Thirty Years of The Selfish Gene

I remember when I first discovered The Selfish Gene. I was browsing in a Barnes and Noble and it struck my eye. I sat down with it and started reading. A cute girl sat across from me and tried to strike up a conversation, but I was too engrossed to pay her much attention. A few hours later, and probably two-thirds of the way through the book, I finally took a break. It grabbed me like no other science had before or since.

Thirty years after its original publication, an expanded version has come out. Additionally, there's a new book of essays about Richard Dawkins and his impact on science and society by various writers called Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think which looks very interesting. Here is a review which curiously starts with a fabricated story of the reviewer's introduction to The Selfish Gene, but picks up from there:

But one part of my pretentious fantasy is not exaggerated: the impact of the first sentences of The Selfish Gene. For those sentences embody Dawkins’s entire appeal: the deep thought, the stylish expression, and the sheer self-assurance that lets you know from the outset that you are in the hands of a master.

For this is no ordinary science book. Yes, it is about evolutionary biology, but its message, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, still resonates deeply after thirty years. It is a brilliant exposition of how natural selection works, laying out in clear and compelling detail, for both scientists and lay readers, the process that produced all of life’s diversity. Using the metaphor of genes as selfish entities, whose “motivation” is simply to copy themselves at the expense of other genes, Dawkins describes a tale of competition – of nature red in tooth and claw – but in which genes are the combatants, fighting their battles by co-opting the bodies of their carriers. It is nothing less than the story of what made us who we are.

About Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, he writes:

The collection includes twenty-four contributions from a variety of writers and scholars, including the novelist Philip Pullman, Richard Harries (Bishop of Oxford), the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the linguist Steven Pinker and the biologist John Krebs. Their essays cover not just exegesis of The Selfish Gene, but also Dawkins’s general contributions to biology and its philosophy. The section on Dawkins and religion, though tangential to The Selfish Gene, is well worth reading given his vehement hostility to theistic belief.

While such festschrifts are usually deadly dull, designed to flatter rather than enlighten, this is a delightful exception, containing a number of thought-provoking essays that go far beyond mere appreciation of Dawkins’s book. They are in fact essential in understanding the book’s influence. The simultaneous publication of both volumes allows us to re-examine the impact of The Selfish Gene. How well has it aged? Is it still important? And did Dawkins really change the way we think?

...

Straddling the boundary between popular science bestseller and scientific treatise, The Selfish Gene has infused all modern discourse on evolution and natural selection, by layman and scientist alike. This fact, combined with its incomparable prose style, makes the book a masterpiece. It is one of the two books on evolution I would recommend to anyone aspiring to be broadly educated (the other, of course, is Darwin’s Origin of Species).

The reviewer goes on to discuss Dawkin's idea of memetics, which despite it's popularity hasn't turned out to be exactly... true, and also to discuss some of the troubling implications of Dawkin's ideas about evolution and genetics:

And whatever the darker implications of his work, they are more than offset by the luminosity of his prose, and by his infectious awe before a natural process that created the stunning diversity of life. Philip Pullman sums it up in his wonderful essay on Dawkins’s writing:

He is a coiner of memorable phrases; he is a ferocious and implacable opponent of those who water the dark roots of superstition. But mainly he celebrates. He is a storyteller whose tale is true, and it’s a tale of the inexhaustible wonder of the physical world, and of ourselves and of our origins.