The Selfish Gene

Recommended in Lex Fridman Podcast #333 alongside The Vital Question and Life Ascending as the books that shaped his thinking on biology, altruism, and selection.

“Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature.”

Munger praised it for showing how bottom-up selection pressure produces emergent cooperation—a mental model he applied directly to incentive design in organizations.

Tweet from December 2020 simply naming 'The Selfish Gene' in answer to a question about what he was reading.

“A Crucial book on our origins and our natures”

Szabo recommended this in a tweet.

“I found I had already heard many of the ideas in this book”

The page cites Brian Armstrong's Medium reading-list post.

“From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.”

The page cites Matt Ridley's rationaloptimist.com blog post on The Selfish Gene.

Deutsch draws on Dawkins's replicator and meme ideas in his own theory of knowledge.

Macrohistory selection grounding social and cultural evolution in selection at the level of genes and memes.

Listed in the 'Science, Philosophy, Evolution, History of Human Civilization' section of Li Lu's published Recommended Book List (Himalaya Capital, May 2020).

“On the non-fiction side, Richard Dawkin's 'The Selfish Gene' was one book that I think is pretty influential.”

From Slashdot's October 2012 reader Q&A; this is the single non-fiction title he named, while adding that he can't think of a book that was truly 'life-changing' for him.