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In 1976, Richard Dawkins, then a 35-year-old Oxford lecturer in animal behaviour, published his first book, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press). Distilling a body of recent population-genetics research — notably that of W. D. Hamilton — it argued that genes, not organisms, were the targets of natural selection. An organism, Dawkins wrote, was simply a gene's way of replicating itself.
The book was a surprise best-seller. Along with E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1975), it helped to spark a new nature–nurture debate that pitted sociobiologists against socialist biologists. Notable among the latter were the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the population geneticist Richard Lewontin, who accused the sociobiologists of rationalizing social evils such as racism and infidelity as genetically hard-wired, evolutionarily programmed. Yet Dawkins's fiercely reductionist, materialist world view exuded a transgressive sexiness, and his suave, swaggering prose appealed to many readers, lay and professional.
Dawkins's greatest gift has been as a lyricist. With terms such as selfish genes, memes and the extended phenotype, he has provided much of the vocabulary of modern evolutionary biology...