Book Review – The Selfish Gene
It would be unfair to say that I randomly thought about doing a book-review on a blog that has gone close dormant and is not very far from extinction without any specific motivation. It is motivated by the awesomeness that ‘The Age of Seth’ was and it raised the feeling of impotency which often overpowers me when it comes to expressing myself with the written word. It is precisely the reason why I try and avoid reading something new by Gulzar, and by ‘new’ I do not mean something Gulzar has created in the recent past but something that is ‘new’ to me, and as to why I have not used a more conventional term like ‘fresh’ or ‘previously-unheard’, that could be a discussion over drinks and not the content of a blogpost.
The next logical thing, if you have an idea about instructional design that in my opinion is a fancy term often used by people who want to methodize everything, would be to defend or explain the choice of the book, especially when The Selfish Gene is a book written about three and a half decades ago. The reason for this is an idea – if everyone in the world read this book, the world would be a better place. You may say I am a dreamer, but the plethora of fans and detractors that the book has would prove that I am not the only one.
The book has a radically new way of looking at evolution. At least it is a radically new way for those of us who did not study biology beyond the compulsory class 10th. As to what we have studied or rather what we remember, evolution works towards protecting the species and it is the fittest species that survives. As per Mr. Richard Dawkins it is not the case. He believes and during the course of 300-odd pages tries to convince the draw – it is not the case. He gives numerous examples and encourages the reader to understand the conclusions that he has drawn rather than the “Survival of the fittest” phrasemonger biology teacher that we had.
Dawkins proposes the idea of a ‘replicator’ gene and then the imperfections that can and most certainly do appear because of the sheer large number of genes. In these imperfections, the once who are ‘selfish’ enough survive and the others perish. Eventually these ‘selfish’ genes are the ones that replicate and become, for the lack of a better word, the MotherLoad. A simple and crude application of this idea would be – assume a plane crashes in the Alps. Also assume that there are few survivors and they do not have anything to eat. Eventually some of them would start killing each other to eat and some of them would be too sensitive to do so. The selfish ones will survive and breed whereas the sensitive ones will be wiped out. Okay! Okay! I understand that this is a very morose and far-too-much-generalisation sort of an example. Well, that is the reason that you should read the book.
The above example is based on a discussion that I had with a friend at lunch and you would be surprised to know that it is not too far from the truth. And for the interweb kids – the word ‘meme’ was first used in this book.