Why did I love this book?
When I read Richard Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype I knew I wanted to become an evolutionary biologist. The book is the most ambitious articulation of the gene’s-eye view (a work of ‘unabashed advocacy’, as Dawkins put it). Less famous that The Selfish Gene, it also includes responses to the criticisms that The Selfish Gene received, which also made debates in theoretical biology seem so exciting. In many ways, that excitement has never left me.
1 author picked The Extended Phenotype as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins crystallized the gene's eye view of evolution developed by W.D. Hamilton and others. The book provoked widespread and heated debate. Written in part as a response, The Extended Phenotype gave a deeper clarification of the central concept of the gene as the unit of selection; but it did much more besides. In it, Dawkins extended the gene's eye view to argue that the genes that sit within an organism have an
influence that reaches out beyond the visible traits in that body - the phenotype - to the wider environment, which can include other…