An unabridged audiobook edition was released in 2011, narrated by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward. The Extended Phenotype was more groundbreaking, The Blind Watchmaker more persuasive, Climbing Mount Improbable more logical, River out of Eden and Unweaving the Rainbow more lyrical, The Ancestor's Tale more encyclopaedic, The God Delusion more controversial. A brilliant book celebrating improbability as the engine that drives life, by the acclaimed author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. The Blind Watchmaker is a perfect metaphor for the emergent order in markets. Dawkins speaking at an atheist event in 2012. Credit: Terry Smith/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty. I found The Selfish Gene painfully dry. They pass through the generations, reshuffling themselves each time they pass from parent to offspring ... Natural selection will favour those genes which build themselves a body which is most likely to succeed in handing down safely to the next generation a large number of replicas of those genes ... our basic expectation on the basis of the orthodox, neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that Genes will be 'selfish'.”. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. It was dawning on molecular biologists that humans possessed 30–50 times more DNA than they needed for protein-coding genes; some species, such as lungfish, had even more. You can also search for this author in Williams said in an interview that Dawkins's book had “advanced things a lot further than mine did” (see go.nature.com/21j1mt); Hamilton wrote that The Selfish Gene “succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of using simple, untechnical English to present some rather recondite and quasi-mathematical themes of recent evolutionary thought” in a way that would “surprise and refresh even many research biologists” (W. D. Hamilton Science 196, 757–759; 1977). He is a columnist for The Times. Was he right or wrong? That is a distance of … A previous work, The Selfish Gene (1976), appeared a year before molecular biologists discovered, to their surprise, that the sequence of most animal and plant genes is interrupted by other "selfish" sequences of genetic material (DNA). The book is intended as a defense of evolution theory against the lame attacks by creationists and it is so well done that as a boomerang effect it smashes right into the face of creationism itself. The natural next book is called The Extended Phenotype. Dawkins began writing the book in 1973, and resumed it in 1975 while on sabbatical. I was being shown the arguments, not the answers. Nature But here was a writer turning some settled science upside down and inviting me to join him on a journey to discover a truth that seemed to him “stranger than fiction”. What stood out was Dawkins's radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. Richard Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014). Troubled by the persistent resistance to orthodox Darwinism from creationists, revisionist scientists, and the general public, Dawkins sets out to show how Darwin provided "the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our … But the watch is the market as a whole. It might even have avoided the common misconception that Dawkins was advocating individual selfishness. Since then, Dawkins's speculation has been borne out by the discovery that much surplus DNA consists of reverse transcriptase — a viral enzyme whose job is to spread copies of itself — or simplified versions of transposons dependent on it. Selfish genetic elements and the gene?s-eye view of evolution. While he's a great communicator, I feel like he's actually wasted a significant amount of his career espousing fairly cheap and not deeply thought out criticisms of religion and religious practice, when, as he himself claimed on his recent interview with Joe Rogan when asked about why religions form and do what they do, "I just don't get it!". In the end, it was Michael Rodgers of Oxford University Press who enthusiastically published The Selfish Gene, after demanding “I must have that book!” when he saw early draft chapters. A background in biology will be very very helpful. James Gleick's Chaos (Abacus, 1988), Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988) and Pinker's The Language Instinct (William Morrow, 1994) were among the nuggets mined before the boom petered out. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer. Dawkins and Ward do a fantastic job at making this a very enjoyable 16 (or so) hours. 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