As I spend a lot of time in the gym (honestly) I have decided to use that a little more productively and listen to decent non-fiction audio books – and I have just finished listening to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.
I quite enjoyed the book (or the recording) in the end – certainly added to my knowledge of genetics (not that that would be tough) and made a convincing case for its central argument: that genes the fundamental replicators of the biological world and it is their ‘drive’ to selfish self-preservation that shapes so much of our world. In fact my biggest criticism of the book is the way it anthropomorphises genes – a weakness reflected in the title itself. Genes are not selfish really – they are molecules that, statistically, interact with other molecules in a way that ensures their molecular formation survives. The book’s unwillingness to discuss anything but the most minimal amount of maths means Dawkins refuses to discuss that perspective in anything but the briefest of terms.
I also found his explanation of intelligence unconvincing, but this is a tricky and exceptionally difficult subject and I don’t have an original idea to counter Dawkins with.
And, of course, there is no discuss of the chemical processes that allow these proteins to shape their ‘machines’ or their phenotypes generally.
But, yes, it’s worth reading or listening to.
Next up? Andrew Hodges‘s Alan Turing: The Enigma. This, at 30 hours, is almost twice as long as Dawkins’s book, so suspect will be listening to this into August (unless I go mad for the gym) – will be interesting to see how, if at all, the maths are dealt with.
Related articles
- The trouble with “The Selfish Gene” (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
- Turing was defiant until death (bbc.co.uk)
- The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins to write his memoirs (telegraph.co.uk)
I decided that the idea – of listening to a book while pounding away on the exercise equipment at the gym – is a good one and I would pick another book, but not a novel (it now seems lazy to listen to a novel but not to a non-fiction work).
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