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The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976. It builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's first book Adaptation and Natural Selection. Dawkins coined the term selfish gene as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes. An organism is expected to evolve to maximize its inclusive fitness—the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy. The book also coins the term meme for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human culture, in a different sense. Memetics has become the subject of many studies since the publication of the book.
This item contains the following content
1] The audiobook as 60 MP3 files
2] The PDF of the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene
3] The book as a single Microsoft Word file, as well as the 60 individual Microsoft Word files that correspond to the audiobook files
Note: this book is read by a synthesized voice (AT&T Mike); however, I am a very experienced audio book listener and I have created the MP3 files as well as all of the Microsoft Word source files. I used textspeaker 2.0, converted the Word files to WAV files and then converted them to MP3. After much testing I have determined that this permits a much better quality than simply allowing textspeaker to convert the files directly to MP3. I have created the Microsoft Word files (and therefore the audio files) with some care by placing periods after all titles and sections for natural pauses, as well as the elimination of the title contents pages and any citations that would not normally be found in an audio book, and I have included footnotes that would generally be included within an audiobook. In case you are interested it took approximately half as long, perhaps more, to create this audiobook as it would have taken to simply read the book, but I was hoping to share my work with a larger community as well as to enable myself to listen to the book again at a later date. Often there are many times I listen to audio books and then wish to search for or relisten to a particular item and the inclusion of the PDF as well as the Word file should enable you to search for content electronically which then makes searching for that portion of the audio book considerably more easy.
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