Contentious genes : a commentary on

In the preface to The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins tells us that 'three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing': the layman, the student, and the expert. I recently asked Dawkins how he had fared with each of his target readers. Lay readers, he believes, 'have been moderately enthusiastic, but have quite often misunderstood' the book. Students have received it very favourably. But the response of the expert, 'which is the one I 'm most interested in', came as something of a surprise. Dawkins thought his colleagues would agree that 'the gene' is ' the level at which selection operates' and did not expect to find himself debating 'individual selectionists', nor did he anticipate that the metaphor of a volitional gene would stick in so many throats. The writing style of The Selfish Gene is popular to the point of cutenessDawkins now finds himself 'positively embarrassed when students parrot the quaint anthropomorphic way of speaking ' -but this probably has not greatly influenced expert response. Scientific reviewers who like the contents call the style 'superbly readable'. Those who do not substitute 'gushing'. The popular style is by no means inconsequential, however. Favourable reviews in such periodicals as the New Yorker, the Economist, and the New York Times Review o f Books, as well as the hundreds of letters that the author has received, attest to Dawkins's success with the public. Students truly enjoy the book. Text-book publishers, please take note. Without irrelevant photographs, coloured type-faces or any other pandering to the alleged minimal attention spans of a television-reared generation, indeed without a single illustration or subdivision beyond his eleven chapters, Dawkins has written a book which students (according to my informal survey of instructors in biology, psychology and anthropology) are almost unanimous in praising. It is of course precisely because of Dawkins's success with his lay and student readers that expert opinion becomes important. What exactly has he popularized and has he got it right? It must first be remarked that Dawkins is more interested in explaining theory than in presenting evidence. Sometimes this seems particularly