A Blog on Books

Reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was enlightening and challenging. It's an iconic book, one of the most influential in evolutionary biology, I believe bested only by Charles Darwin himself. I haven’t read On the Origin of Species yet but would love to give it a read at some point. This book offers a look into a gene's role as the central unit of evolution and natural selection. I don’t know exactly how I first came across this book, but what compelled me to read it was the fact that Richard Dawkins wrote a blurb praising Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World , which is probably my favourite work of science literature that I’ve come across. It's between that and Billions and Billions . Putting the title and author together, I decided it was worth a shot to tackle this monumental work. Dawkins has a way with words and can transform complex scientific concepts into thought-provoking arguments to support the “selfish gene” theory. Coming into this work, I mistak...