, Richard Dawkins introduces natural selection at the somewhat (you'll have to read the book to understand just how "some" and "what") gene level, and he shows it to be a powerful model for understanding life.Until now, I have thought of natural selection as occurring at the organism level. But I now believe this to be erroneous; organisms are but machines used by genes to propagate themselves. Self-aware machines present a principal-agent problem, with interests between genes and human beings, for example, not always being aligned.
Dawkins takes the reader on a tour through a number of topics, such as reciprocity, gender preferences and age differences and applies this model to explain various occurrences in nature. By the middle of the book, I found that I was able to apply his model before reading his explanation, as it is intuitive and easy to understand.
He makes his case using a great number of fascinating examples from the animal (and sometimes plant) kingdom, ensuring the reader is never bored.
My chief quibble with the book is that Dawkins sounds a little bit too sure about some things that we probably can't be sure about.
I highly recommend The Selfish Gene
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