Two Boys From Oak Park And An Oxford Don

Brian and I are headed to East Lansing tonight to hear the great zoologist and author Richard Dawkins speak. I'm bringing one of his books with hopes of getting it signed and meeting the man who is a living legend in his field.

Professor Dawkins has recently retired from Oxford where he held the chair of "Professor for Public Understanding of Science", and he has degrees, awards, and bestsellers aplenty.

Richard became well-known in the scientific community for his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene", in which he proposed a new "gene-centered" view of the evolution of life, in which larger organisms such as animals are seen not as selection units but as "survival machines" built by genes for their preservation. In other words, he proposed that genes are the only "real" life on Earth, and everything made up by genes is incidental packaging assembled to further their survival.

When this idea was first proposed it was scandalous. It was generally thought that selection acted at the level of the organism, or even the group. Since 1976 though, the "gene's eye view" has been found to solve many problems in the field and is now the accepted perspective.

Dawkins later extended this idea to ideas themselves, which he calls "memes". Memes can compete, reproduce and evolve just like organisms, and he argued that they can be studied in much the same way.

We're excited that East Lansing is Richard's first stop in his trip across the pond this time!!!