The 100 best nonfiction books: No 10 – The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

An intoxicating renewal of evolutionary theory that coined the idea of the meme and paved the way for Professor Dawkins’s later, more polemical works

What is man, and what are we for? Remarkably, it was not until Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 that anyone, in our history, had thought methodically to address the reason for our existence. Darwin’s answer to this simple question was to show that every earthly species – chimps or humans, lizards or fungus – had evolved over about 3bn years by the process known as natural selection.

But then, after the furious controversy surrounding that publication, Darwin’s celebrated theory fell into neglect and misuse. A hundred years later, in the heady, innovative atmosphere of the 1960s, a new generation of young and ambitious evolutionary biologists found themselves confronted with a rare opportunity: the rediscovery and renewal of evolutionary theory. Enter Richard Dawkins, a young Oxford zoologist who had been born, and partly raised, in Africa. Following some notable pioneers such as WD Hamilton and GC Williams, Dawkins pulled together many disparate strands of thought about the nature of natural selection, and organised them into a conceptual framework with far-reaching implications for our understanding of Darwin’s ideas. He called it The Selfish Gene, a title he later considered to contain an unconscious echo of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. Dawkins was convinced that an amplified and developed version of neo-Darwinism “could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain”. His book would extol, he wrote, a “gene’s-eye view of evolution”.

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