The Selfish Gene
Dawkins reframed evolution from the perspective of the gene (not organism, not species) and coined the word "meme." Even readers who dispute his conclusions about altruism and consciousness find their thinking permanently altered by the gene's-eye view of life. The most important popular science book since Darwin.
Critics say the title itself has spent fifty years being misread, that the shorthand “denatures the meaningful and well-established central concept of genetics” and that “too many people read it by title only.” The tone strikes readers as “contemptuous of the reader,” Dawkins “comes off as thinking a great deal of himself.” The middle stretch of kin-selection and game-theory math is the slog after the breezy opening. And the 1976 science is “almost out of date” on how genes actually get expressed and regulated. A harsher verdict holds that he “invented the word meme and basically nothing else,” and readers increasingly hear his combative public persona in the authorial voice.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
