The New Scientist Book Club read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in June The New Scientist Book Club has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. I hadn’t previously read this one – it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did.