Review: The Selfish Gene

I read the Selfish Gene over the course of a single night in a single sitting, from 8pm to 12:30. What helps is that Dawkins is just a really good writer and that it isn't incredibly long. It is only ~200 pages, and so reading it is like watching a long documentary. Dawkins starts out basically saying he is going to war with group selection and other theories of evolution. He produces throughout the book a series of generalized models that work of the "Mendelian particle nature" of genes. But Mendel was wrong! You might say. Well, Dawkins knows that. He proposes that we consider a gene to be an /approximation/ of that particle nature by considering it to be essentially a strip of a chromosome that lasts over many generations, be it for a hundred thousand years or millions of them.

What I found really great was just the writing. Dawkins is fantastic. He has his asides, and apologizes for them. Perhaps the documentary metaphor is off. It might be considered almost conversational, with Dawkins' adversaries speaking up to either aid or be destroyed (assuming he isn't creating strawmen for them. I don't know).

Something interesting is that the models that Dawkins presents have been repeated in more recent literature. Professor Pinker in Better Angels might of well have copied Dawkins' chapter on aggression for parts of his book. Selfish Gene is an old book, almost 40 years old actually, and it shows its wear. It talks about computers that haven't beaten humans at chess yet and talks about only a few hundred transistors in the area of the human brain. Maybe reading the 30th Anniversary edition would've better suited me than the one I got at the university library.