The recap
What is natural selection really selecting? Richard Dawkins's first book offers a bold answer: not the species, not even the individual, but the gene. In this view, bodies are vehicles that genes build to carry themselves into the next generation, and a great deal of animal behavior starts to make sense once you look at it from the gene's point of view. Dawkins uses that lens to tackle puzzles that long troubled biologists, such as why animals help their relatives, why parents and offspring sometimes clash, and why cooperation can pay off even between strangers, drawing on game theory and on the work of researchers like W. D. Hamilton. Crucially, he insists that "selfish" describes a statistical process rather than a motive, and that humans are not doomed to obey their genes. The writing is clear, witty and full of vivid thought experiments, and a late chapter floats an idea about cultural evolution that went on to have a remarkable life of its own. Newer editions add an epilogue reflecting on how the argument has held up.
Why read it
For readers who want to understand how evolution actually works at its deepest level, and who enjoy a confident, provocative argument. It is also essential background for decades of later debates about biology and culture.
Fun facts
- 01
Dawkins coined the word "meme" in this book, trimming the Greek-derived "mimeme" so that it would echo "gene".
- 02
He began writing in 1973, put the manuscript aside, and returned to it during a sabbatical in 1975.
- 03
Publisher Tom Maschler urged him to call it "The Immortal Gene" instead, and Dawkins later said he wished he had taken that advice.
- 04
In 2017 it topped a Royal Society public poll of the most inspiring science books of all time, ahead of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
- 05
Oxford University Press marked its 40th anniversary in 2016 with an edition that includes a new epilogue by the author.
