nairijan 's review for:

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

3.0

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

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As someone who enjoys learning about evolution and wants to study it in graduate school, this book is great at distilling information in a logical way and in an accessible way through extended metaphor to a non-scientific audience. However, the book suffers on two accounts - the haughty self-important tone that one may expect from a British man and the moralizing/parallel drawing to human society of these evolutionary lessons. This second issue is perplexing as Dawkins in the beginning even discusses the limitations of doing so because of the confounding nature of culture and yet there is a bioessentialist talk on overpopulation (racially tinged unfortunately) and how welfare makes no sense in human society. I believe you might be better off reading a textbook or attending a lecture.