Living With the Selfish Gene

Abstract

Abstract I haven’t lived with the author of The Selfish Gene for nearly twenty-five years but I have lived in close and constant contact with the book itself since before it was published. Its words and figures of speech are thrown at me almost daily from student essays. The questions it raises are the driving force behind the most successful tutorials and the sound of pennies dropping as each new generation of students takes in the extraordinary implications of what the book is saying, is as loud now as it ever was. The Selfish Gene seems to occupy a unique place in biological writing. Some books, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, herald a new age and have a huge impact on the way people think at the time but thereafter are read mainly for historical interest.