Richard Dawkins “The Selfish Gene”

As much as I like to use descriptive and metaphorical language for reviewing fiction book, with non-fiction literature I would prefer to stick to the facts and assess the books based on the criteria important to me.

I come from an economics-finance background with a foreign languages twist (Rus, Eng, De, Fr), so my primary interest is either to learn something I either didn’t know or take a fresh look at something I thought I knew too well.

Selfish Gene by R.Dawkins

Subject: Biology, evolution, gene-centered theory of evolution

Publishing date: 1978

Information relevance: high

Subjectivity: medium

Review:

It’s a fair chance you heard about Professor Dawkins, and so did I, albeit in a different context of atheism. I started to read this book with an established, yet blurry faith in the Darwin Theory – and by blurry I mean “I know how it works, but don’t ask me the details’ (which is a pretty accurate description of my knowledge in many scientific principles). Further interest was fuelled by the fact that as far as argument between creationists and evolutionist go, I could only contribute with mild annoyance that evolution is evident, but very little knowledge to actually argue for it.

And not only did I acquire a better understanding of evolution; I found the scientific foundations of many actual behaviours that I observed. I knew there was a deeper biological reason behind them, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it, e.g. altruism and mating behaviour. Gene-centered evolution theory is like a pretty frame on your picture of the world that just fits and you know it truly works. Like an internal invisible structure that holds everything. This feeling of clarity is the closest I could get to a spiritual experience.

As far as personality of Professor Dawkins is concerned, many say that he blindly defies criticism . Look, I don’t know. But at least its not how the book reads – I did’t have the feeling that I had, say, with works of Noam Chomsky (no disrespect to Prof. Chomsky at all, but still).