Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene recasts evolution from the gene’s point of view: organisms are survival machines built by replicators that persist by copying themselves. Altruism, cooperation, and conflict are explained as strategies that help genes spread. The book also introduces the meme as a unit of cultural imitation. Clear, provocative, and widely influential, it asks what natural selection really acts on and how that changes our picture of life, behaviour, and culture.
Date: 1976 (United kingdom)
Length: ~224 pages (varies by edition)
Cultural impact: ~2.648.000 copies (estimates)
Genre: Nonfiction,
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"It's the kind of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius" — The New York Times
"Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer" — Matt Ridley, science writer and author of The Red Queen
"When I read the book it changed my life" — Daniel Dennett, philosopher and author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea
"A most skillful reformulation of the central problems of social biology in terms of the genetical theory of natural selection. Beyond this, it is learned, witty and very well written" — Peter Medawar, Nobel Prize-winning immunologist
"The book should be read, can be read, by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution" — W. D. Hamilton, evolutionary biologist and pioneer of kin selection
"The Selfish Gene has attained its own literary and scientific immortality: as long as we study life, it will be read" — Adam Rutherford, geneticist, science writer and broadcaster
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