Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Apr 21, 2008

Jono rated it:

One of the most important things I took from The Selfish Gene is an idea that I find a bit difficult to put into words. Richard Dawkins is really good at crafting metaphors to describe scientific principles that on their own may be not be so interesting, or may be stubbornly inaccessible. While his rhetoric may make concepts more accessible and convenient to discuss, he openly warns that no metaphor is completely accurate. Understanding that the metaphors must be viewed skeptically, he offers More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Conner H. rated it:

Thoroughly unscientific. Dawkins's book has set back evolutionary theory by decades through positing a specualtive motivator for speciation. Genetic mutation is 99% deliterious to organisms and could not cause speciation, only modification to existing forms. The metaphor is also innapropriate and has all sorts of disastrous social implications. Dawkins swears these off, claiming to be a scientist, all the while writing books about the social and political world based on his gene theories. H More...

38 comments like (13 people liked it)

Oct 02, 2007

M rated it:

I read this book when I was a student and studying genetics at the time. This helped a lot, it made an awful lot more sense than what I was learning and I have Professor Dawkins to thank for making me look like a genius in a lecture and completely getting my head round an essay.

I am a big fan of Richard Dawkins, and this is his genius. I admire his ability to argue something so comprehensively and convincingly. I first discovered him in a book of essays where he wrote a letter to his More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Oct 02, 2007

rachelm rated it:

Writing lucidly about science for a lay audience while remaining scientifically rigorous is not easy, and Dawkins does a tremendous job as he examines evolution from the point of view of the gene rather than the organism.

I found this book to contain a number of "aha" moments -- for example, that rather than pose the question "Why is DNA an efficient mechanism for an individual organism to reproduce itself?", we should ask instead "How did a giant, complicat More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Nov 12, 2007

Luke rated it:

The book, ostensibly about how evolution acts primarily at the level of genes rather than organisms, is damn cool. Also, though, tacked into the back is the coining and brief explanation of the idea of memetics, applying a genetic evolutionary model to the way ideas disperse amongst cultural groups and become entrenched in the societal fabric. It's an utterly mindblowing epistemological theory that's totally changed the way I think about ... everything really ... and it's included almost as an a More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Jason rated it:

listen to this story.
10 people in a private room with a big deal/money insurance company eating expensive steaks and drinking expensive wine. one guy says to the effect: "simple starches convert almost instantly to sugar, sugar actually makes you more hungry."

so i say to the guy "so, evolutionarily we have develop to take advantage when we find food with alot of sugar. like hoarding."

to which the gentleman, well dressed, presumably well paid, rep More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 30, 2011

Becky rated it:

I know that you're all swooning now and sitting in awe of how incredibly well read I am, but let's just all settle down a minute so that I can tell you what I thought of this. Because really, that's why we're here. ;)

Overall, I thought that this was really interesting. I like Dawkins already after listening to The God Delusion (although I liked that one much more than this one). I think The Selfish Gene is intriguing and plausible and actually makes a lot of sense. It was really intere More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 08, 2008

Brian rated it:

Although I consider myself a Jesus-loving, god-fearing, creationist, I simply LOVE reading about evolution. I'm not sure what it is, but I find the whole concept, when explained by a lucid and accessible author, fascinating. And Dawkins is nothing if not lucid and accessible. He presents the topic and various questions and scientific controversies in a way that anybody with a willingness to pay attention can follow it. Some of the chapters were a bit more of a slog as Dawkins has to resort to sc More...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2008

Dave rated it:

I was led to read this book by way of one of those six-degrees-of-separation links that make the world the place that it is... I was watching the excellent documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about my former employer, Enron, and it struck with me that the movie mentions "The Selfish Gene" as being one of Jeff Skilling's favorite books. A reader of Stephen Jay Gould's, I already had a bit of an interest in genetics and understood the book to expound upon one of my fav More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 20, 2012

Alexander rated it:

I asked Twitter for reading recommendations just before Christmas and one of them was this book. It's so outside my comfort zone (a book about genetics? Are you MAD?), I just went for it. And I am very glad I did.

That's the great thing about Kindles. You can do mad stuff in seconds flat.

Skip the forewords and introductions, they're sententious verbiage. Just start reading the book - by the time you've done, you'll actually WANT to go back to the forewords and revision not More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 09, 2008

Michaelbert rated it:

I can't believe this book has been around for so long and I'd never heard of it! This guy coined the word "meme"! And had lots of intelligent things to say about evolutionary theory. He even made clear just what is meant by a gene!

This is not your usual, vague, bio-jabberwocky-laden, strained- metaphor-filled, popular science book. Dawkins is a mathematician at heart; he sure isn't one of those all too common people who chose the "softer" sciences because he was More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 06, 2007

Charles rated it:

This is the crown jewel of Dawkin's popular works. It is a masterpiece of choice illustration, finely honed definitions and pedantically nuanced distinctions, all framed by his engaging, pacey style. It has justly made him an iconic populariser. It is his best referenced and most tightly reasoned book.

He starts with characteristic confidence: Darwinian evolution is as established as the earth's solar orbit. Blind prejudice or intellectual deficiency alone could misinterpret the data More...

8 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 03, 2007

Nathan rated it:

Didactic, patronizing, condescending and arguably neo-intellectual twaddle. I do not believe in a God, certainly not any God that's been conceived by man, but I also believe Richard Dawkins is a self-satisfied thought-Nazi who is as fundamental in his view of religion as any right-wing minister. Fundamentalists of all faiths scare me, and atheism is just as much a faith as any religion. The existence or non-existence of a God cannot be proven, nor can the existence or non-existence of a soul, an More...

12 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 11, 2010

Boognish3 rated it:

I am about 2/3 of the way through. I generally tear through a book, but this one is taking a bit longer. It is very well-written though and successfully covers topics of evolution, behavior and genetics. I think most anyone could pick it up and have an easy time understanding the concepts Dawkins covers, but I have a background in science so perhaps I am biased. I think though, that it more clearly states the workings of genes and evolution than most students will receive in introductory biology More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Jessica rated it:

The Science and Inquiry Book Club selection for August. Also the inaugural selection - yippie!

-- -- --
Key concepts for me:
+The universe is populated by stable things
+"In sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection."
+"The individual is a survival machine built by a short-lived confederation of long-lived genes."
+Evolutionarily stable s More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 23, 2007

Eric rated it:

Some guy here said this book is "thoroughly unscientific" which is on the right track. This is a philosophical work - exploring the philosophy of genetics. As a manifesto, its logic is extremely compelling. As science, it's all holes - but hey, this is not science, it's a book about science. Still, it has inspired hard scientific research to support many of the book's claims.

The revolutionary idea presented in The Selfish Gene is "memes" which has informed m More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 30, 2007

Ethan rated it:

I was hoping that this book would focus more on the social relationships between humans, but instead it was truly a biological examination of gene theory. Which is cool and all, just not what I was expecting.

Pretty fascinating shit, actually... Dawkins' revolutionary theory basically revealed that the meaning of life is defined by our genes' "desire" to replicate themselves. In other words, it's not that we, as individuals or "vehicles" are looking to duplicate More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 08, 2007

Pierce rated it:

Lukemon's birthday present.

I'm not really qualified to give an scientific assessment of this. I have not read opposing evolutionary theory. (Or the Bible, hahaha.)

It was very engaging. Made the theory seem remarkably complete. I guess a lot of the examples seemed kind of selective, but the chapter on social insects (sharing DNA, cooperating so as to propagate genes through the queen's DNA. Almost not individual animals) made so much sense compared to "the good of the gro More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 02, 2007

Toni rated it:

We are just survival machines for our genes. The choices all animals make are programmed by our genes and sometimes the individual benefits from the choices but it may also pays the ultimate price, based on it's environment and how capable those preprogrammed choices are in the environment in which we find ourselves. This book discusses animal nature (including humans) from an entirely science/nature perspective on why one would make the decisions it would, even though a different choice would More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 14, 2010

Manny rated it:

- What some people seem to find hard to understand is that there's a part of you, in fact the most important part, that's immaterial and immortal. Your body is really no more than a temporary shell for the immortal part, and houses it for a little while until it dies. But what you do during that short time is very important. If you live well, the immortal part of you will become absorbed in something much bigger than you are. It will grow and change and achieve things that you can't even dream o More...

48 comments like (24 people liked it)

Sep 05, 2007

Casey rated it:

This book was recommended to me while I was working on a research project in Evolutionary Psychology at my university. Being a student in Psychology, I had background knowledge in evolution and natural selection, but this book changed the way I thought about evolutionary theory.

It may not be hard science (it is, after all, popular science writing), but it will open your eyes to different ways of thinking about genes and genomes. It's also a fun read, that can be read in a day (which More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 25, 2007

Lee rated it:

I read this book in a day as I traveled from Philidelphia to Laramie, Wyoming. Couldn't put it down. This ground-breaking and highly influential book transformed the field of evolutionary biology by arguing that natural selection acts on genes and genes alone - effects on organisms and species being secondary products of this. Prior to it's authorship evolution was more concerned with "good of the species" arguments. After this book, the cutting edge fields of homeobox genes, genome se More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 27, 2007

Anne rated it:

I was assigned this book for an animal behavior class, but once I started I couldn't put it down. This is the most definitive work on evolutionary theory since Darwin's Origin of the Species, explaining the journey of genes all the way from the prebiotic soup in captivating and easy to understand terms. With opponents to evolution ever more vocal and effective in their quest to subtract reason and science from public schools it is increasingly important for every person to have a good understand More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 18, 2009

Edgar rated it:

The book that changed my life, all of you should read this book, I have no lines to say all important was to me, but is the most scientist book showing you "the why" of human behavior...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 18, 2009

Al rated it:

One of the worst books I ever read :) The author seems obsessed with distinguishing "philosophy" (which he seems to deem the worst insult you could possibly throw at somebody) from science. Pointless distinction, insofar as Newton was dubbed as "the Last Magician" and he wrote more abouth alchemy than math, and Dawkins evidently must have never read Kant: a mind that can afford operating without philosophical assumptions does not exist.
Scientists were originally called More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 26, 2008

Philip rated it:

I'm behind the times in reading this right now, and I'm already familiar with many of the ideas it contains, but this was still an excellent read. This and books like it should be required reading for high school science.
He lost me a little bit with the whole meme thing toward the end. Not that I disagree with the premise, but it caused the book to lose its focus. Also the extended phenotype argument could have been left out.
But still, an excellent popular science book I'd recommend More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Erica rated it:

Well, from start to finish it took me just over 24 hours to read. Quite a quick time considering the topic of the book, but I had a lot of time on my hand.

I started it on the two metro journey from Foshan to Guangzhou airport. I was very intrigued as the foreword described how many people have been upset about the book, it calling into question what the purpose of life was, or causing a crisis in faith.

Having to be at an airport several hours before an international flight, a More...

0 comments like

Nov 16, 2011

Mark added it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Nov 09, 2011

Susan rated it:

This is the first book by Dawkins that I have actually read, having just watched lectures and heard about him for a long time, and mostly in the context of books like The God Delusion. As such I had categorized him as an "angry biologist." Don't get me wrong...I agree with almost all of his views that I had heard, I just felt that I wasn't a person who really needed any convincing.

However, I am so happy to have read this. Dawkins wrote at one point that the problem with More...

0 comments like

Aug 14, 2011

Laura rated it:

Fascinating stuff though I am certainly no evolutionary biology expert. The book itself, while grounded in scientific research, is self-aware of its speculative and theoretical nature (as any good scientific theory should until proven..). Evolution is fascinating, but its effects on animal behavior are IT for me. I'm not sure how you can make ethology into a hobby, but I might have to look into it. Female praying mantises eat the heads of males that try to copulate with them; a species of ma More...

0 comments like

reviews