Reception
The book was extremely popular when first published, caused "a silent and almost immediate revolution in biology", and continues to be widely read. It has sold over a million copies, and has been translated into more than 25 languages.
Proponents argue that the central point, that the gene is the unit of selection, usefully completes and extends the explanation of evolution given by Charles Darwin before the basic mechanisms of genetics were understood. Critics argue that it oversimplifies the relationship between genes and the organism. Mathematical biologists' initial relationship with the ideas in the book was, according to Alan Grafen, "at best difficult" due to what Grafen postulates is a reliance solely on Mendelian genetics by these biologists.
In 1976, Arthur Cain, one of Dawkins's tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, called it a "young man’s book" (which Dawkins points out was a deliberate quote of a commentator on A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic); Dawkins later noted he had been "flattered by the comparison, knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and could hardly miss Cain’s pointed implication that should, in the fullness of time, do the same."
Read more about this topic: The Selfish Gene
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)