Episode · People I (Mostly) Admire · 2024-08-03
Books mentioned on 137. Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos
The author of the classic The Selfish Gene is still changing the way we think about evolution. SOURCE:Richard Dawkins, professor emeritus of the public understanding of science at Oxford University.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a seminal science book that popularizes a gene-centric view of evolution and explores the biological origins of selfishness and altruism.
Discussed“I have to start with a confession before last week i' never read your book to selfish genene I have now and I was quite shocked at how eye openening the book was for me”
Where to get it
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The God Delusion
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is a prominent polemical work that argues against the existence of a creator deity and critiques the societal impacts of religion.
Discussed“this is in some sense a leading to talking to you and the reactions you've gotten when you've argued against religion in books like The God Delusion you have this enormous amount of research and you've done around natural selection”
Where to get it
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The Genetic Book of the Dead
The Genetic Book of the Dead is a science book by Richard Dawkins and Jana Lenzová that explores how animal bodies act as archives of evolutionary history encoded within DNA.
Discussed“you've got a new book and it's called the genetic Book of the Dead how would you describe it it's aimed at the same audience as the selfish Gene that's to say as we were talking about earlier”
Where to get it
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Flights of Fancy
Flights of Fancy is a science book by Richard Dawkins that examines the mechanics and evolutionary origins of flight in nature, featuring illustrations by Jana Lenova.
Discussed“yes the artwork is by Yana Lenova who is a Slovak artist and translator actually met her because she translated The God Delusion into Slovak and she illustrated my previous book Flights of Fancy which is about flight”
Where to get it
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Cuckoo
Cuckoo by Nick Davies is a scientific examination of the evolutionary strategies, behaviors, and ecological adaptations of cuckoo birds, drawing heavily on decades of ornithological fieldwork.
Recommended“by the way I'm deriving this mostly from the work of Nick Davis of Cambridge University whose book called cucko I strongly recommend it”
Where to get it
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The Blind Watchmaker
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is a seminal popular science book that argues for the power of natural selection in explaining biological complexity without the need for a conscious designer.
Discussed“in my third book The Blind watchmaker for example I devoted most of a chapter to bat echolocation sonar the navigation by bats using Echo”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (3) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“Richard Dawkins is both a distinguished scholar of zoology and evolutionary biology and a remarkably successful popularizer of scientific ideas through his bestselling books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.”
“Richard Dawkins is both a distinguished scholar of zoology and evolutionary biology and a remarkably successful popularizer of scientific ideas through his bestselling books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.”
“In 2017, the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's Academy of Sciences, conducted a public poll asking readers to name the most influential science book of all time. The winner was The Selfish Gene.”