Forty years of The Selfish Gene are not enough.

Itai Yanai,Martin J Lercher

doi:10.1186/s13059-016-0910-7

Itai Yanai, Martin J Lercher

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-0910-7

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Abstract

Forty years of The Selfish Gene are not enough.

Highlights

There is no book quite like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
Dawkins demonstrated with the utmost lucidity that we had biology upside down: evolution — and biology — is not concerned with the organism, but with the genes that survive unscathed through the eons by jumping from body to body
* Correspondence: yanai@technion.ac.il 1Department of Biology, Technion - Israel Institute of Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel Full list of author information is available at the end of the article bring this point home, he memorably defines bodies as survival machines: “robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

Summary

Introduction

There is no book quite like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Forty years after its first publication, the book is still in Amazon’s top 10 for both the Genetics and Evolution categories, with over a million copies sold and more than 25 translated versions. * Correspondence: yanai@technion.ac.il 1Department of Biology, Technion - Israel Institute of Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel Full list of author information is available at the end of the article bring this point home, he memorably defines bodies as survival machines: “robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” These survival machines — us — are discarded as our genes move on to another transient individual.

Results

Conclusion