Philosophical Dead Ends

WHAT MAKES A successful popular science book? One could not find a better paradigm than Richard Dawkins’s 1976 best-selling classic The Selfish Gene. This book presented a quite widely if not universally accepted interpretation of the so-called “Modern Synthesis,” the set of ideas that have constituted much evolutionary thinking since the mid-20th century. Because the theoretical science that drove the Modern Synthesis was population genetics, the mathematical study of the evolutionary trajectories of genes, it was natural to think of evolution as a theory about genes, and Dawkins took this view to a somewhat extreme conclusion, painting evolution as genes striving to replicate themselves—a.k.a. the gene’s-eye perspective. Individual genes were seen as competing with one another to have the most positive effects on the organisms in which they resided, and thus to become more prevalent in the next generation.

This was an intriguing vision, and Dawkins presented and developed it in elegant and engaging prose, showing an exceptional talent for providing illuminating metaphors and vivid examples. The outcome was a spectacular success: over 48 years and a million copies later, Amazon tells me that it is currently the number three bestseller on the topic of evolution.

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