The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author [Versión Kindle]

Without going into the content of the book, which I find very good, the Kindle edition was poorly produced. It is littered with typos of the sort that look like it was simply run through OCR software and then the publisher called it a day. These are things like "1" being replaced with "i", ugly pixelated graphics for mathematical notation (even very simple stuff like ""), or commas being placed after rather than before the spaces separating clauses. Additionally, the endnotes aren't proper hyperlinks, and so navigating to them requires repeatedly setting and clearing bookmarks alternatively at your current point in the text and the section where the endnotes are.

It's a shame that a book of such excellent writing quality received such poor production treatment for this new format.

The Selfish Gene was truly an amazing book. Upon reading it, I cannot help but view the world in an entirely new light, one that is at once unsettling and intriguing. Author Richard Dawkins is quite effective at communicating his opinions to readers in a clear and provoking manner, interspersing short anecdotes in his discussions to further illustrate his ideas. Dawkins is clever in that his work can be read by both the scientist and the layman with great fervor. I, myself, found my eyes hooked onto its pages for hours at a time. From the very first page, one is addicted; these self-replicators are mindless congregations of matter that have been able to construct "gigantic lumbering robots" within which entire colonies of themselves exist, sealed off from the outside world (p. 19). Their communication with their host is limited, instead opting to deal with their creation through indirect and oftentimes torturous manipulation. It is mind-boggling to accept that these replicators are none other than DNA, and we are merely their "survival machines" (p. 20). I found it most interesting to see Dawkins' arguments from a philosophical standpoint; how have we as survival machines lost the ability to recognize that we are not one separate entity? Why do we think and feel as "I" and not "we"? Dawkins provides an explanation and it is simply that selection has favored genes that promote cooperation with others. This has happened to such an extent that the communal nature of a colony of identical genes is for all intensive purposes unrecognizable. Evolution has seemed to favor a survival machine having the ability of subjective consciousness. This certainly brings us to the paradox of what our individual consciousness entails--what our lives truly mean. As Dawkins so beautifully ponders, "...perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself" (p. 59). Returning to the topic at hand, what makes The Selfish Gene so remarkable is that presenting its heavily scientific concepts is prose that is almost lyrical in nature. Indeed, this is where the magic of the book grasps the reader like a clenched fist. Instead of describing the movement of cistrons from one generation to the next by describing how the chromosomes align on the metaphase plate, and how chiasmata form, Dawkins chooses a much more romantic route: "As the cistrons leave one body and enter the next, as they board sperm or egg for the journey into the next generation, they are likely to find that the little vessel contains their close neighbors of the previous voyage, old shipmates with whom they sailed on the long odyssey from the bodies of distant ancestors. Neighboring cistrons on the same chromosome form a tightly-knit troupe of traveling companions who seldom fail to get on board the same vessel..." (p. 33). That is the magic that is The Selfish Gene.

I read The Selfish Gene (2nd edition, 1989) because it is one of the twenty books Charlie Munger recommends in the second edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack (which I have recently read and recommend very strongly indeed).

I'm going to quote Dawkins from the preface to the original edition as he provides an excellent summary of the central message of the book and its effect upon him (and me):

"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it."

Using one of the many excellent analogies utilised throughout his book, Dawkins explains that we are like a chess computer program that has been programmed by its creator to play in its absence. The programmer (genes) takes no part in the game (life) but instead provides the tools for its vehicle (animal, plant etc.) to play the game on its behalf.

I am glad that Dawkins says that he never gets fully used to this idea. I find it very difficult to replace the idea of my primacy in my body with the idea above. It requires a sort of `flip' in one's perception - but it is so different to what our senses tell us that it flips back without a conscious effort (or so I find, anyway). But how many of us have not regularly had to do battle with themselves to do what they know they should do rather than what they feel an urge to do? Dawkins' ideas provide an excellent framework in which to help understand these problems, which I suspect is a major part of the reason why Munger recommended this book.

For example, Munger believes that what he calls `reward and punishment superresponse tendency' is the most powerful of the psychological biases that affect humans (and other animals). Dawkins provides a very convincing explanation of why this should be the case: because it is a method that the programmer (genes) can use to provide rules that its vehicle (us) can use to learn to cope with its environment better in the absence of the programmer. It is thus much more efficient than providing an endless number of detailed rules and copes with the problem of an environment that may be different to that `expected' by the genes. Even so, these rules do not always help us today - for example it helps to explain why rich societies have a problem with obesity: our genes did not expect us to have access to such plenty that the rule to reward us for putting sweet things into our mouths would cause problems.

Our selfish, almost immortal genes do not care about us - their short-term, throwaway vehicles. We should also expect to find that we have been programmed with selfish behaviour in our creators' image. However, he makes two very important caveats, which mean that overall I think the book has a rather hopeful message:

1. We are likely to have a statistical propensity towards selfishness, but that does not mean that individually we are doomed to that behaviour. We have a choice.

2. In my favourite chapter, `Nice guys finish first' (one of the two chapters added for the 2nd edition) Dawkins uses the Prisoner's Dilemma gambling game to show that if certain conditions are met (which often are in nature), paradoxically, the best outcome is for selfish individuals to cooperate. And that the `good' character traits of niceness, forgivingness and non-enviousness can therefore be the most successful.

I believe that unless we wish to rely on luck throughout our lives we need to embrace reality as closely as possible, which is what a first-rate book like Dawkins' helps us to do.