Putting aside Richard Dawkins as a person, and especially as a public figure, this book is a really great example of a few different impulses in writing, argument, and scholarship. The basic idea here as an argument is that when thinking about evolution and “survival of the fittest,” that it’s not the individual organism that we’re focused on, but the specific gene as the most basic unit. “Selfishness” as we’re thinking about it here is the drive to spread that gene and to act in […]