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Books : The Selfish Gene
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The Selfish Gene by: Richard Dawkins List Price: £8.99 Childrens Toy Shop Price: £6.74 You Save: £2.25 (25%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 576.5 EAN: 9780199291151 ISBN: 0199291152 Label: OUP Oxford Manufacturer: OUP Oxford Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 384 Publication Date: March 16, 2006 Publisher: OUP Oxford Studio: OUP Oxford Sales Rank: 313 Related Items:
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Customer Reviews
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 Rating:  - jean genieDawkins is excellent while he sticks to biology however he may have lost the plot in the last chapter as he has in thinking promoting science involves attacking religion If an evangalist is someone who does not leave people to work it out for themselves but pushes his point of view Dawkins is one Nutty Baptists and Dawkins looked similar on channel 4 for example ie they both spin world events too far to promote a point of view Rating:  - Imaginative guessingI have attempted to read Dawkins's books on a few occasions but seldom get beyond the first 100 pages. I simply find his style of writing boring and his theories pure imaginative guesswork; I cannot take this author's ideas onboard yet biology fascinates me and especially that of epigenetics which seems to disprove all that this author advocates. I suspect that there is a snobbery value to those who support him. Irrespective of his academic standing I cannot avoid regarding the author as an imposter as I constantly want to wage war with his views. Admittedly, he comes across publicly as a very plausible academic but, that does not sway me. Rating: - Blind theorizingDawkins writes that "the argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes" (p.xxi) and that "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" (p.xxi). Yet, according to him, this book "is not science fiction; it is science" (p.xxi)! Dawkins contrives to overlook the twin discoveries that: 1. the observable traits of organisms are mostly conditioned by the interactions of many genes; 2. most genes have multiple effects on many of these traits. Dawkins transfers characteristics with which he is familiar from human behaviour on the macro-level to the inanimate components, "genes", of which we are physically ... Read More: Rating:  - Scientifically sound but philosophically flawedDarwin's theory of evolution is no doubt a successful scientific hypothesis, and Prof. Dawkins brings across this very clearly. However, I do have some doubts regarding his philosophical assertions. Essentially Prof. Dawkins believes that: 1) Selfishness and competition is at the root of all biological phenomena - nature as "red in tooth and claw" 2) There is no basic "dis-continuity" between humanity and other animals - humans are not qualitatively different from other animals 3) There is however no ethical dilemma between this basic fact and the human desire for goodness - since descriptive and normative realities are intrinsically separate (what is and what should be are independent of each other) Read More: Rating:  - Still great after all these yearsDespite being over 30 years old, this book is still a powerful and exciting account of how life, including humans, came to be. The examples and explanations (aphid & ant coexistence, fluke worms in snails) are breathtaking in their descriptions of the natural world, and could easily awaken an interest in zoology in the casual reader. |
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