Book review: ‘The Selfish Gene’

For readers who are new to books on biology, evolution and natural selection, I would recommend reading Dawkins’ other works, “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Greatest Show on Earth” before tackling this one. In “The Selfish Gene,” which originally came out in 1976 one year before I was born, Dawkins seems to still be developing his writing style. As such, parts of the book tend to get a little weighted down by minutiae, and we only get glimmers of the eloquence that so characterizes his later works.

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“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins: 30th Anniversary Edition

That said, this is well worth the effort, as it presents the revelatory premise that we, along with every other living thing in the universe, are merely “survival machines” carrying genes that live on well past our individual lifetimes based on the “ruthless selfishness” of our genetic and evolutionary makeup. Some have criticized this view as depressingly cynical and bleak, but as Dawkins points out, “however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.”

“The Selfish Gene,” of course, does not imply selfishness at the conscious level by human beings or any other plant or animal. The term is a figure of speech, and Dawkins’ main thesis has nothing to say about morality or how we ought to act, as Dawkins is mainly concerned with the selfishness of genes living inside “survival machines,” and in some cases, altruism and cooperation, at the genetic level.

Indeed, as a way to move forward as the only self-conscious creatures in the universe — that we know of — Dawkins posits that we can and should rise above our own basic selfish nature and proceed as a species in spite of it. As he says in the book:

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

I very much look forward to reading “The Extended Phenotype,” which is the follow-up work to “The Selfish Gene.”

[rating: 4.0]