The Selfish Gene

Ranked #1 in Bioinformatics, Ranked #1 in Biochemistrysee more rankings.

Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Selfish Gene from the world's leading experts.

Charles T. Munger Vice Chairman/Berkshire Hathawayrecommends this book in the second edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. (Source)

Ev Williams Co-Founder/Twitter, CEO/MediumRecommends this book

Matt Ridley Turned evolutionary biology on its head and was written like a great detective story. (Source)

Brian Armstrong Co-founder & CEO/CoinbaseRecommends this book

Phil Libin CEO/EvernoteHad a profound influence on me pretty early on. (Source)

Preston Pysh For anyone out there that likes the book, The Selfish Gene, I would argue, The Wisdom of Your Cells, by @biologyofbelief, is a great counterargument. Curious if there are any other books on biology out there that people really like? (Source)

Joe Henrich I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. (Source)

Bob Metcalfe It just seemed to explain everything. (Source)

Vlatko Vedral This is really extremely famous and I think rightly so – The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins: I love that book. When you look at theories in physics, they are really phrased very precisely with mathematical formulae, and if you are trying to make a prediction of a physical system you can do this extremely well with very high precision. So, for example, if you want to know where Mars will be in 10,000 years’ time, then our laws of physics are so accurate that actually you can really do that to an extremely good precision. However, when you look at more complicated things like biology and you... (Source)


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