explanation, most of The Selfish Gene is clearly more focused on other species. Dawkins clarifies this in what was originally the final chapter of the book, “Memes.” But until that clarification, the reader may be forgiven for making the easy leap from “other species” to “humanity,” and then from there to the possibility that Dawkins is approving of cold, horrifying eugenics. This passage, for example:
In fact, it’s when Dawkins shifts from the central focus of The Selfish Gene to talking about culture and religion that he is at his weakest. If I were reading this book and knew nothing else about him, I would wish that he would keep writing about science but leave off writing about religion. What has actually transpired in his writing career thus makes me sad, and I almost don’t even want to say anything about his views on religion, as expressed in this, his first book. As good as he is at telling the story of science, his opinions about religion (and the related public persona that he has willingly cultivated) seem to have made it nearly impossible for people to calmly discuss what he says. Honestly, I picked up this book because I was interested in reading Dawkins for his reputation as a clear, engaging science writer, and because I believed that this first book didn’t contain the level of animosity toward religion that has become almost his trademark in the years since. That’s all true—religion doesn’t come up very often in the book, and it doesn’t seem very significant to Dawkins for his discussion. However, it does come up, and it is something that I care about, so with all this preamble out of the way, here are a few of my thoughts about it.
Dawkins supposes that the only need for God is to help us out with things we don’t understand. In areas where we’re blind to the “real facts,” it’s (for some reason) natural for us to attribute it to God and assume that he knows what’s going on, which relaxes us and makes us more comfortable with the ambiguity and blindness. Thus, if we can figure out some of the ways the universe works, then it should be natural for us to say, “Oh well, now that we can explain it ourselves, what’s the need for God?” It’s an argument that’s a little circular, first assuming that if there’s a God, that God would be thus-and-such kind of a God—in this case, that a God who created the world in a certain way (using evolution, as Dawkins and I would agree) wouldn’t also intend that we gradually figure out that creation process and come to delight in the way the natural world works, also coming to know God better and better, not in spite of but because of the beauty of how the world works and what we learn about it.
The fact that God created a world in which we have the creative and intellectual freedom to tell that world’s story in all kinds of ways doesn’t diminish my view of God at all. Dawkins tells a story of the world without God, but that doesn’t prove that there’s no God; it just proves that there are many ways to tell the story of the world. There are some such stories that are definitely wrong (that the world is flat, for example, or that the universe revolves around the earth), and others that seem to us definitely correct. But the existence of God is beyond the scope of the storytelling that Dawkins favors here. That logical approach doesn’t rule out God, but neither can it definitively prove God. There is mystery. It’s a different question, and just as fascinating. It may be possible for people to be “educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought” (372; quoting P. B. Medawar); it may also be possible for people to be educated far beyond their capacity to undertake spiritual thought.
In considering people’s reliance on God, Dawkins says that “The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary” (250). But if something is effective, why assume that it’s imaginary? Dawkins’s assumption is that only “small minded” people (129) follow religious rules, and then only blindly, even when they know better. And combining this with an idea of the Bible (and scriptures of other faith traditions) as merely a book of rules to be followed blindly, Dawkins easily dismisses religions as unnecessary nonsense. His misreading of the story of “Doubting Thomas,” from John 20, is a truly puzzling way of making the Bible fit his idea of it:
Faith is not, as Dawkins says, “a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence” (432). Yes, faith may make intangible connections (the proverbial “leap of faith”), but the faithful person also relies on some evidence that is deemed compelling and supportive. I’m not arguing that nothing bad has ever been done in the name of a religion. But let’s be more nuanced than Dawkins, particularly when “blind faith” is so often the motivator for people demonstrating the “going against the genes” altruism that he hopes humanity will choose. Dawkins writes, “As for me, I am skeptical of all myths. If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look” (301). I agree, and I sense that he is holding himself back from really seeking the truth in this particular case.
You see how hard it is not to talk about religion when discussing Dawkins? Anyway, as I said earlier, religion is not as significant a part of this book as my review comments might indicate. Near the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes, “Let me end with a brief manifesto, a summary of the entire selfish gene/extended phenotype view of life” (342), and nowhere in this summary does the topic of God or religion come up. As a follower of Jesus, I can read this book and thoroughly enjoy what’s to be enjoyed, while considering the author’s opinions on religion and then moving on. I wish more people could take Dawkins in this way, and that Dawkins could have held himself to this genre of writing, where has so much to offer everyone.
More than forty years after its initial publication, The Selfish Gene is fascinating and enlightening. For anyone who wants to read it, I highly recommend the fortieth anniversary edition, which includes two additional chapters, a new epilogue, and many pages of notes in which present-Dawkins interacts with his younger self, candidly and graciously pointing out areas where he has been proven wrong (and yes, patting himself on the back for all the areas where he’s been proven right), and pointing toward related research that’s taken place over those forty years. Do not skip these endnotes! They are an amazing conversation, and integral to the book.
What makes Dawkins so readable here is the combination of his distinctive writing voice and his infectious enthusiasm and delight for learning about the natural world. Books like The Selfish Gene and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell in the 1970s opened the way for so many other “science books for us non-scientists” that have come out since. They show that science is never merely a bunch of facts to memorize in class, but instead is always a story that’s unfolding day by day.
The story that Dawkins constructs is extremely compelling—regarding everything in the world but humans. When it comes to applying the same principles and equations to humanity, the story is more complicated and less convincing. Dawkins sometimes suggests that there is no real distinction between humanity and any other species, yet he struggles to use the logic of natural selection to explain humans in the same way that it explains everything else. This difficulty is partly because we’re so close to the subject matter, and so it’s harder to see objectively. But it’s also largely because of the nagging fact of consciousness. We think, we analyze, we seem to know ourselves and our environment in ways that no other species does. We can sense the frustration of trying to include humans in the selfish gene discussion when Dawkins writes,
Each one of us knows, from the evidence of our own introspection, that, at least in one modern survival machine [humans], this purposiveness has evolved the property we call “consciousness.” I am not philosopher enough to discuss what this means, but fortunately it does not matter for our present purposes because it is easy to talk about machines that behave as if motivated by a purpose, and to leave open the question whether they actually are conscious. (64)But then later: “Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes” (245).
Though it ultimately doesn’t harm the general flow of The Selfish Gene , this issue of human consciousness, and the question of where exactly we fit into all this, is occasionally troubling. The wonder of Dawkins’s argument, really, is that he can bring us around to his point of view that what “matters” in natural selection is not an individual in a species but the genes within that individual. Still, though: we don’t ourselves intuitively feel that we are fundamentally our genes rather than our whole-person consciousness, do we? Within Dawkins’s very neat, tidy explanation of life on our world, this is the one tension that doesn’t quite go away. We are different: how and why and when did that happen?
Whether or not humanity fits nicely into this explanation, most of The Selfish Gene is clearly more focused on other species. Dawkins clarifies this in what was originally the final chapter of the book, “Memes.” But until that clarification, the reader may be forgiven for making the easy leap from “other species” to “humanity,” and then from there to the possibility that Dawkins is approving of cold, horrifying eugenics. This passage, for example:
As soon as a runt becomes so small and weak that his expectation of life is reduced to the point where benefit to him due to parental investment is less than half the benefit that the same investment could potentially confer on the other babies, the runt should die gracefully and willingly. He can benefit his genes most by doing so. . . . There should be a point of no return in the career of a runt. Before he reaches this point he should go on struggling. As soon as he reaches it he should give up and preferably let himself be eaten by his litter-mates or his parents. (168–9)Or again: “If a population arrives at an [evolutionarily stable strategy] that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad” (242). The middle chapters of the book are full of this kind of logical precision applied to “choices” genes make in the course of their quest for survival: “game theory” kinds of rules about how genetically closely related someone has to be for it to be worth your while to go out of your way to help them, and so forth (and woe to you if you zone out for a page or two in the midst of these chapters, because you will quickly lose track of what’s being argued and why; it’s not a hard book for the general reader, but Dawkins doesn’t let you sit in the back row and sleep through class). Being too ready to apply everything to humans is not going to meet with success, and it’s not what Dawkins intends. As he admits, “man’s way of life is largely determined by culture rather than by genes” (214). There is a lot to unpack in that simple statement, and this is not the book that will even begin to unpack it.
In fact, it’s when Dawkins shifts from the central focus of The Selfish Gene to talking about culture and religion that he is at his weakest. If I were reading this book and knew nothing else about him, I would wish that he would keep writing about science but leave off writing about religion. What has actually transpired in his writing career thus makes me sad, and I almost don’t even want to say anything about his views on religion, as expressed in this, his first book. As good as he is at telling the story of science, his opinions about religion (and the related public persona that he has willingly cultivated) seem to have made it nearly impossible for people to calmly discuss what he says. Honestly, I picked up this book because I was interested in reading Dawkins for his reputation as a clear, engaging science writer, and because I believed that this first book didn’t contain the level of animosity toward religion that has become almost his trademark in the years since. That’s all true—religion doesn’t come up very often in the book, and it doesn’t seem very significant to Dawkins for his discussion. However, it does come up, and it is something that I care about, so with all this preamble out of the way, here are a few of my thoughts about it.
Dawkins supposes that the only need for God is to help us out with things we don’t understand. In areas where we’re blind to the “real facts,” it’s (for some reason) natural for us to attribute it to God and assume that he knows what’s going on, which relaxes us and makes us more comfortable with the ambiguity and blindness. Thus, if we can figure out some of the ways the universe works, then it should be natural for us to say, “Oh well, now that we can explain it ourselves, what’s the need for God?” It’s an argument that’s a little circular, first assuming that if there’s a God, that God would be thus-and-such kind of a God—in this case, that a God who created the world in a certain way (using evolution, as Dawkins and I would agree) wouldn’t also intend that we gradually figure out that creation process and come to delight in the way the natural world works, also coming to know God better and better, not in spite of but because of the beauty of how the world works and what we learn about it.
The fact that God created a world in which we have the creative and intellectual freedom to tell that world’s story in all kinds of ways doesn’t diminish my view of God at all. Dawkins tells a story of the world without God, but that doesn’t prove that there’s no God; it just proves that there are many ways to tell the story of the world. There are some such stories that are definitely wrong (that the world is flat, for example, or that the universe revolves around the earth), and others that seem to us definitely correct. But the existence of God is beyond the scope of the storytelling that Dawkins favors here. That logical approach doesn’t rule out God, but neither can it definitively prove God. There is mystery. It’s a different question, and just as fascinating. It may be possible for people to be “educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought” (372; quoting P. B. Medawar); it may also be possible for people to be educated far beyond their capacity to undertake spiritual thought.
In considering people’s reliance on God, Dawkins says that “The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary” (250). But if something is effective, why assume that it’s imaginary? Dawkins’s assumption is that only “small minded” people (129) follow religious rules, and then only blindly, even when they know better. And combining this with an idea of the Bible (and scriptures of other faith traditions) as merely a book of rules to be followed blindly, Dawkins easily dismisses religions as unnecessary nonsense. His misreading of the story of “Doubting Thomas,” from John 20, is a truly puzzling way of making the Bible fit his idea of it:
Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. (257)Dawkins has missed the important point that in that story: Thomas demands evidence because he’s the only one in the room who hasn’t already seen the evidence. Everyone else had already had their chance to examine the evidence and reach the conclusion they did (v. 24). Jesus’s line, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” is not about anyone in that room, all of whom were, of course, seeing right at that moment. It means the people who will come generations after the people in that room and will not see Jesus in the same way, so they will be believing based on the evidence that these people have seen and testified as correct. Scientists needn’t repeat every experiment that’s been done, just to verify that it’s still accurate. Rather, they trust that previous scientists were rigorous in their examination of the evidence, and so long as nothing has fundamentally changed to call the results into question, those results remain acceptable and evidence-based beyond the lives of the scientists who first carried it out.
Faith is not, as Dawkins says, “a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence” (432). Yes, faith may make intangible connections (the proverbial “leap of faith”), but the faithful person also relies on some evidence that is deemed compelling and supportive. I’m not arguing that nothing bad has ever been done in the name of a religion. But let’s be more nuanced than Dawkins, particularly when “blind faith” is so often the motivator for people demonstrating the “going against the genes” altruism that he hopes humanity will choose. Dawkins writes, “As for me, I am skeptical of all myths. If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look” (301). I agree, and I sense that he is holding himself back from really seeking the truth in this particular case.
You see how hard it is not to talk about religion when discussing Dawkins? Anyway, as I said earlier, religion is not as significant a part of this book as my review comments might indicate. Near the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes, “Let me end with a brief manifesto, a summary of the entire selfish gene/extended phenotype view of life” (342), and nowhere in this summary does the topic of God or religion come up. As a follower of Jesus, I can read this book and thoroughly enjoy what’s to be enjoyed, while considering the author’s opinions on religion and then moving on. I wish more people could take Dawkins in this way, and that Dawkins could have held himself to this genre of writing, where has so much to offer everyone.
More than forty years after its initial publication, The Selfish Gene is fascinating and enlightening. For anyone who wants to read it, I highly recommend the fortieth anniversary edition, which includes two additional chapters, a new epilogue, and many pages of notes in which present-Dawkins interacts with his younger self, candidly and graciously pointing out areas where he has been proven wrong (and yes, patting himself on the back for all the areas where he’s been proven right), and pointing toward related research that’s taken place over those forty years. Do not skip these endnotes! They are an amazing conversation, and integral to the book.
Immensely fascinating. I understood the basics of this book going in, but Dawkins does a great job of building out the implications of the theory as the book goes on. In a nutshell... we are merely vehicles for our genes to replicate. Most of the education and conversation about evolution (even now, almost 40 years after the book was first published) focuses on the level of the individual (humans, plants, animals, bacteria), but the individual is just a vehicle for many genes to replicate themselves.
I can see why some people find that depressing.
But I learned a lot of fun stuff from this book. Ants take slaves? Female bees can be more related to their sisters than to their children? Who knew?
I can see why some people find that depressing.
But I learned a lot of fun stuff from this book. Ants take slaves? Female bees can be more related to their sisters than to their children? Who knew?
3.5/5
Having recently read The God Delusion, I hoped The Selfish Gene's writing would be where Dawkins is more at home (given Fox News's description of Dawkins as a "professional atheist", it might surprise you to learn that he is, in fact, an evolutionary biologist! Though I can understand coming to the conclusion that organized religion's influence of public opinion is a large barrier to progress in your own field). It turns out to be partly the case: the book gives a neatly packaged and well-communicated overview of how to think like an evolutionary biologist, but still feels a bit simplistic at times. My biggest complaint: the book didn't seem to have any formal references/notes (at least my electronic copy, but I suspect the actual book is no different), despite often referring to other names in his own field.
The first few chapters briefly describe what we know and what we suspect about the origins of life and how that influences thinking about biology from an evolutionary perspective. Despite the complications of dealing with distant levels of abstraction (from individuals to DNA), Dawkins describes evolution with precise, carefully-chosen terminology that help shape the conversations about evolutionary biology for the unfamiliar. These early chapters satisfactorily describe how evolution at a genetic level influences
The middle section of the book spends a lot of time using game theory to describe broader evolutionary trends with the concept of an "evolutionarily stable system" to explain how types of behavior will be successful over time. Unfortunately, the game theory is incredibly surface level, and repeatedly the book follows the pattern:
That said, if you can accept that the book will read like that, it still contributes to the broader goal of showing the thought patterns of an evolutionary biologist.
Two highlights from the book, both from the last few chapters:
There is a chapter on the idea of "memes" as (non-biological) genetic units of culture, evolving as they are discussed and communicated between individuals. Dawkins describes how memes evolve on a much quicker (orders of magnitude) timescale than biological evolution and makes some interesting conclusions (aka celibacy will, for obvious reasons, not be genetically selected for, but could reoccur for motivations that have evolved culturally). I would highly enjoy reading something that expands further on this idea.
Dawkins tackles the notion of what he calls "bottlenecking", asking the question of why we tend to see organisms as discrete entities and (relatedly) why we are reproduced through a single cell that then replicates, as opposed to the possible alternate explanation of continually growing and branching off. He insightfully points out that the hardest part isn't answering the question, but realizing that the question is there to be asked.
Overall, though I had a few issues with the writing, this book changed my thinking, especially when considering how evolution affects behavior over time, how to think about larger or smaller entities (genes, humans, insect colonies), how culture evolves similarly but at a different pace (and what some consequences of that are), and what life on a different planet might actually look like. This book taught me something deep, and I would recommend it!
Having recently read The God Delusion, I hoped The Selfish Gene's writing would be where Dawkins is more at home (given Fox News's description of Dawkins as a "professional atheist", it might surprise you to learn that he is, in fact, an evolutionary biologist! Though I can understand coming to the conclusion that organized religion's influence of public opinion is a large barrier to progress in your own field). It turns out to be partly the case: the book gives a neatly packaged and well-communicated overview of how to think like an evolutionary biologist, but still feels a bit simplistic at times. My biggest complaint: the book didn't seem to have any formal references/notes (at least my electronic copy, but I suspect the actual book is no different), despite often referring to other names in his own field.
The first few chapters briefly describe what we know and what we suspect about the origins of life and how that influences thinking about biology from an evolutionary perspective. Despite the complications of dealing with distant levels of abstraction (from individuals to DNA), Dawkins describes evolution with precise, carefully-chosen terminology that help shape the conversations about evolutionary biology for the unfamiliar. These early chapters satisfactorily describe how evolution at a genetic level influences
The middle section of the book spends a lot of time using game theory to describe broader evolutionary trends with the concept of an "evolutionarily stable system" to explain how types of behavior will be successful over time. Unfortunately, the game theory is incredibly surface level, and repeatedly the book follows the pattern:
- Pick some values for different outcomes, claim they're arbitrary and don't matter
- Describe how the simulation goes
- Aha! Some strategies are successful because of the values we picked.
That said, if you can accept that the book will read like that, it still contributes to the broader goal of showing the thought patterns of an evolutionary biologist.
Two highlights from the book, both from the last few chapters:
There is a chapter on the idea of "memes" as (non-biological) genetic units of culture, evolving as they are discussed and communicated between individuals. Dawkins describes how memes evolve on a much quicker (orders of magnitude) timescale than biological evolution and makes some interesting conclusions (aka celibacy will, for obvious reasons, not be genetically selected for, but could reoccur for motivations that have evolved culturally). I would highly enjoy reading something that expands further on this idea.
Dawkins tackles the notion of what he calls "bottlenecking", asking the question of why we tend to see organisms as discrete entities and (relatedly) why we are reproduced through a single cell that then replicates, as opposed to the possible alternate explanation of continually growing and branching off. He insightfully points out that the hardest part isn't answering the question, but realizing that the question is there to be asked.
Overall, though I had a few issues with the writing, this book changed my thinking, especially when considering how evolution affects behavior over time, how to think about larger or smaller entities (genes, humans, insect colonies), how culture evolves similarly but at a different pace (and what some consequences of that are), and what life on a different planet might actually look like. This book taught me something deep, and I would recommend it!
This book changed my life. Its central argument of selection working at the genetic level just clicked with me immediately. The idea made sense and so much else made sense in the light of it. I like Dawkins' writing style, so found the book very enjoyable to read. About the only part I don't quite buy is the section on memes (so I'm not a totally uncritical Dawkins fangirl) but still found even that part interesting to read.
This book came as a surprise to me. I had heard of Dawkins and his ability to shed light on complex questions in a very appealing manner, nonetheless, I am very critical when popular science books are made available for a broad audience. If (in my eyes) done well, they tend to get boring, dull, and lengthy, if done badly, they are superficial, have hidden agendas, are extremely biased, and defy the scientific method that supposedly lies at the heart of the subject matter they set-out to explain (or in the very least, is implicitly used to "sell" their point).
I was deeply impressed that Dawkins did it all, he tells the story of one of the most powerful principles in evolutionary biology "survival of the fittest (gene)" in a gripping and appealing manner. Sure enough, there are several aspects where he is outright wrong, e.g. when he compares the complexity of the brain and in particularly a neuron with its "electronic" counter part:
I'm not expert enough to judge how fairly different "schools" of evolutionary biology are represented in his book, it seems to me he does other scientists and points of view justice and always clearly lays out what it is he is disagreeing with and he's throughout the book, challenging people to come up with better explanations.
Some of his "religious jabs" in the book I found a little unnecessary but that is really a very minor aspect (and I'm guilty with sympathizing with his atheist view of the world).
If you have interest in scientific reasoning, evolution, evolutionary theory, game theory, or simply like to ask why, I can enthusiastically recommend this book.
I was deeply impressed that Dawkins did it all, he tells the story of one of the most powerful principles in evolutionary biology "survival of the fittest (gene)" in a gripping and appealing manner. Sure enough, there are several aspects where he is outright wrong, e.g. when he compares the complexity of the brain and in particularly a neuron with its "electronic" counter part:
This is brought home by the fact that there are some ten thousand million neurones in the human brain: you could pack only a few hundred transistors into a skull, but this "mistake" is rather testimony of the incredible advances in the semiconductor industry in recent years than anything to worry about. His introduction on how matter started to organize and form the first "replicators" is for experts (and in light of what is known today in the field of molecular self-assembly) sketchy at best, and one might think that, as appealing as the introduction of a probabilistic treatment of evolutionary questions in the framework of game theory is, it is a mere "make believe" in terms of credibility as there are next to no strict rules when it comes to assigning "points" to certain tasks which can then be "played" out against each other to arrive at an evolutionary stable strategy, to name but a few examples. Nonetheless, I believe that even Dawkins would have little to no problem admitting shortcomings and he might even be thrilled to discus new prospects in light of new scientific developments, because he portrays the scientific model brilliantly throughout his book. He takes Darwin's principle of "survival of the fittest" strips it bare, reveals it's essentials and uses no more than 3 basic qualities to explain the evolution and coming into being of all forms of life. He plays all the tricks that are essential to tell a story (and often kill it's scientific credibility), such as shifting points of view and "sloppy" language, but he will never do so at a disadvantage for scientific thinking, in the contrary, he will constantly remind the reader what it is he "really" means when he talks about genes, animals, plants, insects, or later on about phenotypes and memes.
I'm not expert enough to judge how fairly different "schools" of evolutionary biology are represented in his book, it seems to me he does other scientists and points of view justice and always clearly lays out what it is he is disagreeing with and he's throughout the book, challenging people to come up with better explanations.
Some of his "religious jabs" in the book I found a little unnecessary but that is really a very minor aspect (and I'm guilty with sympathizing with his atheist view of the world).
If you have interest in scientific reasoning, evolution, evolutionary theory, game theory, or simply like to ask why, I can enthusiastically recommend this book.