commonplace book redux

INTRODUCTION TO THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

It is sobering to realise that I have lived nearly half my life with The Selfish Gene —for better, for worse. Over the years, as each of my seven subsequent books has appeared, publishers have sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to the new book, whichever one it is, with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and ask intelligent questions. Then they line up to buy, and have me sign . . . The Selfish Gene. […]

Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that ‘The Selfish Gene’ on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. […]

IN the dozen years since The Selfish Gene was published its central message has become textbook orthodoxy. This is paradoxical, but not in the obvious way. It is not one of those books that was reviled as revolutionary when published, then steadily won converts until it ended up so orthodox that we now wonder what the fuss was about. Quite the contrary. From the outset the reviews were gratifyingly favourable and it was not seen, initially, as a controversial book. Its reputation for contentiousness took years to grow until, by now, it is widely regarded as a work of radical extremism. […]

But a change of vision can, at its best, achieve something loftier than a theory. It can usher in a whole climate of thinking, in which many exciting and testable theories are born, and unimagined facts laid bare. […] I prefer not to make a clear separation between science and its ‘popularization’. Expounding ideas that have hitherto appeared only in the technical literature is a difficult art. It requires insightful new twists of language and revealing metaphors. If you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing. And a new way of seeing, as I have just argued, can in its own right make an original contribution to science. […]

If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’

When Oxford University Press approached me for a second edition they insisted that a conventional, comprehensive, page by page revision was inappropriate. There are some books that, from their conception, are obviously destined for a string of editions, and The Selfish Gene was not one of them. The first edition borrowed a youthful quality from the times in which it was written. There was a whiff of revolution abroad, a streak of Wordsworth’s blissful dawn. A pity to change a child of those times, fatten it with new facts or wrinkle it with complications and cautions. So, the original text should stand, warts, sexist pronouns and all. Notes at the end would cover corrections, responses and developments. And there should be entirely new chapters, on subjects whose novelty in their own time would carry forward the mood of revolutionary dawn.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2006