The Selfish Gene

Adam Rutherford, The Observer In 1976, The Selfish Gene became the first real blockbuster popular science book, a poetic mark in the sand to the public and scientists alike: this idea had to enter our thinking, our research and our culture... The Selfish Gene has attained its own literary and scientific immortality: as long as we study life, it will be read.


Adam Rutherford, The Observer Dawkins's prose is lucid and powerful, his argument difficult to contend ... The Selfish Gene has attained its own literary and scientific immortality: as long as we study life, it will be read.


Robert McCrum, Observer highly readable and entertaining ... exhilirating gene's-eye-view of life


Matt Ridley, Nature Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both changing science and reaching the public are rare. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication
40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer


Nick Spencer, The Tablet Richard Dawkins' magnificent introduction to the world of popular science writing ... Punchy, elegant, self-righteous, devotional (at least in a Dawinian way), it showed that genetics was absorbing, challenging and important

Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the most influential science writers and communicators of our generation. He was the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he held from 1995 until 2008, and is Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford. His bestselling books include The Extended Phenotype (1982) and its sequel The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), A Devil's Chaplain (2004), The Ancestor's Tale (2004), and The God Delusion (2007). He has won many literary and scientific awards, including the 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award, the 1990 Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society, the 1994 Nakayama Prize for Human Science, the 1997 International Cosmos Prize, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest in 2009.

Introduction to 30th anniversary edition Preface to 1989 2nd edition Foreword to 1976 1st edition Preface to 1976 1st edition 1: Why are people? 2: The replicators 3: Immortal coils 4: The gene machine 5: Aggression: stability and the selfish machine 6: Genesmanship 7: Family planning 8: Battle of the generations 9: Battle of the sexes 10: You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours 11: Memes: the new replicators 12: Nice guys finish first 13: The long reach of the gene Epilogue to 40th anniversary edition Endnotes Reviews from earlier editions Updated bibliography Index and key to bibliography