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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.
Introduction to 3rd edn
Preface to 1989 2nd edn
Foreword to 1976 1st edn
Preface to 1976 1st edn
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
Endnotes
Reviews from earlier editions
Updated bibliography
Index and key to bibliography
"The sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius."
- New York Times
"This book should be read, can be read, by almost everyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.:
- W.D. Hamilton, Science
"Learned, witty and very well written [...] Exhilaratingly good."
- Peter Medawar in The Spectator
"The exciting theories and their wide implications are explaned with clarity, wit and enthusiasm."
- Peter Parker, Sunday Times
"Dawkins demonstrates that complex, theoretical or mathematical ideas can be expressed rigorously, in plain English. The book remains an excellent way for those who have not been trained in evolution to understand modern arguments."
- Trends in Ecology and Evolution
"A splendid example of how difficult scientific ideas can be explained by someone who understands them and is willing to take the trouble"
- The New Yorker
"the reader will come away with a clear understanding of kin selection, evolutionary stable strategies, and similar staples of the literature on evolutionary theories of animal behaviour. This is a considerable achievement."
- Times Higher Education Supplement
"buy this book, read it and recommend it to your students [...] There is still nothing else quite like it. Not only are the new chapters and endnotes worthy additions to the original, but the 1976 text comes up as fresh as a primrose and, in its way, nearly as perfect."
- Animal Behaviour
"Scientists give every appearance of being addicts, and science is their vice. That is one reason why progress in science is so rapid. I for one have benefited a great deal from Dawkins's addiction."
- David L. Hull, Nature
"Thirty years on from its first publication, this classic work in the development of evolutionary thought remains as influential as ever."
- Prospect
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