The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition

Richard Dawkins

Mar 2006 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

The million copy international bestseller, critically acclaimed and translated into over 25 languages. This 30th anniversary edition includes a new introduction from the author as well as the original prefaces and foreword, and extracts from early reviews. As relevant and 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.

Ratings and reviews

I literally couldn't continue reading this otherwise excellent book because in the (Google play) eBook there were far too many OCR type errors. I'd demand a refund if I knew how to (it's not at all intuitive).

I read this when it first came out, and it was one of the first books of many to start me on my path of evolutionary psychology. If I remember correctly, didn't Dawkins coin Meme in this book?

This book is more important for showing people what is out there and causing them to do their own research, than it is for the actual concepts inside.

About the author

Richard Dawkins is the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 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) and The Ancestor's Tale (2004). 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 Shakespeare Prize in 2005.