Re: Wistar Symposium "Mathematical Challenge to Neo-Darwinism".

On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 10:24:30 +0100, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 05/06/2024 12:37, Martin Harran wrote:

'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. A bit dated now and weak in
some areas like altruism but I have a soft spot for it as it was the
second-ever book I read on evolution (see below for my first book.)

>
The Dawkins' books that I'd recommend are "The Extended Phenotype"
(written for biologists, rather the general populace, but I found it
accessible, and covering somewhat of the same ground as "The Selfish
Gene"),

For some reason, "The Extended Phenotype" is one of the very few
Dawkins books that I never got around to reading but I'd take a bit of
convincing that someone with extensive knowledge of biology is a good
judge of how accessible it would be to those with less knowledge.

and "The Ancestor's Tale" (a Gould essay collection written by
Dawkins, with a unifying theme of consecutive sister groups to Homo
sapiens).

I started "The Ancestor's Tale" and initially thought it a great
approach but by about two thirds of the way through, I found it
becoming excruciatingly tedious and gave up on it.

>
The weakness I found in "The Selfish Gene" is that it confused the
individual/group selection dichotomy with the replicator/vehicle
dichotomy.

That's a good example of the sort of language that loses the general
populace :(

That's fixed in "The Extended Phenotype".