Name: The Selfish Gene
ISBN: 9780192860927

The Selfish Gene

As influential today as when it was first published, The Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research. Forty years later, its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published. This 40th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue from the author discussing the continuing relevance of these ideas in evolutionary biology today, as well as the original prefaces and foreword, and extracts from early reviews. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

What Hacker News says

jijijijijOct 2026

All of it is a matter of active research, as this relates to the evolution of sex/sexual reproduction, which, contrary to popular belief, is still an unsolved problem in biology. Classical evolutionary theory cannot explain sexual evolution. Any book about "why?" will either be highly opinionated, agenda-driven, out-dated, or simplistic (as are my comments here).

I am not a biologist, so I can not refer to or evaluate any meaningful recent papers on the matter. However, I can recommend the podcast 'Big Biology', which dives into current biology research, theory and philosophy, including sexual evolution.

You may start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproducti...

Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene' is also an excellent read/audiobook. His specific theories of the evolutionary "unit" have been disproven, but his argumentation teaches a lot about "evolutionary thinking". I really wish he stuck with biology and science education instead of becoming this reactionary giga twat.

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nlSep 2026

Doesn't reference Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene".

That explores this in a more general sense. Since they didn't reference that I questioned its perspective and didn't read further.

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robocatSep 2026

Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.

Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.

Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.

Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.

Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).

I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.

It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.

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pixl97Sep 2026

First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing you see on Reddit.

GCC countries are resource economies mostly. They must weave a very narrow path to success to non-oil based means of income or the entire region collapses. I will say they do realize this is a problem and are using oil money to diversify, but resource curses are very hard to break and collapse can happen very quickly.

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son's son will ride a camel." --Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum

>Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian

This is just stating that that in 1700 you were a Christian or you got hung (hell, pre-independence America was founded by people that thought that too few people were being hung). As we see when you take out the hanging or social shame part of the religion people tend to flee them as they are oppressive structures. You could say them being men of science either had no bearing to their religion, or was in spite of their religion.

I am saying, for example, that the Abrahamic religions are bronze age (ok, sorry, Iron age) social structures. I don't think studied scholars are going to disagree on that point very much. People saw how people worked and could be sheppereded in societies without formal education and turned it into a series of stories that were effective in modifying peoples behaviors. Kings later came along and added their stories so they could further control the population. Over time a semi-coherent story about how people worked was formed below a set of rather incoherent stories regarding things that didn't happen that people are supposed to accept with faith.

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pdonisJul 2026

> Dawkins never had much of a research career.

Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.

Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.

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falcor84Jun 2026

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

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