A paradigm shift

The idea enunciated by Dawkins in the book constituted what Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, called a paradigm shift: "natural selection acts at the gene and not at the level of the individual." This simple idea has weighed heavily in thought since it was set.
There is thus a milestone. Moreover, the book is quite readable and is sometimes quite funny.

However, it seems to me that the book suffers from an excess of determinism. Even if the theory proved 100% correct, it would still be less than a living organism governed by tens of thousands of gene would be difficult to reduce the sum of determinism acting on its genes. A system of three planets subjected to the simple determinism of gravity has an unpredictable path (this is the famous three-body problem). A fortiori, determinism acting on the genes are not able to express what living creatures.

It does nevertheless remains one of the few scientific books that an honest man of the XXI century should have read.