So I did just finish The Selfish Gene 40th Anniversary Edition, by Richard Dawkins. First published in 1976, with editions republished in 1989, 2006, and 2016, this book was one of the first that attempted to communicate the then-most-current-understanding of evolution to the public. While it has now been 42 years since it’s initial publication, the concepts described in it have generally stood the test of time and staggering amounts of additional confirmatory research.
The second photo is near the conclusion of the book and is about the best summary of it. I certainly couldn’t think of a better one to write, but in case you don’t want to read that, it basically says the following:
Contrary to popular (mis)understanding of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the individual organism is not the most fundamental unit of evolution. Rather, it is individual genes. An even better term is that of “replicator,” and the individual organism can best be thought of as “vehicles for those replicators/genes. When all of life is examined through this lens, we find that even ideas that would seem to be contradicted by Darwin’s initial understanding of evolution, such as altruism, can be found to make perfect sense, and the statistical likelihood of traits passing on to future generations can be calculated, based on the idea of “Evolutionarily Stable Strategies.”
If you’re anything like I am, there are parts of the book that are hard to read, because he goes into brief descriptions of those statistical likelihood’s. Not in great depth or showing all the calculations, but enough to make my brain go cross-eyed until I got past them. That is NOT most of the book, thank goodness.
Interestingly, I now think that I am better prepared to go back and try reading Daniel Dennett’s newest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again.. I struggled with that book a lot, and I’m hoping that this book will give me a better foundation to read Dennett’s. So that’s the next one I will pull off the shelf, to see if I’m right, before this fades too much.
