Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. In the epilogue to the latest edition of The Selfish Gene ( see my review here ), Richard Dawkins marvels at modern techniques in genomics, which can reveal the geographic and demographic traits of our ancestors. As an appropriate follow-up to that book, I decided to read Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived , which Mr. Dawkins himself apparently considers "stimulating" and "right". The title of the book seems to be inspired by A Short History of Nearly Everything , but that's just my hunch. Needless to say, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is not literally about everyone who every lived. Rather, it is about the history of the human species viewed through the lens of genetics (in combination with some archaeology, anthropology and so on). But in a sense it is  about every per...

Book Review: Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", Oxford University Press, 2016 (40th anniversary edition). If the name Richard Dawkins rings a bell, it might be because he is a prominent atheist and author of The God Delusion . But he is also a well-respected evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society. The book that launched him to fame, all the way back in 1976, was The Selfish Gene , which today can be bought in its 40th anniversary edition. It has been recommended as reading for aspiring rationalists, and following Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" I've been more keen on natural sciences. So, today I'll explain to you the hype behind The Selfish Gene . The first thing to address is the title, since it tends to confuse people. This is not a book about how people are selfish; it is a book about how genes  are "selfish" in the sense that they care only about increasing thei...