A fantastic survey of evolutionary biology. It reminds me a bit like reading a math book: it starts off with axioms and definitions (replicators) and then follows through chains of reasoning to arrive at novel explanations of biological phenomena (kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, reciprocal altruism), although of course unlike mathematics Dawkins’s claims are backed also by experiment, not just argument.
Much of what Dawkins presents is not original to him, but his synthesis of extant work by recasting it in the framework of the selfish gene is a contribution that I think has merit outside of popularization. It seems like the gene-centric view of evolution is a strong unifying force for the field, though apparently the debate regarding group selection, which Dawkins vehemently argues against, is not yet dead.
The novel chapter on memes is suggestive, but I am highly doubtful whether expanding the idea of replicators to culture has much purchase. Culture just seems much too complicated to reduce it into a complex of memes. Among other problems, the answers that Dawkins provides to thorny questions regarding biological replicators (e.g. what counts as a gene? what is fitness?) doesn’t seem to extend well to analogous questions regarding cultural replicators. Sure, “Auld Lang Syne” seems to be a decent example of replicators with copying errors. At least parts of it (a prefix of melody) can be robustly replicated. But what is fitness regarding songs? Just asking everyone on Earth whether they know its melody seems much too crude to measure fitness of the “Auld Lang Syne” meme. Problems like these are even more pervasive for more abstract “memes,” like love or justice, which does not seem to be discrete enough to count as a replicator but obviously is an enormous part of the culture.
But I don’t find this too much of a knock against this wonderful book. Dawkins elaborates his theory of replicators to its logical conclusion with the introduction of memes: even if memes aren’t all that useful in discussing culture it is a testament to him that he was clear-eyed enough to see what his ideas truly entailed.