Selfish Gene
In school, I hated biology. And yet, years later, I absolutely loved The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins’ masterpiece. I realized the ultimate proof of how well someone explains things is if, after hearing the explanation, you come away feeling, “How could I have missed that? It’s so obvious!” What I hadn’t realized was that Dawkins’ book wasn’t just appreciated by laymen like me. As Matt Ridley put it : “Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another.” And here I had thought that most of the book was just explaining the theories that had already been accepted! But no, points out Ridley. In the third chapter, Dawkins mentioned the then unexplained “problem” of excess DNA: most species had way too much DNA then they needed. Dawkins’ hypothesis for that? “From the point of view of the selfish genes themselves there i...