Product Description

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life.
In his internationally bestselling, now classic volume, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature. Bees, for example, will commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, and birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk.
This 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins' fascinating book retains all original material, including the two enlightening chapters added in the second edition. In a new Introduction the author presents his thoughts thirty years after the publication of his first and most famous book, while the inclusion of the two-page original Foreword by brilliant American scientist Robert Trivers shows the enthusiastic reaction of the scientific community at that time. This edition is a celebration of a remarkable exposition of evolutionary thought, a work that has been widely hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, and that continues to stimulate whole new areas of research today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #526 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.

Why are there miles and miles of "unused" DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. If we are puppets, he says, at least we can try to understand our strings. --Rob Lightner

Review

"Dawkins first book, The Selfish Gene, was a smash hit...Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology-some of it truly subtle-in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.)"--New York Review of Books
"This important book could hardly be more exciting."--The Economist
"The sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius."--New York Times
"Who should read this book? Everyone interested in the universe and their place in it."--Jeffrey R. Baylis, Animal Behaviour
"This book should be read, can be read, by almost everyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution."--W. D. Hamilton, Science
"The presentations are remarkable for their clarity and simplicity, intelligible to any schoolchild, yet so little condescending as to be a pleasure to the professional."--American Scientist

About the Author

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature, and an international lecturer. His acclaimed books include The Extended Phenotype, a more technical sequel to The Selfish Gene, and The Blind Watchmaker, which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Prize, both in 1987. His other bestsellers include River out of Eden, Climbing Mount Impossible, Unweaving the Rainbow, and the A Devil's Chaplain. His most recent book is The Ancestor's Tale.
Professor Dawkins is the recipient of many prizes and honors, including the Shakespeare Prize, the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Award, the Nakayama Prize for Achievement in Human Science, The International Cosmos Prize, and the Kistler Prize.

Customer Reviews

Dissecting "The Selfish Gene"
"The Selfish Gene" is Richard Dawkins masterpiece, and admiration for the scope and detail of his exploration of animal life has been world wide. His gift of analysis and synthesis is like a giant microscope givng an entrance into an area of knowledge never revealed before.

He outdistances Charles Darwin in his penetration into animal life, animal behavior, and the biological mechanisms that influence and sometimes determines behavior. As a scientific study and exposition, it has no parallel in contemporary scientific writing.

But that is where its value ends.



Richard Dawkins is an Ethologist, as he indicates in the 1976 edition of his book, an observer and chronicler of animal behavior, following in the footsteps of his master, Niko Tinbergen, and one of the founders of this branch of zoology, Konrad Lorenz. But the leap that Richard Dawkins has made in this new branch of science, is to identify his findings in animal behavior with human behavior, and this is the foundation for his conclusions in ethics, psychology, social science, philosophy and theism.

He is convinced, with no empirical data to back it up, that human beings are animals, not only in the category of genus, which nobody denies, but in the category of specificity as well. And that has been the huge blunder in his scientific research.

The whole tower of atheism, his excursions into philosophy and religion are based upon this methodological mistake. His positing as valid conclusions from his ethological research to human beings are conclusions that are valid only in animal research.

That is why "The Selfish Gene" can be very, very deceiving. Its conclusions do apply to the genetic code, the psychology and the behavior of the animals he has studied. But his application of these conclusions to human pschology and behavior are scientifically invalid.

"The Selfish Gene" is a brilliant book, advancing some facets of evolutionary biology into new and encharted territories. But when, as he does (with images that are fascinating and analogies that are captivating) apply his conclusions to human beings, he is out of his league.

He is a behaviorial scientist for the zoo, the jungle, the forest, the ground beneath our feet and the sea. His personal biases have overtaken his methodological skills and can ultimately cast doubt on the body of his work. That would be a tragedy, for Richard Dawkins is a brilliant scientist and his work lays the foundation for earthshaking advances in a multitude of sciences. His excursions into anthropololgy are based on a catalogue of personal biases from which he seems unable to escape.

Life is a watch too complex to create
No, this isn't an Ayn Rand book urging you to be more selfish.

I consider The Selfish Gene to still be one of the cornerstones of Evolutionary Dynamics theory, particularly in its extension of biological dynamics into the non-biological world. Memetics really took general evolutionary theory past a threshold for information and soft sciences. I found its concepts to be invaluable for one of my grad papers on international systems where I made further extrapolations from both biology and memetics, formulating more specific characteristic traits shared by all extreme complexity nonlinear evolutionary systems.

Just as Darwin was not perfect, though, Dawkins himself oversimplifies at times. The scales at which these "games" transpire outside a vacuum include multi-gene traits, male-female trait-complimenting within speciation, role hierarchy, inter-species symbiotic relationships, larger populations, and even whole ecosystems. Furthermore, non-zero sum outcomes are more prevalent than winner-takes-all. Thus accounting for the multitude of levels at which competition occurs and adding, for example, Nash Equilibriums, one can only begin to explore the infinite complexity of how systems evolve.

On the religion aspect of this book, I think Dawkins does a fine job showing how biology and the workings of the universe do not necessarily "bare witness" to a god with the way life works, the planets revolve around the sun, or the rain falls from the sky. Biological evolution is a very specific example of this and case studies in transitional fossils, the newer computer experiments, and showing the prevalence of evolution everywhere help bare it out quite well here. At times, however, he seems to get a little preachy unconstructively to people who will likely just attribute their rationale to faith, anyway.

For a more recent and legally interesting exploration of the creationism v. evolution debate, I recommend the Nova documentary "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" for its timeliness and brevity. While I think this discussion is essentially long past over, even for an agnostic like myself I'm not going to dismiss all spiritualism or interest into the nature of consciousness or existence itself. The twisting of science using half-truths and ignorance in support of specific institutional dogmas is fair game for attack, though. And I have to admit The Selfish Gene was as successful as I think one can be in long-form.

Un libro indispensable en nuestra biblioteca.
Dado que mi "review" de este libro no es nada original comparado con las que ya se han escrito, la escribo en español. Este libro también se ha traducido en Español, aunque la que yo compré es la edición del trigésimo aniversario en inglés. La edición a la que aquí se hace referencia. El libro de Dawkings escrito hace ya 30 años, es vigente y creo que es un libro indispensable en la biblioteca personal. Un best seller en su lenguaje de origen me parece que es poco conocido en países hispanoparlantes, he visto pocas referencias a él, sin embargo creo que será más conocido en los próximos años, por sus implicaciones, su lenguaje, su sencillez y la complejidad de sus ideas. Es un libro que recomiendo ampliamente a estudiantes de biología, biólogos y público en general. La idea de "memes" creo que también es muy importante sobretodo en el siglo XXI donde la información se replica a gran velocidad. También es un libro que se lo recomendaría a las personas que tienen un interés por la filosofía y las ciencias sociales, dos disciplinas que aún se comportan como si Darwin jamás hubiera existido. Así pueden imaginarse a este libro como una versión del "Origen de las Especies y la Selección _Natural" (sobre todo de la Selección Natural) de Darwin RELOADED.