The Selfish Gene

1976 essay by Richard Dawkins

In the Vinony graph

Vinony's link graph records 180 inbound references to The Selfish Gene, and connects out to abiogenesis, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and River Out of Eden.

It is catalogued under topics including 1976 non-fiction books, Biology books and Books about evolution.

Vinony links it to 40 Wikipedia language editions.

Key facts

Author: Richard Dawkins
Language: English
Subject: Evolutionary biology
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 1976 Second edition in 1989 Third edition in 2006 Fourth edition in 2016
Publication place: United Kingdom
Media type: Print
Isbn: 0-19-857519-X
Followed by: The Extended Phenotype

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Author: Richard Dawkins
Genre: essay
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Followed by: The Extended Phenotype
Main subject: evolutionary biology

Show 4 more facts

publication date: 1976-01-01
title: The Selfish Gene
language of work or name: English language
Dewey Decimal Classification (works and editions): 591.5

Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

~20 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Selfish Gene is a 1976 popular science book by Richard Dawkins that espouses the gene-centred view of evolution. It builds upon the thesis of George Christopher Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and W. D. Hamilton's work on kin selection. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more genes two individuals share, the more sense it makes for them to co-operate.

The book introduced the term meme for a unit of cultural evolution analogous to the gene. Memetics has become a subject in its own right in the years since. In popularising Hamilton's ideas, as well as making its own valuable contributions to the field, the book has also stimulated research on human inclusive fitness.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “The Selfish Gene” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.