---
title: "The Selfish Gene"
chunk: 4/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:23.752400+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Awards and recognition ==
In July 2017 a poll to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Royal Society Science Book Prize listed The Selfish Gene as the most influential science book of all time.
The Royal Institution conducted a poll to determine the best science book ever. The Selfish Gene made the shortlist, along with Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring and, in first place, Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.
Ian McEwan writes that it "stood at the beginning of a golden age of science writing. With a fine sense of literary tradition, the physicist Steven Weinberg, in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, revisited Huxley's lecture on chalk in order to make the case for reductionism. Steven Pinker's application of Darwinian thought to Chomskyan linguistics in The Language Instinct is one of the finest celebrations of language I know. Among many other indispensable 'classics', I would propose EO Wilson's The Diversity of Life on the ecological wonders of the Amazon rain forest, and on the teeming micro-organisms in a handful of soil; David Deutsch's masterly account of the Many Worlds theory in The Fabric of Reality; Jared Diamond's melding of history with biological thought in Guns, Germs and Steel..."
Weinberg included it on his list of the 13 best science books for the general reader.

== See also ==

The Making of the Fittest (2006) by Sean B. Carroll, a book about evidence for evolution from genomics
Non-cooperative game – Type of game involving individual competitionPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Selfish DNA – Genetic segments that can enhance their own transmission at the expense of other genesPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Evolutionarily stable strategy – Solution concept in game theory
Green-beard effect – Hypothesis for altruism in evolutionary biology
Nice Guys Finish First (1986), BBC documentary on evolution of altruism

== Notes ==

== References ==

== Bibliography ==
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-286092-7.
Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene (second ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-217773-5.
Dawkins, Richard (2006). The Selfish Gene (30th anniversary ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929115-1. Archived from the original on 4 May 2006. The Selfish Gene at Google Books
Grafen, Alan; Ridley, Mark, eds. (2006). Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929116-8.
Ridley, Matt (28 January 2016). "In Retrospect: The Selfish Gene". Nature. 529 (7587): 462–463. Bibcode:2016Natur.529..462R. doi:10.1038/529462a.

== External links ==

Video introduction by Richard Dawkins Archived 6 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine from Google Videos
The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On Archived 14 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine and mp3 from Edge Foundation, Inc.
Richard Dawkins discusses The Selfish Gene on the BBC World Book Club
Richard Dawkins on the origins of The Selfish Gene Archived 26 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine Royal Institution event video, 20 September 2013