The Selfish Gene

The 40th anniversary edition of the million copy international bestseller, with a new epilogue from the author. As relevant and influential today as when it was first published, this classic exposition of evolutionary thought, widely hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, stimulated whole new areas of research.

The million copy international bestseller, critically acclaimed and translated into over 25 languages. 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. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

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

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

• 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