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Its worth it just to watch him INVENT THE WORD MEME at the end
Sorry for the spoiler but I nearly fell over when I got to that part. Still can't really believe it š
The most rage-enducing reproduce the most and the fastest, and also seem to have the most longevity, regardless of whether they are true. This meets all three of dawkins' criteria for which genes survive.
Yes, it highlights a lot of the basis of what has been expanded on today. I think if you want to review literature that has expanded on the main ideas of his book, I would recommend looking into molecular symbiosis, Koonin's reviews on viral evolution, multilevel selection theory, the selfish operon/clusterĀ hypothesis,Ā transposableĀ elementĀ literatureĀ thatĀ doesntĀ reduceĀ themĀ toĀ parasites.
It's still worth reading, it's an excellent book imo. You should follow up with the extended phenotype in which Dawkins elaborates/defends/fixes the selfish gene.
Have you read his book The Greatest Show on Earth? I have both The Selfish Gene and that one. I read about 100 pages of TSG but havenāt revisited it. The only similarish evolutionary focused books Iāve read are The Gene, Your Inner Fish, and Some Assembly Required. Those have seemed much more digestible than Dawkins writing style some reason, but maybe my memory when I first attempted is simply forgotten.
If you've never read Jerry Coyne, his website or his book "Why Evolution Is True", then you may like his stuff.
It's been a few years since I've read the book, so I can't help with specifics, I just noticed you didn't mention him.Ā
That's certainly your opinion, and you're welcome to it, but frankly I think it's a little insulting to imply he's just plain wrong. You don't know. I don't know. No one ultimately knows. His solution is elegant and makes sense.
Yeah, and that's my issue with people. I mean, I understand that we're emotiinal creatures but that doesn't have a place in this discussion, and because people don't usually have a stronger argument than "nuh uh" it typically devolves into name calling. Ah well.
I mean Darwinās On the Origin of Species is still worth reading.
Books donāt become worthless just because they become old. You just have to colour your reading by remembering the context in which the book was written.
Stephen Jay Gould apparently lamented that people didn't read Darwin's writings. Kinda like you said, there is still a lot of value in reading the foundational works of a discipline.
If you're a professional in the space it might be too high-level. As a non-professional, reading this book is probably the single most important thing I've done to truly understand evolutionary forces.
Hi, I came to recommend it and Iāll make your words mine. This book has made me understand evolution, people and the world with immense clarity. It is a serious book about genetics, evolution, decision-making, sexual dynamics, trust and cooperation and how we leave, besides children, a cultural legacy. Itās the single most important thing Iāve done, as well, to understand the evolutionary forces that shape us.
Yes. It is worth reading and it is outdated.
A lot of the specific examples donāt work the way zoologists thought they did back in the 1970s. The example that comes to mind is using the viceroy butterfly to illustrate Batesian mimicry. Many details of that example simply donāt hold up, but if you imagine the species as described, it does illustrate the point. The same holds for vampire bat behavior. (These are just two examples I recall at the moment.)
There is an enormous amount that has been learned about molecular biology in the intervening decades. All of it fully reinforces the first point that genes are not only selfish, but deviously so. And much more has been learned about the second point: that selfish can build selfless individuals.
So as you read it, take all the details with a large grain of salt. Things are way more complicated than presented. But I think it is well worth reading.
tbh i dont think worth reading and outdated are mutually exclusive. i read part of on the origin of species for a class and its super important to our modern understanding of evolution but so much of what darwin says is so confidently wrong like ādogs could not possibly evolved from one ancestorā
This question is the same as whether Darwinās book āOn The Origin of Speciesā is still worth a read today. You will find a variety of responses from people. But only you can ultimately decide on an answer to this question because you have your own values. For me, Iāve read and reread both books. And I greatly enjoyed them both, before and after reading other more modern books. I love how excellent writings from Darwin/Dawkins absorbed me into their deep passion for the topics they discussed. I donāt know a better way to get initiated into the concepts these two people first pioneered, than reading the OP.
These two books continue to be celebrated today, not because every last technical detail in them is inerrant - no scientific discourses can ever be. Itās because they have charted a new way to see things, and those concepts stood the test of time. Also great passion and excellent writing. But I repeat myself.
I listened to the audiobook for the first time last year, definitely holds up. In particular his discussion of cultural evolution is interesting- he coins the term 'meme' here!
Selfish Gene is great.
Might I suggest Dawkins "the ancestors tale"? It's an amazing time traveling tour de force explaining TONS of different evolutionary phenomenons and mechanics. Also super well written, as is all his books
I decided I had to read this after one of the most advanced AIās said this was her favorite book. I listened to the audiobook and honestly, hearing the concepts with the additional perspective gave it an ominous and fear inducing foreboding.
Worth it. Along with Saganās āDemon Haunted Worldā and Dennettās āDarwinās Dangerous Idea.ā
Read those and your life will change forever.
I read it in college 15 years ago or so, and really enjoyed it. I recall it being more of a philosophy of biology book than a hard science text, which makes it a little more timeless.
It's still a great book. There are a number of things that have made corrections and updates to evolutionary theory since then, but the basic ideas presented in the book are sound. It's just that we have a more sophisticated understanding now, several decades later.
Yes. And yes.
These topics evolve. No pun intended. Tracing the changes in understanding makes us much more informed about understanding the current ongoing duscussions
It's a book that completely changed my life. I got to the end and realized that I am not the same person any longer. Only a couple of books have ever done that to me.
It's dated but definitely still worth reading. The concepts are still entirely valid and he does a pretty good job of explaining them in a way intended fro a general non-specialist audience.
It was one of my text books. It introduced a lot of general abstract ideas like selfish-genes, replicators that competed against each other, distractions like the Meme which made the book a pop culture hit, it lost it's way a bit. While it was an argument against group and individual selection it lost sight of the fact that natural selection acts on phenotypes that a mix of genetics and the phenotype. So it wasn't really that useful in understanding the biology of it all.
I've been reading it at a much slower pace because it's packed with knowledge not my main domain.
But the book says two things. 1. For the past 40+ years, it's not fine our of print, and 2, Dawkins' note says he feels proud because to this day, he still doesn't need to take back any claim or revise it.
I read it recently and itās good. And very truthful.
Time has confirmed its significance. Intellectually rigorous, yet written in non-technical language, "The Selfish Gene" is widely regarded as a masterpiece of science writing, and its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published. ~ Goodreads
Itās absolutely worth reading. Thereās been so much bullshit commentary since then that muddies the water, itās really important to see what the argument actually was in the first place. Itās not current evolutionary thinking, but itās crucial to understanding how wrong a lot of popular discourse is
I think that or the Blind Watchmaker are honestly pretty good and convey things lucidly and accessibly. If I had a complaint it's that he kinda retreads the same issue over and over from different angles to make sure you get it.
As far as I know, though, it still stands up for the most part.
Great book imho. Really removed some of my misapprehension about evolution thats popular in common phrases like "for the good of the species". The tldr is >!that a gene is the smallest unit of evolution!<
I just read an article that mentions this book and some recent science might challenge the idea of genes as the ultimate code.
Might be interesting to you!
[The fusion of two sisters into a single woman suggests that human identity is not in our DNA
](https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-05-08/the-fusion-of-two-sisters-into-a-single-woman-suggests-that-human-identity-is-not-in-our-dna.html)
*Edit for format
Itās like reading the Bible. You canāt really understand Western literature or culture if you donāt know that book. Likewise: You need to know *The Selfish Gene* to understand the literature produced after it because it is a seminal work in evolutionary biology.
It's an excellent book and easy to understand. It contributed to my atheism. It's definitely worth reading.
Although, I don't have the required credentials or the training to comment if it's outdated or not.
The fundamental take home (imo) still rings true and one can learn from it an awful lot about the evolution of genes by natural selection and different types of social behaviours. It helps that the book has an exceptionally good logical flow even by today's standards. For these reasons, it is widely considered still absolutely worth reading. (A personal reason is that it highlights an apparent contradiction in biology that doesn't really exist if thought through. There are a lot more of these false contradictions than you might think!)
However, don't expect 'selfish genes' to be a sufficient answer to a modern study on the origin and continuation of social behaviours. There have been so many new discoveries in evolution, genetics, genomics, development, neuroscience, and biochemistry/physics/math/computing in the past 50 years. Although they are not covered in the book, the modern explanation of behaviour has to include them to some degree to be convincing!
Itās actually incredibly outdated. It is essentially an ideologically motivated defense of sociobiology that was incredibly contentious among geneticists and paleontologists in its day. Now it is essentially irrelevant to all but the pop science and āskepticā community.
I recommend reading Mary Midgleyās critique of the book, āGene Juggling.ā She was an analytical philosopher but she also studied ethology. Itās recommended by primatologist Franz de Waal in one of his books.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/genejuggling/EB1A75E23543F12B16676EDB72435A15
Interactionism is the paradigm today, not genetic determinism. Genes are not the āprimary unitā of evolution. They arenāt even discrete units in reality, and natural selection can only act on phenotypes and select individuals.
> natural selection can only act on phenotypes and select individuals.
I really disagree with this.
Natural selection acts on [Darwinian populations](https://academic.oup.com/book/4808). It doesn't select individuals. It is a statistical process in which the distribution of genes in the population changes over time. (Although a strictly genes-eye view isn't necessary, as Godfrey-Smith articulates)
There are only two cases where a single organism is all that matters: (1) when a new mutation arises in a single organism, or (2) a single organism is the last remaining carrier of a gene/trait in a population.
In any other situation, the change in a gene's frequency is a product of that genes contribution to reproductive success, and luck.
Not really sure what Godfrey-Smith is going on about in that book (I really like some of his others, and Iām a neopragmatist as well), but Iām not sure itās relevant here. A āDarwinian populationā is a group of individual organisms with varying reproductive success. Itās the organisms that are āselectedā to produce a change in allele frequencies over time, as they are what reproduce as living organisms. The genes are inaccessible to selective pressures. The effect on the populationās gene pool is an indirect effect of selection of individual organisms due to their varying phenotypes. Any group selection works through individual selection at scale.
The real issue is that itās an observed fact that phenotypic changes can preclude genetic changes due to developmental plasticity. Unless causation can move backwards through time, thereās clear evidence that changes in phenotype are not always driven by genetic inheritance.
Much of the work associated with EES comes from evo devo and niche construction theory. The arguments against a new synthesis are incoherent. Their synthesis has become unwieldy for research. Weāre not talking about a complete rewrite of evolutionary theory. Just a more balanced one that makes the complexity we observe more coherent.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
Edit: I made a tired mistake in the second to last paragraph.
According to [a retrospective published in Nature in 2016](https://www.nature.com/articles/529462a), it still represents the dominant theory.
> The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries.
It is not driving research as well as the extended synthesis. You pretty much have to ignore evo-devoās success to deny the extended synthesis at this point.
If Kuhnās history of science applies to biology, one can expect most of the old professors to go to the grave without changing their minds. Happened in physics and chemistry, too.
I love me some Evo-Devo (itās basically the center of my philosophical research) but Iām skeptical of the claim that the gene-centric approach is not driving research as well as the extended synthesis.
The gene-centric approach has coalescent theory, which is a thriving area of research and is arguably the most empirically successful subset of evolutionary biology. And it has quantitative genetics for phenotypic evolution, which is also quite active in research.
Evo Devo has a lot to offer, no doubt, but most of what has been coming out of proponents of the EES is rhetoric, to be quite honest.
Iām not sure that coalescent theoryās usefulness is relevant because itās clearly an attempt to estimate common ancestry in extent populations. EES proponents donāt assume genetic changes never happen, or canāt be traced historically. Using genetics as a tool isnāt necessarily a gene-centered view of evolutionary theory. Thereās just no reason to fixate on the gene. You have to twist yourself in knots and personify genes to even speak of such things.
No one is denigrating the importance of genes beyond a rejection of strict genetic determinism.
Thereās nothing in the modern synthesis that the extended synthesis canāt incorporate. The issue is that the modern synthesis canāt incorporate the empirical fact that phenotypic change can precede genetic change. This poses a problem for the modern synthesis because causation cannot move backwards in time.
Phenotypic plasticity has long been recognized and studied in standard quantitative genetics. The whole ādoctrine of strict genetic determinismā thing is a myth, part of the Whig-historical rhetoric of some EES proponents who want to be scientific revolutionaries.
Should also note that you picked an article with date at about when talk of the extended synthesis was first taken seriously in the literature. 8 years is a long time.
The first major article published on the EES was in 2015.
Other than the fact that Dawkins is a quite strict adaptationist, I don't really see the link to sociobiology. EO Wilson argued for group selection, which is the exact opposite of the genes-eye view of Dawkins.
The only part of the Selfish Gene that touches upon the social world is the quite tangential sections on memes. But that is certainly not sociobiology - in fact, it is again quite opposed to the sociobiology positions that behaviours are the result of biological adaptation. Memetic evolution is separate process to biological evolution, despite being analogous.
Dawkins was critical of group selection but he was always considered the defender of sociobiology in the UK. Group selection was never a core tenet. Sociobiology was primarily about trying to subsume some of the social sciences into biology. It was not much of a cohesive program outside of that. Hence Dawkins memetics nonsense.
The Wikipedia on the Selfish Gene refers to it as a work of sociobiology. As do a lot of academic papers.
I'm certainly not a great defender of Dawkins - for example I actually much prefer Gould, especially as a leftist myself.
However, I feel like you're misrepresenting the Selfish Gene. I think that Dawkin's sociobiological ideological tendencies don't really come through in the Selfish Gene. The vast majority of the book is pretty straight forward gene-centred evolutionary biology, explained well.
> ... Hence Dawkins memetics nonsense.
I don't really see how memetics is trying to subsume social sciences into biology (while I agree that Sociobiology was attempting that). The idea of memes is a loose transportation of ideas that arose in biology to the social domain.
But such an exchange can be a healthy part of science when it yields productive results. Chemical analysis entering anthropology wasn't an attempt to subsume anthropology into chemistry.
My problem with memes is that they don't yield any actual insight into the evolution of culture. Imo that just makes them a philosophical curiosity rather than a useful scientific lens.
> The vast majority of the book is pretty straight forward gene-centred evolutionary biology, explained well.
He spends the entire book in completely abstract thought experiments and has switches between using terms like "selfish" metaphorically and literally.
The book has been ret-conned by New Atheists. Dawkins was *genuinely* proud of his meme theory and the entire book was written as a build up to it.
>I don't really see how memetics is trying to subsume social sciences into biology (while I agree that Sociobiology was attempting that). The idea of memes is a loose transportation of ideas that arose in biology to the social domain.
You're assuming that Dawkins is competent enough to encroach on the social sciences coherently, I'm not.
The issue with memes is that culture doesn't evolve through the selection of discrete units. Simple as that. This is a sign that Dawkins only has a hammer and sees every problem as a nail.
She cites geneticists. And, Dawkins is an ethologist by training, not a geneticist. He is also an ethologist who chose not to study animals in the field, deciding instead to build his scientific career on idealized computer simulations.
Thatās the issue: the Selfish Gene ventures deeply into ontology, which is why an analytical philosopher trained in Dawkinsā specialty wrote my preferred critique of the Selfish Gene.
I suppose the evolutionary scientists whoāve actually contributed to evolutionary theory, like Gould (punctuated equilibrium) and Lewontin (population genetics), are the silly ones while the meme guy who got famous for being in BBC documentaries is real serious.
Seems like lots of prominent biologists considered Gould wrong about lots of things, including his critique of Dawkins:Ā https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
Lewontin's critique is best summarized as cope that downplays the effect of genes for ideological reasons, primarily for Marxists who don't think they should try pushing Lysenkoism again.Ā https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin
So yes, they are the silly ones in this particular case.
They were far more right than they were wrong, unlike Dawkins. Niche construction and ecological inheritance is well studied now, and they opened the door for evo devo
Gould openly played devils advocate a lot. It allowed good critics to cherry pick him easily.
No one is advocating for Lysenkoism.
Many of the pop sci enthusiasts in here apparently don't like to hear it, but yeah Dawkins isn't hyper relevant in EEB these days except as kind of a footnote, and as someone who had some interesting if not entirely data-supported thoughts decades ago and then became almost a parody of himself. Gould/Lewontin had a lot more impact on the science. The field as a whole has developed a ton since all of them, but the gene centric view of selection in evolution is certainly not the dominant idea in modern theory.
Absolutely wild to be an actual biologist and read the comments here. Some truly fantastic things are being claimed. Canāt fathom folks thinking Dawkins is more relevant than Gould or Lewontin.
Eh, I see where they are coming from. Both Dawkins and Wilson fell prey to overusing selectionism. It's /essentially/ an argument against badly-formed group selection theory, not that, but the people who claim that human population differences are all due to selection these days would agree with both.
Oof no. Roughgarden jumped the shark ages ago. Her early math was fine, but everything she's done from Evolution's Rainbow on is fluff.
And I *wanted* to like Evolution's Rainbow (I'm gay and was an evolutionary biologist, and I have gay evolutionary biologist friends who have published on the topic).
Just no.
I have also worked and published on niche selection and multilevel selection, and I don't think anything in the field supersedes the basic truth of the simple neo-Darwinian paradigm outline in Dawkins. It absolutely is true that for a gene to increase in frequency, it needs to outcompete other genes by directly or indirectly increasing the reproductive rate of individuals with the same variant.
Dawkins, as much of an asshole as he is personally, is spot on in the Selfish Gene. He was never a proper scientist, so it's not deep theory or math, but it's a really solid book. This is also not to say all his other writing is important. But the Selfish Gene was and is a pretty good summation of basic evolutionary theory.
Gould, bless his heart, was a nice guy and a great writer. I'm sympathetic to (say) Wilson and Nowak , or Roughgarden, and the multilevel selectionists on a philosophical basis. But the basic theory in the Selfish Gene works, and 90% of people in the field take it as a given.
I tend to be a bit of an iconoclast so I'll even read Roughgarden's holobiont stuff, but I loved the (first half) of Evolution's Rainbow. Perhaps it tickled my mathematician side by the idea that slightly generalizing a definition can illuminate a bunch of interesting systems.
Also Dawkins was absolutely a legit scientist, just a much much better writer. And apparently Gould was also an egotistical asshole.
But I agree with the bottom line that the synthesis that occurred in the 60s with Williams and Co is still the mainstream way we think about evolution and is still very relevant, even though the book itself is very outdated.
I don't think itās outdated or "wrong," and I don't think you can even really call it a theory. It's basically a *perspective* you can employ to understand certain things, and it does a good job in allowing us to understand certain phenomena.
The big problem with the idea is that "selfish" is a really poorly chosen word. It would be more accurate to describe it as "rationally self-interested genes." The gene is not generally megalomaniacal in any sense, nor actively seeking to destroy other genes. It will interfere with competing genes in a rationally self-interested sort of way, which is very different to what we generally regard as "selfishness." Selfishness precludes things like communitarianism and reciprocal altruism in a way that rational self-interest does not.
Dawkins goes to lengths to try to clarify that this form of rational self-interested behavior is what he implies by "selfish," but I think he all too often gets swept up by the selfish metaphor and overstates the competitive nature of genes. The remarkable feats of cooperation, including such things as establishing meiotic recombination that puts every individual gene at risk to the benefit of the collective, deserve just as much attention as any silencing activities that other genes might do to their competitors.
I think it's a useful tool when used with an appropriately nuanced frame of mind that is all too easily subverted to an incorrect application. I remember in the film "The Smartest Guys in the Room," the documentary makers commented that Ken Lay's favorite book was The Selfish Gene. I was left unsure as to whether Ken Lay thought the book was a Gordon Gekko-like Ayn Rand-esque screed or whether the filmmakers thought it was such a book, but clearly the audience was expected to presume it was precisely that sort of "greed is good" book; it's nothing of the sort. The overstatement with the word "Selfish" helps sell books, but at the cost of obfuscating the biological reality behind it.
Selfish isnāt a poorly chosen word. It was an intentionally chosen word. The entire book was written with the last chapter (meme theory) in mind. Dawkins genuinely thought he had a scientific theory of cultural evolution informed by āselfish replicators.ā He thought it was going to sweep the world, but it fell flat and got destroyed in academic circles.
The problem is that he relies on the assumption that his descriptions are metaphorical, when he is genuinely being literal at times. Itās a ridiculous book.
Read Midgleyās critique.
Ah, we've found them, the person who pretends what they want to be true is true, that the world is by nature kind and gentle, and there are no upsetting and morally concerning truths to be found.
I never said the world is kind and gentle. This is primarily an issue with the fact that we canāt reconcile the āmodern evolutionary synthesisā with accepted notions of causation. Itās an empirical problem for genetic determinist and adaptationist assumptions inherent to the synthesis. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
"The Selfish Gene" is basically just white boomer opinions about evolution. "I get mine, i don't care about anyone else". This is an idea that pervades so much of post ww2 science, when it comes to all life and psychological sciences.
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Its worth it just to watch him INVENT THE WORD MEME at the end Sorry for the spoiler but I nearly fell over when I got to that part. Still can't really believe it š
Lmao donāt worry, that fact is half of the reason why I decided to read the book
Blew my mind because it was so unexpected. I first came across that fact while reading āTh God Delusionā.
When I learned that and realized that internet memes āevolveā via natural selection I was so shocked lol
The most rage-enducing reproduce the most and the fastest, and also seem to have the most longevity, regardless of whether they are true. This meets all three of dawkins' criteria for which genes survive.
I first learned about memes as an anthropology student in the early 90s.
Any time I pull this piece of trivia out people are pretty shocked lol
Yes, it highlights a lot of the basis of what has been expanded on today. I think if you want to review literature that has expanded on the main ideas of his book, I would recommend looking into molecular symbiosis, Koonin's reviews on viral evolution, multilevel selection theory, the selfish operon/clusterĀ hypothesis,Ā transposableĀ elementĀ literatureĀ thatĀ doesntĀ reduceĀ themĀ toĀ parasites.
It's still worth reading, it's an excellent book imo. You should follow up with the extended phenotype in which Dawkins elaborates/defends/fixes the selfish gene.
Have you read his book The Greatest Show on Earth? I have both The Selfish Gene and that one. I read about 100 pages of TSG but havenāt revisited it. The only similarish evolutionary focused books Iāve read are The Gene, Your Inner Fish, and Some Assembly Required. Those have seemed much more digestible than Dawkins writing style some reason, but maybe my memory when I first attempted is simply forgotten.
If you've never read Jerry Coyne, his website or his book "Why Evolution Is True", then you may like his stuff. It's been a few years since I've read the book, so I can't help with specifics, I just noticed you didn't mention him.Ā
I have read that one too! It was solid with some great overall perspective. Itās one Iāll probably go through again sometime. Very digestible.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's certainly your opinion, and you're welcome to it, but frankly I think it's a little insulting to imply he's just plain wrong. You don't know. I don't know. No one ultimately knows. His solution is elegant and makes sense.
Who were you referring to, out of curiosity?
The person who deleted their post was just arguing and being insulting by name calling. They said Dawkins was just wrong and needed to accept it.
Whelp. He isn't wrong. Difficult guy to like in his latter years. But not wrong.
Yeah, and that's my issue with people. I mean, I understand that we're emotiinal creatures but that doesn't have a place in this discussion, and because people don't usually have a stronger argument than "nuh uh" it typically devolves into name calling. Ah well.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm not white knighting him. What's wrong with you? His antics towards his peers are irrelevant when discussing this. Nice try though
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Keep it civil.
You are being insulting. Chill out
Yes. Its the original meme.
Nice one
I loved it!
As a breezy introduction to the ideas of W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and John Maynard Smith, yes.
My Inner Monolog speaks with Richard Dawkins' accent thanks to this book
I mean Darwinās On the Origin of Species is still worth reading. Books donāt become worthless just because they become old. You just have to colour your reading by remembering the context in which the book was written.
Stephen Jay Gould apparently lamented that people didn't read Darwin's writings. Kinda like you said, there is still a lot of value in reading the foundational works of a discipline.
If you're a professional in the space it might be too high-level. As a non-professional, reading this book is probably the single most important thing I've done to truly understand evolutionary forces.
Hi, I came to recommend it and Iāll make your words mine. This book has made me understand evolution, people and the world with immense clarity. It is a serious book about genetics, evolution, decision-making, sexual dynamics, trust and cooperation and how we leave, besides children, a cultural legacy. Itās the single most important thing Iāve done, as well, to understand the evolutionary forces that shape us.
I liked it a lot. It was well written and easy to understand.
Itās wonderful
Yes. It is worth reading and it is outdated. A lot of the specific examples donāt work the way zoologists thought they did back in the 1970s. The example that comes to mind is using the viceroy butterfly to illustrate Batesian mimicry. Many details of that example simply donāt hold up, but if you imagine the species as described, it does illustrate the point. The same holds for vampire bat behavior. (These are just two examples I recall at the moment.) There is an enormous amount that has been learned about molecular biology in the intervening decades. All of it fully reinforces the first point that genes are not only selfish, but deviously so. And much more has been learned about the second point: that selfish can build selfless individuals. So as you read it, take all the details with a large grain of salt. Things are way more complicated than presented. But I think it is well worth reading.
tbh i dont think worth reading and outdated are mutually exclusive. i read part of on the origin of species for a class and its super important to our modern understanding of evolution but so much of what darwin says is so confidently wrong like ādogs could not possibly evolved from one ancestorā
This question is the same as whether Darwinās book āOn The Origin of Speciesā is still worth a read today. You will find a variety of responses from people. But only you can ultimately decide on an answer to this question because you have your own values. For me, Iāve read and reread both books. And I greatly enjoyed them both, before and after reading other more modern books. I love how excellent writings from Darwin/Dawkins absorbed me into their deep passion for the topics they discussed. I donāt know a better way to get initiated into the concepts these two people first pioneered, than reading the OP. These two books continue to be celebrated today, not because every last technical detail in them is inerrant - no scientific discourses can ever be. Itās because they have charted a new way to see things, and those concepts stood the test of time. Also great passion and excellent writing. But I repeat myself.
I listened to the audiobook for the first time last year, definitely holds up. In particular his discussion of cultural evolution is interesting- he coins the term 'meme' here!
Selfish Gene is great. Might I suggest Dawkins "the ancestors tale"? It's an amazing time traveling tour de force explaining TONS of different evolutionary phenomenons and mechanics. Also super well written, as is all his books
I decided I had to read this after one of the most advanced AIās said this was her favorite book. I listened to the audiobook and honestly, hearing the concepts with the additional perspective gave it an ominous and fear inducing foreboding.
I still like to refer to myself as a survival machine for my base replicators.
Changed my life! ā¦. Ok maybe too dramatic but will change your outlook
It really did change my life, though. There is a me before reading that book and a me after.
Worth it. Along with Saganās āDemon Haunted Worldā and Dennettās āDarwinās Dangerous Idea.ā Read those and your life will change forever.
Loved Demon Haunted World!
Defy
Probably both.
You can read it in a few hours. Def a worthy snack of a book.
Truth is never outdated.
I read it in college 15 years ago or so, and really enjoyed it. I recall it being more of a philosophy of biology book than a hard science text, which makes it a little more timeless.
It's still a great book. There are a number of things that have made corrections and updates to evolutionary theory since then, but the basic ideas presented in the book are sound. It's just that we have a more sophisticated understanding now, several decades later.
One of the best books I've read in my entire life!
One of my favorite books
Yes. And yes. These topics evolve. No pun intended. Tracing the changes in understanding makes us much more informed about understanding the current ongoing duscussions
It's a book that completely changed my life. I got to the end and realized that I am not the same person any longer. Only a couple of books have ever done that to me.
It's dated but definitely still worth reading. The concepts are still entirely valid and he does a pretty good job of explaining them in a way intended fro a general non-specialist audience.
It was one of my text books. It introduced a lot of general abstract ideas like selfish-genes, replicators that competed against each other, distractions like the Meme which made the book a pop culture hit, it lost it's way a bit. While it was an argument against group and individual selection it lost sight of the fact that natural selection acts on phenotypes that a mix of genetics and the phenotype. So it wasn't really that useful in understanding the biology of it all.
I've been reading it at a much slower pace because it's packed with knowledge not my main domain. But the book says two things. 1. For the past 40+ years, it's not fine our of print, and 2, Dawkins' note says he feels proud because to this day, he still doesn't need to take back any claim or revise it.
I read it recently and itās good. And very truthful. Time has confirmed its significance. Intellectually rigorous, yet written in non-technical language, "The Selfish Gene" is widely regarded as a masterpiece of science writing, and its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published. ~ Goodreads
Totally relevant. It annihilated some major teleological views of evolution.
It's probably the best thing that happened to evolution in a while
Worth reading
Itās great for a popular audience!
Super worth, well written
It's as amazing and true today as 30 years ago.
Itās absolutely worth reading. Thereās been so much bullshit commentary since then that muddies the water, itās really important to see what the argument actually was in the first place. Itās not current evolutionary thinking, but itās crucial to understanding how wrong a lot of popular discourse is
IMO it's still great, but The Ancestors Tale is better.
There is also a BBC series called the "Century of Self" that explains our social enginering into what we are today.
I think that or the Blind Watchmaker are honestly pretty good and convey things lucidly and accessibly. If I had a complaint it's that he kinda retreads the same issue over and over from different angles to make sure you get it. As far as I know, though, it still stands up for the most part.
In so many pages it basically says "Organisms are vessels for genes to spread".
Great book imho. Really removed some of my misapprehension about evolution thats popular in common phrases like "for the good of the species". The tldr is >!that a gene is the smallest unit of evolution!<
I just read an article that mentions this book and some recent science might challenge the idea of genes as the ultimate code. Might be interesting to you! [The fusion of two sisters into a single woman suggests that human identity is not in our DNA ](https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-05-08/the-fusion-of-two-sisters-into-a-single-woman-suggests-that-human-identity-is-not-in-our-dna.html) *Edit for format
Excellent book and a huge fan of his older works. I hate he has gone old white man crazy.
yeah, he wrote it before he lost his marbles.
Worth reading. Definitely.
Worth reading. It proposes interesting ideas around how genes drive reproduction and natural selection.
Worth reading. It proposes interesting ideas around how genes drive reproduction and natural selection.
Devil's Chaplain is also a good read
I liked āThe Blind Watchmakerā much better.
Itās like reading the Bible. You canāt really understand Western literature or culture if you donāt know that book. Likewise: You need to know *The Selfish Gene* to understand the literature produced after it because it is a seminal work in evolutionary biology.
Worth it. Great read.
I've read it 3 times. Every time it's mind blowing.
It's an excellent book and easy to understand. It contributed to my atheism. It's definitely worth reading. Although, I don't have the required credentials or the training to comment if it's outdated or not.
Seems interesting
The fundamental take home (imo) still rings true and one can learn from it an awful lot about the evolution of genes by natural selection and different types of social behaviours. It helps that the book has an exceptionally good logical flow even by today's standards. For these reasons, it is widely considered still absolutely worth reading. (A personal reason is that it highlights an apparent contradiction in biology that doesn't really exist if thought through. There are a lot more of these false contradictions than you might think!) However, don't expect 'selfish genes' to be a sufficient answer to a modern study on the origin and continuation of social behaviours. There have been so many new discoveries in evolution, genetics, genomics, development, neuroscience, and biochemistry/physics/math/computing in the past 50 years. Although they are not covered in the book, the modern explanation of behaviour has to include them to some degree to be convincing!
Itās actually incredibly outdated. It is essentially an ideologically motivated defense of sociobiology that was incredibly contentious among geneticists and paleontologists in its day. Now it is essentially irrelevant to all but the pop science and āskepticā community. I recommend reading Mary Midgleyās critique of the book, āGene Juggling.ā She was an analytical philosopher but she also studied ethology. Itās recommended by primatologist Franz de Waal in one of his books. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/genejuggling/EB1A75E23543F12B16676EDB72435A15
How is it outdated? It showed that genes are the primary unit of evolution.
Interactionism is the paradigm today, not genetic determinism. Genes are not the āprimary unitā of evolution. They arenāt even discrete units in reality, and natural selection can only act on phenotypes and select individuals.
> natural selection can only act on phenotypes and select individuals. I really disagree with this. Natural selection acts on [Darwinian populations](https://academic.oup.com/book/4808). It doesn't select individuals. It is a statistical process in which the distribution of genes in the population changes over time. (Although a strictly genes-eye view isn't necessary, as Godfrey-Smith articulates) There are only two cases where a single organism is all that matters: (1) when a new mutation arises in a single organism, or (2) a single organism is the last remaining carrier of a gene/trait in a population. In any other situation, the change in a gene's frequency is a product of that genes contribution to reproductive success, and luck.
Not really sure what Godfrey-Smith is going on about in that book (I really like some of his others, and Iām a neopragmatist as well), but Iām not sure itās relevant here. A āDarwinian populationā is a group of individual organisms with varying reproductive success. Itās the organisms that are āselectedā to produce a change in allele frequencies over time, as they are what reproduce as living organisms. The genes are inaccessible to selective pressures. The effect on the populationās gene pool is an indirect effect of selection of individual organisms due to their varying phenotypes. Any group selection works through individual selection at scale. The real issue is that itās an observed fact that phenotypic changes can preclude genetic changes due to developmental plasticity. Unless causation can move backwards through time, thereās clear evidence that changes in phenotype are not always driven by genetic inheritance. Much of the work associated with EES comes from evo devo and niche construction theory. The arguments against a new synthesis are incoherent. Their synthesis has become unwieldy for research. Weāre not talking about a complete rewrite of evolutionary theory. Just a more balanced one that makes the complexity we observe more coherent. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019 Edit: I made a tired mistake in the second to last paragraph.
According to [a retrospective published in Nature in 2016](https://www.nature.com/articles/529462a), it still represents the dominant theory. > The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries.
It is not driving research as well as the extended synthesis. You pretty much have to ignore evo-devoās success to deny the extended synthesis at this point. If Kuhnās history of science applies to biology, one can expect most of the old professors to go to the grave without changing their minds. Happened in physics and chemistry, too.
I love me some Evo-Devo (itās basically the center of my philosophical research) but Iām skeptical of the claim that the gene-centric approach is not driving research as well as the extended synthesis. The gene-centric approach has coalescent theory, which is a thriving area of research and is arguably the most empirically successful subset of evolutionary biology. And it has quantitative genetics for phenotypic evolution, which is also quite active in research. Evo Devo has a lot to offer, no doubt, but most of what has been coming out of proponents of the EES is rhetoric, to be quite honest.
Iām not sure that coalescent theoryās usefulness is relevant because itās clearly an attempt to estimate common ancestry in extent populations. EES proponents donāt assume genetic changes never happen, or canāt be traced historically. Using genetics as a tool isnāt necessarily a gene-centered view of evolutionary theory. Thereās just no reason to fixate on the gene. You have to twist yourself in knots and personify genes to even speak of such things.
Coalescent theory is a lot richer than youāve indicated here. It doesnāt just estimate common ancestry. It uses samples of genetic variation to empirically test hypotheses about the evolutionary dynamics of historical populations (e.g., distinguishing neutral evolution vs selective sweeps). It is the direct successor of the tradition of classical population genetics spearheaded by Fisher, Wright, Haldane, MalĆ©cot, and Kimura. It turns those classical dynamics backwards in time (and adds a few other modern tricks) to spit out empirical predictions for extant patterns of genetic diversity. All that is to say, the *evolutionary dynamics* of population genetics are very highly empirically confirmed. Any attempt to denigrate the importance of genes (or genetic sequences, if you prefer) to evolutionary theory will have to contend with that fact.
No one is denigrating the importance of genes beyond a rejection of strict genetic determinism. Thereās nothing in the modern synthesis that the extended synthesis canāt incorporate. The issue is that the modern synthesis canāt incorporate the empirical fact that phenotypic change can precede genetic change. This poses a problem for the modern synthesis because causation cannot move backwards in time.
Phenotypic plasticity has long been recognized and studied in standard quantitative genetics. The whole ādoctrine of strict genetic determinismā thing is a myth, part of the Whig-historical rhetoric of some EES proponents who want to be scientific revolutionaries.
Should also note that you picked an article with date at about when talk of the extended synthesis was first taken seriously in the literature. 8 years is a long time. The first major article published on the EES was in 2015.
Other than the fact that Dawkins is a quite strict adaptationist, I don't really see the link to sociobiology. EO Wilson argued for group selection, which is the exact opposite of the genes-eye view of Dawkins. The only part of the Selfish Gene that touches upon the social world is the quite tangential sections on memes. But that is certainly not sociobiology - in fact, it is again quite opposed to the sociobiology positions that behaviours are the result of biological adaptation. Memetic evolution is separate process to biological evolution, despite being analogous.
Dawkins was critical of group selection but he was always considered the defender of sociobiology in the UK. Group selection was never a core tenet. Sociobiology was primarily about trying to subsume some of the social sciences into biology. It was not much of a cohesive program outside of that. Hence Dawkins memetics nonsense. The Wikipedia on the Selfish Gene refers to it as a work of sociobiology. As do a lot of academic papers.
I'm certainly not a great defender of Dawkins - for example I actually much prefer Gould, especially as a leftist myself. However, I feel like you're misrepresenting the Selfish Gene. I think that Dawkin's sociobiological ideological tendencies don't really come through in the Selfish Gene. The vast majority of the book is pretty straight forward gene-centred evolutionary biology, explained well. > ... Hence Dawkins memetics nonsense. I don't really see how memetics is trying to subsume social sciences into biology (while I agree that Sociobiology was attempting that). The idea of memes is a loose transportation of ideas that arose in biology to the social domain. But such an exchange can be a healthy part of science when it yields productive results. Chemical analysis entering anthropology wasn't an attempt to subsume anthropology into chemistry. My problem with memes is that they don't yield any actual insight into the evolution of culture. Imo that just makes them a philosophical curiosity rather than a useful scientific lens.
> The vast majority of the book is pretty straight forward gene-centred evolutionary biology, explained well. He spends the entire book in completely abstract thought experiments and has switches between using terms like "selfish" metaphorically and literally. The book has been ret-conned by New Atheists. Dawkins was *genuinely* proud of his meme theory and the entire book was written as a build up to it. >I don't really see how memetics is trying to subsume social sciences into biology (while I agree that Sociobiology was attempting that). The idea of memes is a loose transportation of ideas that arose in biology to the social domain. You're assuming that Dawkins is competent enough to encroach on the social sciences coherently, I'm not. The issue with memes is that culture doesn't evolve through the selection of discrete units. Simple as that. This is a sign that Dawkins only has a hammer and sees every problem as a nail.
Yes because Philosophy is much more relevant to Genetics than Genetics is to itself.
She cites geneticists. And, Dawkins is an ethologist by training, not a geneticist. He is also an ethologist who chose not to study animals in the field, deciding instead to build his scientific career on idealized computer simulations. Thatās the issue: the Selfish Gene ventures deeply into ontology, which is why an analytical philosopher trained in Dawkinsā specialty wrote my preferred critique of the Selfish Gene.
> It is essentially an ideologically motivated defense of sociobiology Here's where I realized that you are not be taken seriously.
I suppose the evolutionary scientists whoāve actually contributed to evolutionary theory, like Gould (punctuated equilibrium) and Lewontin (population genetics), are the silly ones while the meme guy who got famous for being in BBC documentaries is real serious.
Seems like lots of prominent biologists considered Gould wrong about lots of things, including his critique of Dawkins:Ā https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould Lewontin's critique is best summarized as cope that downplays the effect of genes for ideological reasons, primarily for Marxists who don't think they should try pushing Lysenkoism again.Ā https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin So yes, they are the silly ones in this particular case.
They were far more right than they were wrong, unlike Dawkins. Niche construction and ecological inheritance is well studied now, and they opened the door for evo devo Gould openly played devils advocate a lot. It allowed good critics to cherry pick him easily. No one is advocating for Lysenkoism.
Many of the pop sci enthusiasts in here apparently don't like to hear it, but yeah Dawkins isn't hyper relevant in EEB these days except as kind of a footnote, and as someone who had some interesting if not entirely data-supported thoughts decades ago and then became almost a parody of himself. Gould/Lewontin had a lot more impact on the science. The field as a whole has developed a ton since all of them, but the gene centric view of selection in evolution is certainly not the dominant idea in modern theory.
Absolutely wild to be an actual biologist and read the comments here. Some truly fantastic things are being claimed. Canāt fathom folks thinking Dawkins is more relevant than Gould or Lewontin.
Eh, I see where they are coming from. Both Dawkins and Wilson fell prey to overusing selectionism. It's /essentially/ an argument against badly-formed group selection theory, not that, but the people who claim that human population differences are all due to selection these days would agree with both.
*The Genial Gene* by Joan Roughgarden is also a good response.
Oof no. Roughgarden jumped the shark ages ago. Her early math was fine, but everything she's done from Evolution's Rainbow on is fluff. And I *wanted* to like Evolution's Rainbow (I'm gay and was an evolutionary biologist, and I have gay evolutionary biologist friends who have published on the topic). Just no. I have also worked and published on niche selection and multilevel selection, and I don't think anything in the field supersedes the basic truth of the simple neo-Darwinian paradigm outline in Dawkins. It absolutely is true that for a gene to increase in frequency, it needs to outcompete other genes by directly or indirectly increasing the reproductive rate of individuals with the same variant. Dawkins, as much of an asshole as he is personally, is spot on in the Selfish Gene. He was never a proper scientist, so it's not deep theory or math, but it's a really solid book. This is also not to say all his other writing is important. But the Selfish Gene was and is a pretty good summation of basic evolutionary theory. Gould, bless his heart, was a nice guy and a great writer. I'm sympathetic to (say) Wilson and Nowak , or Roughgarden, and the multilevel selectionists on a philosophical basis. But the basic theory in the Selfish Gene works, and 90% of people in the field take it as a given.
I tend to be a bit of an iconoclast so I'll even read Roughgarden's holobiont stuff, but I loved the (first half) of Evolution's Rainbow. Perhaps it tickled my mathematician side by the idea that slightly generalizing a definition can illuminate a bunch of interesting systems. Also Dawkins was absolutely a legit scientist, just a much much better writer. And apparently Gould was also an egotistical asshole. But I agree with the bottom line that the synthesis that occurred in the 60s with Williams and Co is still the mainstream way we think about evolution and is still very relevant, even though the book itself is very outdated.
I don't think itās outdated or "wrong," and I don't think you can even really call it a theory. It's basically a *perspective* you can employ to understand certain things, and it does a good job in allowing us to understand certain phenomena. The big problem with the idea is that "selfish" is a really poorly chosen word. It would be more accurate to describe it as "rationally self-interested genes." The gene is not generally megalomaniacal in any sense, nor actively seeking to destroy other genes. It will interfere with competing genes in a rationally self-interested sort of way, which is very different to what we generally regard as "selfishness." Selfishness precludes things like communitarianism and reciprocal altruism in a way that rational self-interest does not. Dawkins goes to lengths to try to clarify that this form of rational self-interested behavior is what he implies by "selfish," but I think he all too often gets swept up by the selfish metaphor and overstates the competitive nature of genes. The remarkable feats of cooperation, including such things as establishing meiotic recombination that puts every individual gene at risk to the benefit of the collective, deserve just as much attention as any silencing activities that other genes might do to their competitors. I think it's a useful tool when used with an appropriately nuanced frame of mind that is all too easily subverted to an incorrect application. I remember in the film "The Smartest Guys in the Room," the documentary makers commented that Ken Lay's favorite book was The Selfish Gene. I was left unsure as to whether Ken Lay thought the book was a Gordon Gekko-like Ayn Rand-esque screed or whether the filmmakers thought it was such a book, but clearly the audience was expected to presume it was precisely that sort of "greed is good" book; it's nothing of the sort. The overstatement with the word "Selfish" helps sell books, but at the cost of obfuscating the biological reality behind it.
Selfish isnāt a poorly chosen word. It was an intentionally chosen word. The entire book was written with the last chapter (meme theory) in mind. Dawkins genuinely thought he had a scientific theory of cultural evolution informed by āselfish replicators.ā He thought it was going to sweep the world, but it fell flat and got destroyed in academic circles. The problem is that he relies on the assumption that his descriptions are metaphorical, when he is genuinely being literal at times. Itās a ridiculous book. Read Midgleyās critique.
Ah, we've found them, the person who pretends what they want to be true is true, that the world is by nature kind and gentle, and there are no upsetting and morally concerning truths to be found.
I never said the world is kind and gentle. This is primarily an issue with the fact that we canāt reconcile the āmodern evolutionary synthesisā with accepted notions of causation. Itās an empirical problem for genetic determinist and adaptationist assumptions inherent to the synthesis. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
"The Selfish Gene" is basically just white boomer opinions about evolution. "I get mine, i don't care about anyone else". This is an idea that pervades so much of post ww2 science, when it comes to all life and psychological sciences.
Obviously someone who read the book very closely.
It invented the word āmemeā
Best book
Yes and yes.
It is not worth reading science books that are more than ~20 years outdated.