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Book Review: The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins

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Book Review: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Marx Wang After reading this book review, I hope you can get a sense of what are the topics of biology that Richard Dawkins discusses through his witty wordings and specific examples in nature. However, before I start talking about the content of this book, I want to confess that I am a guy who is more involved in humanities and social science. The reason that I think it is necessary to mention this point is first, I believe that no matter what your interests are, you can at least learn something and gain some insights through reading this book. As for the other intention of mentioning my interests, this book talks about the idea of “selfish” from a perspective that is kind of different from …show more content…

The fact is that animals in nature are not recklessly breeding offspring all the time. There is this idea of family planning. A wise gene will definitely consider letting the survival machine that it dwells to healthily survive and sustain its function, and further pass the gene to the offspring. Family planning contains similar senses. If there are excessively large amounts of offspring, the parents’ limited energy and the potential lack of food will lead to the early deaths of most of the offspring. As a result, that is why hunger and other factors that lead to deaths are the reasons for the impossibility of endless growth and development. If the species can adjust its birth rate, there will be fewer cases of hunger and deaths. It makes more sense if one knows the birth control policy in China in the past. At the early stages of the country, people tend to bear as many children as they can; yet the following hunger becomes a huge burden to most of the families, especially those in poorer areas. For the sake of increasing productivity and feeding more children, the government later comes up with the decision of family planning. It is beneficial for the fast developing stage of China, because when there are fewer people who share the limited amount of food, there will be more who can be well-fed and contribute completely to

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