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J Bioecon (2009) 11:9598
DOI 10.1007/s10818-008-9040-y
BOOK REVIEW
Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think: Reections by Scientists, Writers, and Philosophers
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, xiii + 283 pp. Cloth: $25.00, 12.99
Michael T. Ghiselin
Published online: 16 November 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2008
Beginning with The Selfish Gene in 1976, Richard Dawkins has produced a remarkably successful series of books on evolutionary topics. This volume celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of The Selfish Gene, with 25 brief contributions from Dawkinss friends, fans, sycophants and such. I count myself among his acquaintances. We were both Assistant Professors of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, for the academic years that began in 1967 and ended in 1969. At the time Dawkins was still a brilliant chicken psychologist and had not yet begun his remarkable forays into popular writing. I had already switched from sea-slug genital anatomy to sexual selection and the history and philosophy of Darwinism. During that time we had a few conversations, some of which dealt with philosophical topics, but we spent little time together and have not seen each other since he went back to Oxford.
One of the contributors, my old friend the philosopher Michael Ruse, suggests(p. 145) that apart from Darwin himself, the only man to have competed with Dawkins supreme brilliance as a popular writer about evolution was Stephen Jay Gould. It is hard to rank such luminaries, but if one is trying to come up with a short list of them, I would certainly want to include Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel. Huxleys prose was elegant and clear, although he did very little to explicate Darwins theory of natural selection. Haeckel was, if anything, even more adept than Dawkins at making statements that offend the sensibilities of lay persons and outrage professional scientists.
Dawkins always struck me as a very clever thinker, to the point that he often out-smarted himself. But for that very reason I have found his notions about selfish genes a stimulus for serious philosophical reection. When I reviewed his book The Blind
M. T. Ghiselin (B)
Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive, San...