Discover's 25 Greatest Science Books

I'd kick Dawkins out of here. While more recent stuff of his can (barely) pass, The Selfish Gene did more to miseducate people about evolution than any other book. Replace with Gould's "Structure".

I'd definitely drop Voyage of the Beagle well down the list - it's an interesting book but not one that revolutionizes science the way the rest of the top five or so do. I'll have to think about Principia versus Origin, though - the former invented both calculus and modern dynamics, but the latter is so fundamental to modern biology. Tough call.

Gould's rambling bloated opinionated pseudo-erudition? I think not.

>The Selfish Gene did more to miseducate people about evolution than any other book.

How so? Perhaps you are more talking about their misreadings of what Dawkins was saying?

> the former invented both calculus and modern dynamics

If by the former, you mean Principia, actually, no. If you read Principia there is no calculus (just geometry). While Newton had developed the calculus well before 1687, it was only in 1693 (after Leibniz had published in 1684) that he publicized the techniques.

Be sure to check out the introductory essay to that list, by Kary B. Mullis, the disproof to the claim that Nobel prizes are never awarded to the insane.

"Gould's rambling bloated opinionated pseudo-erudition?"

Rambling, bloated, and opinionated, yes. But he's authentically erudite. You're just being bitchy.

I don't see how Selfish Gene makes it anywhere near that high on the list either - if at all. It's surrounded by towering monuments. Beagle may not belong either, but it's the only one on the list that's fun to read.

I have little to add on the book rankings, but I came across this article from National Geographic and am hoping you'd comment on it. The article details the growth of lizard legs and states "supports a somewhat controversial idea in biology: Animals' behavior in response to environmental change can spur evolutionary adaptations."

Is this a misunderstanding of natural selection or is there a controversy?

The article can be found here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061116-lizard-evolution…

What's wrong with Selfish Gene?

I'm reading it currently, and I find it quite lucid. I haven't come upon anything that strays too far from current orthodox thinking as far as evolutionary biology is concerned.

Give me a "for instance". What in Selfish Gene is wrong? Cite a specific claim that Dawkins got wrong (A direct quote would be really helpful.)

Lumbering robots.

His biology is about 40 years out of date. Selfish Gene is so wonderfully written, further to hypnotize the readers into believing him. If it was not so beautifully written - and the guy really has a knack with language - it would be on the same level with Desmond Morris, and equally ignored.

His subsequent books, written after heavy criticisms by both philosophers and biologists, gradually gave way, a litle by little, but he cannot take the last step and finally abolish the "genes-eye" view as that would make him a Gouldian - something his career cannot survive, yet would actually bring him into 21st century biology. In this sense, he at least showed much more honesty and flexibility (he did change his ideas A LOT since Selfish Gene) than Dennett whose understanding of evolution is absolutely atrocious - I know a number of philosophers of science who refer to his book as "Dennett's Dangerous Idea"

On the other hand, he is right on with his writings on religion and should stick to that topic from now on.

This is 7 years out of date but it has a good list of references to use to counteract the Dawkins drug regarding biology.

I'm not trying to troll but most of these are deathly boring except for historical purposes.

Is anyone aware of a list of more readable science books?

Sorry, I haven't read the lumbering robots passage in Selfish Gene.

It just doesn't seem like a cogent criticism of the text. Have you read it recently? He doesn't say we're dumb survival machines. He doesn't say that the genes have primacy. He merely says that they're the smallest unit that natural selection can operate on.

I read that link looking for things Dawkins failed to address. Can you help me with finding the salient points? I'm saying this because I haven't found anything that he doesn't address.

That is, I don't find anything in the text of that link that contradict Dawkins, although I did find plenty that contradicts a straw-man, New York Times Review of Books summation of Selfish Gene.

Clarifying my "primacy" sentence.

What I mean is, yes, I do think he thinks that genes are the ultimate smallest grain that natural selection can act upon. And yes, it's a gene-centric view of the process.

But what I mean is that he doesn't advocate that we are merely the sum total of our genes, and that there's the simple-minded view that there's "a gene" for basketball prowess, and "a gene" for alcoholism.

As far as which genes get expressed based on the environment, well that's directly addressed in the book, Dawkins would agree wholeheartedly and does in the book. As far as development across a life-cycle, of course all of that is true, and not contradicted at all in Selfish Gene.

Okay, the cell is an environment, and yes, you get that from your momma. You also get your momma's mitocondria and your mitocondrial dna. None of that is in dispute. And yet none of that changes the fact that the gene is the smallest unit of heredity. My momma had only one boy. Half of her genes live on, but none of her "cell information" will make it past the bottleneck of my being male, despite the fact that I have successfully reproduced. It is being selected, but even after I reproduce, it cannot be inhereted. It's success only benefits my DNA, not my cells, not my mitocondria, not anything else about my body. Sure, everything about my body, my development, my mitocondria contributed to my survival, but none of it got passed down to my daugher. Just genes.

I agree that cell quality IS selected for. The development process and enviroment are all factors. That's what natural selection IS! Nobody would discount any of that.

Read some Susan Oyama, Steven Rose, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Robert Brandon and Richard Lewontin books/papers for a more detailed (and more direct) critique of Dawkins. I have read Selfish Gene about 15 years ago and almost fell for it due to beautiful language. Since then, I have read some other Dawkins as well as a lot of philosophy of evolutionary biology and I doubt that re-reading SG is going to make me like it better - I would probably have an easier time today detecting errors as soon as I see them on the page.

I think that Selfish Gene was widely misread 30 years ago. The wikipedia entry on Selfish Gene doesn't include any criticism that is strong enough to encourage the dismissal of the book that you seem to imply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

If it really "did more to miseducate people about evolution than any other book", the errors should be blatant and apparant. I'd really like to know where it's so spectacularly wrong. Just give me a concept. I'm really not likely to journey to my local university library based on your list of names. I'm sorry, but that's just reality, I have a life.

Just please articulate for me what's so spectacularly wrong about it that it's the Da Vinci Code of evolution books.

Rose and Lewontin's critiques of SG were part of their larger critique of what they perceived (wrongly) to be Dawkins' uber-reductionism. This also lead them to write some very dumb (and politically inspired) things about sociobiology.

It takes a booklength discource, which others have done better than I can, so that is why I suggested those authors. Rose's "Lifelines" is a direct and correct response to the Dawkins' and Dennett's politically and ideologically motivated attacks as well as to their genocentric, uber-reductionist biology.

This is a short, readable book with a good understanding of evolution. Reading it in sync with The Selfish Gene and noticing the contrasts in the way of thinking can be very edifying.

Thanks for that link, coturnix. Maybe it's because I've been reading more and more evolutionary biology books, but I really don't have a naiive uber genocentrism as my worldview. I'm coming at this book with at least a layperson's general awareness of the overarching world of evo-devo. I understand at least some of the distinction between genotype and phenotype, and what gets expressed when and why. I understand the concept of geneplexes, I grasp cooption. I know Dawkins specifically asserts internal selection, not just external selection, that's fresh in my mind because I learned it from reading Selfish Gene.

I don't assume that Dawkins is writing the whole story of evolution in Selfish Gene. But neither do I think that he has overstepped what he is arguing for. Because he doesn't illuminate certain biological concepts, I do not take that as his assertion that they are meaningless, or that an organism-centered view isn't worthwhile as well.

Selfish Gene is mainly arguing against certain naiive models of group selection or species selection, at least to my understanding and at the place I currently am, about 2/3rds of the way into the book.

Meanwhile, he fiercely and powerfully illuminates the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, which is probably the most powerful explanitory filter I've ever come upon for understanding biology.

From that link, there was this quote:

As Robert Brandon famously stated, genes are invisible to selection. Yet, population genetics assumes that the genes are visible to selection. How? Via phenotypes. But that is an oversimplified notion that a mutation in one gene predictably leads always to the same change in the phenotype. This one-gene one-trait view is sometimes called "bean-bag genetics".

I'm not sure who actually advocates that position, but it sure isn't Dawkins in Selfish Gene. It might be USA Today's headline writers when they find a "gay gene", but it's not Dawkins.

Evolution is best described I think as the change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool of an organism. In this case, this sentence from the above link is straw: "But that is an oversimplified notion that a mutation in one gene predictably leads always to the same change in the phenotype."

The Selfish Gene hypothesis doesn't remotely state that. It only states that those things that get expressed in the phenotype (extended or simple) can be acted upon by natural selection, increasing or decreasing their frequency in the gene pool. It does not need to be expressed in every individual organism to be acted upon by natural selection. If there are 5000 rhinos, and they all have allele Foo32, but it only gets expressed in one individual, natural selection reserves the right to act upon that individual and decrease or increase the frequency of that allele in the rhino genepool.