In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, something radically new began to linger in the air: new ways of understanding natural systems, new ways of thinking that challenge many of our basic assumptions. The biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, materials chemistry: all are vital topics related to what it means to be human. For the first time, we had both the tools and the will to engage in the scientific study of human nature.

No one stood out, influenced, or was more important to the revolution in scientific thought than the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who, forty years ago, with the publication of his book The Selfish Gene, changed our perception of our place in Nature.

Dawkins is a man of ideas, those significant ideas that truly influence and change people's lives—transforming the way other scientists think as well, pushing them to think in a different, constructive way.

If you have not read The Selfish Gene, do it now. And if you once did, read it again now. It is the book you will be reading throughout the 21st century.

In English, the book was first published in 1976 and republished in 1989; its thirtieth anniversary edition was released in 2006, while the fortieth anniversary edition was published in June 2016 by Oxford University Press. The 40th anniversary edition includes a new Epilogue, while the Greek version has undergone new and extensive editing.