From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.
Matt Ridley, Nature
Review from previous edition The sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius.
New York Times
This book should be read, can be read, by almost everyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution. W.D. Hamilton, Science
Learned, witty and very well written...Exhilaratingly good. Peter Medawar in The Spectator
The exciting theories and their wide implications are explaned with clarity, wit and enthusiasm.
Peter Parker, Sunday Times
Dawkins demonstrates that complex, theoretical or mathematical ideas can be expressed rigorously, in plain English. The book remains an excellent way for those who have not been trained in evolution to understand modern arguments.
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
A splendid example of how difficult scientific ideas can be explained by someone who understands them and is willing to take the trouble. The New Yorker
the reader will come away with a clear understanding of kin selection, evolutionary stable strategies, and similar staples of the literature on evolutionary theories of animal behaviour. This is a considerable achievement.'
Times Higher Education Supplement
Buy this book, read it and recommend it to your students...There is still nothing else quite like it. Not only are the new chapters and endnotes worthy additions to the original, but the 1976 text comes up as fresh as a primrose and, in its way, nearly as perfect.
Animal Behaviour
What is so refreshing about Dawkins is that he has confidence in the scientific method, in the testing of beliefs to destruction, no matter how cherished they may be.
Benjamin Woolley, The Listener
'Scientists give every appearance of being addicts, and science is their vice. That is one reason why progress in science is so rapid. I for one have benefited a great deal from Dawkins's addiction.'
David L. Hull, Nature
'It's a classic that's still relevant today.'
Daily Express
Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene, was a smash hit... Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology - some of it truly subtle - in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.)
H. Allen Orr, New York Review of Books
The Selfish Gene is a classic.
Robin McKie, The Observer
A genuine cultural landmark of our time.
The Independent
Review from previous edition The sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius.
New York Times
A splendid edition with a new introduction as well as (importantly) the introductions to the previous editions.
Jonathan Cowie, Concatenation