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 Hard core biology September 30, 2008
It's a tough read at times, since it is aimed at Dawkins' colleagues and biology students. But it gives you a sense that the mechanisms of inheritance and natural selection are getting to be very well understood.
Oddly, the alleged subject of the book is to be found tucked away in the last chapters, the first 10 or so being Dawkins explaining stuff and telling how others are mistaken.
 Theory, without the distractions. July 13, 2008
TEP is primarily a technical treatise. It elaborates the implications of holding a Darwinian explanation for the diversity of life forms across and, most especially, through time. In detail, the reader is alerted to what is conceptually required for a Darwinian theory to be internally consistent, and for it then to be applicable to life as it is and as it has been.
Professor Dawkins persists in using the misleadingly emotive terminology from his previous best seller, The Selfish Gene. However, in TEP it is very much tempered and qualified. The picture he wishes to make vivid is from a vantage entirely remote from human concerns - it is at the level of molecules, and the complex systems which require copies of molecules to be made . From this perspective, to `survive' means to produce a copy, and to be `selfish' is likewise to be inclined towards such replication; the `struggle' to survive, by this account, is simply a tallying of the number of reproductions both across time, and through the generations. It is made clear that the `fighting' takes place between lineages, and hence over a much extended time frame, that is, `in evolutionary time'.
As the participants in this most undramatic of dramas are utterly bereft of any human attributes, the terms are spoken `innocently', that is without any suggestion that any extrapolations can be made from what goes on at the level of goo to the level of human interaction. TSG also claimed to speak innocently, but it protested its innocence in the face of a gale of rhetoric to the contrary - in TEP, the wind has, thankfully, settled.
TEP spends time undermining certain tenets previously central to Darwinian thinking. The notion that the individual organism works for its own reproductive ends is challenged in chapter four, `Arms races and manipulation'. Prioritizing the germ-line over the individual organism is a recurrent theme, perhaps made most stark in chapter six, `Organisms, Groups, and Memes: Replicators or Vehicles?'; here the central issues turn on Darwinian theory requiring a means by which variety is generated in the factors to be `selected', and a means by which these factors are replicated in succeeding generations - dealing with organisms and groups in turn, Dawkins explains troubles with their candidature. In regard groups, while he is not utterly inimicable to selection occurring at this level, he gives good reason to be skeptical that it could account for the development of complex organs and specializations. Oddly, with his own theory of memes he gives a paragraph of objections and these seem far more convincing than the theory itself.
The penultimate chapters expand on the concept of the title. By extending the phenotype, Professor Dawkins is again undermining the notion that the individual organism is the `level of resolution' which we should examine. The level at which forces of selection operate may better be conceived of as organisms plus their direct environmental effects; or, in virtue on focusing on the genetic germ-line, in might be better to focus on an extended lineage of related individuals. Where the limit is drawn is discussed, albeit vaguely, in terms of where there is discernable feedback to the reproductive success of the germ-line in question.
Finally, the author `rediscovers the organism'. The last chapter is, however, more of an invitation to question why life is organized at the level of individual organisms than a celebration of that fact. To ask such a question, once again the germ-line, or the level of the genetic replicator, is made basic.
In sum, TEP asks us to view the panoply of life from the perspective of replicating DNA, and it suggests that such a view helps to order and explain the events of myriad complexity and diversity which otherwise appear wonderful but beyond explanation. The story it tells is full of detail and complextiy itself, and it occurs at a scale of magnitude and a time frame and, ultimately, from a perspective which makes no comment on our actual lives. Remove the vestigial emotive words carried over from TSG, and the TEP stands clearly as an exposition of a technical scientific theory, and a good one at that.
 A scholastic argument April 12, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I read this book because Dawkins in other fora has identified it as his best work. He says it's a version of "The Selfish Gene" for biologists, but as Daniel Dennett points out in the afterword, it is actually an extended philosophical argument. More precisely, it's a scholastic disquisition on why it's only the individual gene that may be denominated as the "unit of selection" for purposes of natural selection as opposed to the organism or some other model. Here's an example of why this is more a medieval "angels on the head of a pin" argument than anything else. Say you are born with a gene mutation that gives you better running ability. Let's say, though, that because your judgment doesn't match your speed, your better running leads you not only to better escape predators, but also to run over the side of a cliff. In that case, is the "running" gene being selected for, or against? The answer really is, neither. Your genome as a whole is being selected against. If you survive long enough to have children and have passed on your mutation, the running gene may have another chance, assuming it's not paired up for life with the "judgment" gene. If you haven't survived long enough, then tough luck. Insisting on the gene as the only possible "unit of selection" is just a semantic argument and doesn't really get you anywhere in terms of understanding the real world. This book is a hard slog, in part because so many paragraphs are digressions to address various biologists who disagree with Dawkins. There were a couple of points that are eye-openers (why are cicada cycle years prime numbers?), but I'm not sure those alone make it worth the effort...
Why the ridiculously small type? February 29, 2008
I was impressed with Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and this book is the logical followup. It is more complicated and therefore more difficult to comprehend than the former. So that makes the very small type all the more annoying -- it adds to the difficulty. Seriously, the type size is among the smallest I have seen in any modern mass produced book.
Anyone know if any of the earlier editions have larger type?
Good info August 23, 2007
Beware that this book is a lot more technical than the Selfish Gene, although Dawkins writes it in a similar fashion and includes a glossary for the tricky terms.
I did find it more repetitive than I was expecting as Dawkins really strives to drive the point home, but as a whole it's still a great book.
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