In the 1960s and 1970s, something radically new began to permeate the air: new ways of understanding natural systems, new ways of thinking that challenge many of our fundamental assumptions. The biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, material 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 tackle the scientific study of human nature.

No one distinguished themselves, influenced, and was more important to the revolution of scientific thought than the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who, 40 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, pushing them to think in a different, constructive way.
If you haven't read "The Selfish Gene," do it now. And if you had done it once, 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 reissued in 1989; its 30th-anniversary edition was released in 2006, while the 40th-anniversary edition was published in June 2016 by Oxford University Press. The 40th-anniversary edition includes a new Epilogue, while the Greek version has received new and extensive editing.