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:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“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)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)