“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins has to come to be one of the most influential books on evolution and is considered to be the cause for a “revolution in biology”. The ideas are conveyed in a well-thought-out and concise manner, utilizing metaphors to make it easier for the reader to understand otherwise difficult concepts. This creates a comfortable middle-ground for the reader that neither overwhelms them with scientific jargon or underwhelms them by its simplicity. Richard Dawkins passion and love for science can be observed in the amount of effort he put in to this book, the same passion that has placed him among the world's most prominent scientists and atheists as well.
I reviewed the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene
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He contests Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest by stating that “Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of ‘survival of the stable’.”, this statement holds a lot of value as stability is constant and almost everything that is used is stable. In the case of replicators (considered a basic unit of evolution), they played an extremely important role in history as we know it; replicators had the unique ability to replicate themselves which most life at the time did not have. Dawkins further states that the existence of mankind is due to replicators, but that these replicators were not all the same. Dawkins states that there are very specific factors that can cause great differences in replicators. An example of this is if Replicator 1 were to copy itself every minute and Replicator 2 only copies itself every day, even if Replicator 2 were to live much longer than Replicator 1 it would still be easily outnumbered by Replicator 1, of course this is a very simplified explanation, but it still conveys the idea that these differences occur on even the smallest