The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins wrote his best known work, The Selfish Gene, in the late 70s and initiated a silent and powerful revolution in the field of evolutionary biology. This was much before when he went nuts and started introducing himself as a militant atheist, writing books with titles like The God Delusion. I personally never heard of anyone who stopped believing in God just because Dawkins told so. If God is a bad idea, which I think it is in a qualified sense, it will slowly be evolved out of the gene pool (or the meme pool to be exact.)

The Selfish Gene, on the other hand, is a triumph of the intellect. It presents the theory of evolution in a way which makes the whole process tautological and the reasoning and the evidence are so beautifully presented that you cannot but marvel at the simplicity of it all. I came to understand that in the general parlance evolution is thought of in completely wrong terms. To think of it as the survival of the individual or the specie is not only simplistic, it's just plain wrong. When we talk about survival of an entity in evolutionary terms, we must at least refer to survival on a time scale large enough for the slow process of evolution to affect. Individuals and groups just do not exist on a time scale that large. The facets which do get shaped by evolutionary forces are traits and characteristics of organisms and they are controlled by gene manifestations in the DNA. It is, therefore, quite logical that evolution through natural selection must act on this small entity - the gene. It is an added benefit that by thinking of evolution in the genetic terms one can easily explain the emergence of altruism and cooperation. Dawkins does it with the delightful example of the Prisoner's Dilemma and other game theory explanations. The gene centric view of evolution also did something which appears lacking in the naive understanding of it: the theory became predictive in a restricted sense, correctly predicting sex-ratios in insect colonies among other things.

It is unnecessary to say at this point that I loved the book and that I would recommend it to prospective readers but I would like to add a qualification here. Dawkins is an exceedingly sharp guy and while reading his book I often got the unnerving feeling that he is smart enough to lead me to believe anything. He is a master reasoner and I didn't know where the boundaries of my belief in him lay. All I could do is trust that he was being rigorous because I never knew what to suspect!