The Selfish Gene

“I really picked this book because for me, and I think for lots of people, it was an entry point into thinking about applying evolutionary principles to human behaviour. In a very user-friendly way, it gives you some of the basic tools you can use to start thinking about it…The book was synthesising a bunch of ideas that had been developed by a variety of researchers, in particular William Hamilton and Robert Trivers, on how we can think about evolutionary processes to explain things like cooperation and altruism, which has been a long-running puzzle. It lays out a particular way of thinking where you think about genes from the genes’ eye view. You think about what is good for the gene, and that allows you to solve a bunch of puzzles about altruism, about why people would help those who have copies of those same genes…I put it on the list because it was inspirational to me, though I like to think we now have an enriched way of looking at things that goes beyond what we did in the 70s. “ Read more...

The best books on Cultural Evolution

Joe Henrich, Biologist

“This is really extremely famous and I think rightly so – The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins: I love that book. When you look at theories in physics, they are really phrased very precisely with mathematical formulae, and if you are trying to make a prediction of a physical system you can do this extremely well with very high precision…However, when you look at more complicated things like biology and you want to say: well, can I look at a species and say what’s going to happen in terms of evolution in 10,000 years, then of course it’s very difficult, and I don’t think anyone has a clue how to make this more mathematical. But the first time I saw how far you can go, and I was really surprised, was with The Selfish Gene…Dawkins’s book was the first time that someone tried to make the theory very mathematical, and explain it fully, and tried to make predictions based on it.” Read more...

The best books on Quantum Theory

Vlatko Vedral, Physicist