The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, because it seems to offer some sort of hope for our future; and my own The Extended Phenotype

evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important

naturally-occurring amino acids would have been thought of as diagnostic of the presence of life. If they had been detected on, say Mars, life on that planet would have seemed a near certainty.