The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Published 1976 · 544 pages · 117,527 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Science & Nature

How hard is The Selfish Gene to read?

The Selfish Gene scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
Biological terminology—alleles, phenotypes, ESS—explained but essential. Dawkins coins new terms freely.
Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
Gene-level evolutionary theory requires thinking at high abstraction. Concrete examples ground the argument.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Dense with biological concepts, thought experiments, and evolutionary logic. Every chapter builds on previous ones.
Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
Direct, linear argument. Dawkins tells you what he'll argue, argues it, then tells you what he argued.
Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
The 'selfish gene' metaphor is powerful but functional. Scientific argumentation rather than literary symbolism.
Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
Dawkins's polemical style includes wit and occasional sarcasm, but the argument is sincere.
Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
Each chapter resolves its argument. The thesis is stated upfront and defended throughout.
Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
Sequential chapters building a cumulative case. Some chapters can stand alone, but the argument is linear.

How The Selfish Gene is regarded

The Selfish Gene holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Selfish Gene sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (202 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Selfish Gene scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
Symbol: Literal and Descriptive (Mythical secondary)
A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iii (irony iii)
Unlike both of them, I think 'nature red in tooth and claw' sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them.

Scenes in The Selfish Gene that Frye would name

24 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, 1. Why are people?
Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. Darwin's discovery is framed as the great recognition that reorients the whole story of life.
Sparagmos, 1. Why are people?
If the female gets the chance, she will eat him, beginning by biting his head off, either as the male is approaching The mantis's ritual dismemberment of the male is the book's first scene of bodily tearing-apart.
Sparagmos, 8. Battle of the generations
he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death: dead brothers do not compete for food! The honey-guide nestling's slaughter of its nest-mates, with the cuckoo's egg-tossing close by.
Displacement, 2. The replicators
In the beginning was simplicity. A Genesis-style creation myth shows through the scientific origin story.
Alazon, 4. The gene machine
The angler is telling a lie, exploiting the little fish's tendency to approach wriggling worm-like objects. The angler fish, along with the Photuris fireflies and the bee orchids, is an impostor luring victims.
Displacement, 2. The replicators
Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world Replicators are cast as ancient beings who gave up 'cavalier freedom' and went into giant robots, a mythic fall narrative.

Books that share these scenes with The Selfish Gene

About the author

Richard Dawkins