If a book can and should change your life, this is that book

books:


	• The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author Richard Dawkins Oxford University Press, USA, 2006 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 278 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great quality, on time, great purchase!

Book is of great quality and I received it on time. Have yet to read through the book itself, but it looks like everything else was perfect. Thanks!

One of those milestone books

I love the way Richard Dawkins writes. Highly logical, and always covering his tracks to avoid misinterpretation as is so likely to happen in this case. I loved the second chapter. For a long time I had wondered how evolutionary theory could explain the beginning of life. That insurmountable mountain is truly difficult to climb. But this book seemed to have a plausible answer. In his second chapter, "The Replicators", Dawkins gives an account of how life could have evolved in the primordial soup as small chemicals that could self assemble and make copies of themselves. When he says that the purpose of our life is to continue the duplication of these original replicators and that we are but survival machines for these chemicals, I experienced a moment of epiphany.
I will recommend this book to every thinking man and woman. I think it has a life view changing impact in the reader. In the 30 years since the book was written biology has made immense advances. However the beautiful theory of evolution was perhaps never better interpreted than in this book. Perhaps no one really understands evolution just like no one understands Quantum theory, but this book is perhaps the best I ever got to understanding the meme of evolutionary theory.

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Very readable for non-scientists

Dawkins takes up where Darwin stopped; his reasoning and logical proofs sweep the last bit of theism from the mind. Especially the notion of memes as a cultural and scientific evolution is right on the dot.

If a book can and should change your life, this is that book

I bought this book for my wife, who as a Zoology major had once been told by a Professor that this book was essential reading. While the book lay on the shelf, waiting for her attention, I felt sympathetic and decided to give it a read. This book, quite simply, changed my life like no other piece of literature, music or art (barring perhaps the Beatles) did.

If you have not been exposed to the beauty of biology, or if you are wondering somewhere at the back of your mind why some species are the way they are and do the things they do, this book will blow your mind. It will make you fit pieces together and dare I say, make you think about religion and God differently. The God Delusion is getting a lot of attention lately, but really, reading the selfish gene puts all the dots on the map of your brain. All you have to do is connect them and you will have the answers to your questions.

Read this book as soon as you can. You owe it to yourself.

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Why Do People Exist?

In eleven short, tightly written, lively, and easy to understand chapters, Professor Dawkins answers all the questions about Darwin's theory of evolution that we might have always wanted to know the answers to but were afraid to ask. He does this even though strictly speaking, the book is not at all intended to be a book on evolution. It was intended to be about the gene-centered view of evolution: that is to say, about how the gene sits at the center of the control module of all living organisms.

Dawkins belief in evolution is solid, because to him, Darwin's theory is settled science that has not only stood the test of time but also is a "thoroughly-tested" and falsifiable theory. And as existential theories of living matter go, Darwin's theory of Evolution -- with its primary instrumentalities of time and natural selection -- provides the simplest explanation (in the sense of Occam's razor), of all living things: of how we got from inorganic to organic matter; from unordered atoms to complex patterns, from simplicity to complexity more generally, and from a single "live" cell, to the cell's ascendance into more complex living organisms, to higher forms and orders. This of course means that a supernatural being of any kind whatsoever would be superfluous.

At the beginning of the book, the author poses the question "Why Do People Exist?" and proceeds to answer it by saying that: We exist in large part because of the "biology of selfishness," that is, due to the selfishness of the genes. In the process of answering this question, he develops the biology of DNA and along the way demolishes some long-held hypotheses of the "pre-Darwinian" social psychologists and theorists who have long believed falsely that evolution is concerned more with the "survival of the species" rather than with the "survival of the individual." Dawkins claim is a radical and controversial one: that this long-held hypothesis about altruism makes no evolutionary sense; and that if we are concerned about the evolution of altruism, then biology is probably not the right place to look.

The crux of Dawkin's thesis is that "bodies are mere transport vehicles for genes." "We are machines created by and under the control of our genes," the predominant quality of which is "their ruthless selfishness." And although altruism may indeed have survival extending value, we are genetically programmed to be ruthlessly selfish rather than altruistic.

This is a seminal work that set off the fireworks in the sociobiology debates, and 30 years on, a great deal of its substance is still valid and has endured. Five stars.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life.
In his internationally bestselling, now classic volume, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature. Bees, for example, will commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, and birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk.
This 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins' fascinating book retains all original material, including the two enlightening chapters added in the second edition. In a new Introduction the author presents his thoughts thirty years after the publication of his first and most famous book, while the inclusion of the two-page original Foreword by brilliant American scientist Robert Trivers shows the enthusiastic reaction of the scientific community at that time. This edition is a celebration of a remarkable exposition of evolutionary thought, a work that has been widely hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, and that continues to stimulate whole new areas of research today.

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