The Selfish Gene.

DAWKINS, Richard.

Item Number: 140001

New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

First edition of Dawkins’ classic work. Octavo, black cloth. Signed by Richard Dawkins on the title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket painting by Desmond Morris. Foreword by Robert L. Travers.

The Selfish Gene was extremely popular when first published by Oxford University Press in 1976. It created "a silent and almost immediate revolution in biology" (Grafen and Ridley, 2009), and it has sold over a million copies and has been translated into more than 25 languages. " Best said by the New York Review of Books, it "was a smash hit...Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology-some of it truly subtle-in stunningly lucid prose." In 1976, Arthur Cain, one of Dawkins's tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, called it a "young man's book." Dawkins received the compliment well and explained that it was allusion to A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (Dawkins, 2006). "This important book could hardly be more exciting," said The Economist, and "[t]he presentations are remarkable for their clarity and simplicity, intelligible to any schoolchild, yet so little condescending as to be a pleasure to the professional" (American Scientist). The Selfish Gene “succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of using simple, untechnical English to present some rather recondite and quasi-mathematical themes of recent evolutionary thought” in a way that would “surprise and refresh even many research biologists” (W. D. Hamilton Science 196, 757–759; 1977).