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February 21, 2005
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene in the mid-70s. Maybe it's old news now. I found it nevertheless fresh and enlightening. It left me with the impression of reading it far too quickly, although it was also slower going than most books.
Dawkins's book centers evolution on the gene, functional and physical unit of heredity, rather than the organism. At the core of his whole argument lies a tautology. Genes that survive tend to produce effects leading to their survival. From that starting point, Dawkins manages to explain a whole range of phenomena, from why parents take care of their children rather, to behavior that appears altruistic when the unit of observation is the organism, to why it makes sense to see the gene's influence beyond the edge of the body.
His book gives you page after page of quality ideas, the kind that seem simple and natural once you've seen them, like elegant solutions to problems. As you'd expect, he borrows many of those ideas from fellow researchers in biology to game theory, though many are his own ideas and improvements. Dawkins also does a thorough job covering counterarguments and presenting the case for and against them. He writes such that it's easier to learn something from his exposition of somebody else's idea than from reading that person's original exposition, e.g. Axelrod's investigations of strategies for the iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game.
Highly recommended.
Posted by Mark at February 21, 2005 07:57 AM