Book Bearings
Cover of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Selfish Gene

  • 352 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 1976
  • 42 editions

Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.

1 About this book

As influential today as when it was first published, The Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research. Forty years later, its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published.

This 40th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue from the author discussing the continuing relevance of these ideas in evolutionary biology today, as well as the original prefaces and foreword, and extracts from early reviews.

  • Evolution
  • Sociobiology
  • Biological Evolution
  • Biology
  • Science
  • Genetics
  • Behavior genetics
  • Natural selection

2 About Richard Dawkins

Born 1941

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, atheist activist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1995 he was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position he held until 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

3 More by Richard Dawkins

4 Similar books

Find a book that fits your moment