The Cooperative Gene: How Mendel's Demon Explains the Evolution of Complex Beings 1st Edition

Science books need to be clearly written and set out a compelling argument. This book, of which the title is actually misleading and clearly only adopted in order to seem like a rebuttal of a far better book (Dawkins' The Selfish Gene), is neither well written nor does it contain a compelling argument. Instead we get a mélange of half-digested concepts, many of which have already fallen by the wayside, presented poorly and leading to a distinctly under-compelling conclusion.

In short, this isn't worth your time.

The title of this book is clearly a reference to Richard Dawkins' famous "The Selfish Gene." One of the most amazing develpments in evolutionary and developmental biology in the past couple of decades is that evolution is just as much about cooperation as it is about competition. In particular, several authors, including Maynard Smith and Szathmary, Michod, and Keller (see his Princton U Press collection) have analyzed the development of multicellular organisms in a conflict/cooperation framework. The result is quite unfavorable to Dawkins' approach.
This book mentions the problem, but disposes of it so rapidly that virtually nothing of interest can possibly get through to the reader. Rather, this book is about the problem of replication error in copying dna. Ridley argues that the level of complexity of organisms is limited by their ability to sustain highly accurate copying, and that humans are about at the limit of this ability.
This is a interesting argument, but to my mind it isn't earth-shattering and it doesn't require a whole book to tell. Of course, you will learn a lot of biology in the telling (if you didn't know it already), and Ridley is a very good writer.
Ridley flirts with eugenics in the policy section of the book, lamenting that modern wealth, technology, and medicine allows lots of defective genes to proliferate in society, but he does not recommend doing anything about it---such as forcing people to abort imperfect fetuses. He argues that cloning shouldn't replace sexual reproduction because, whatever the value of sexual reproduction (Ridley is agnostic, but favor Kondrashov's model), it's clearly valuable. But we don't need a book or copying accuracy of dna to tell us that.
In sum, nothing monumental here, but very nice if you want to learn a little about how modern biologists think, and what they think about.

Ridley's book is a rare combination : a popular book by a professional biologist with novel, important and well-founded ideas. Unfortunately he does not quite succeed in convincing me, even though I started out with a similar outlook. But there's a lot to enjoy, admire and learn from nevertheless: Ridley knows his stuff, has a lively and amusing style, and thinks clearly.
His central idea is that sexual reproduction allows the evolution of much larger genomes, encoding much more complex organisms, than asexual reproduction, because it allows Darwinian evolution to continue even when the single-base copying error rate is much larger than the reciprocal of the genome length. Evolution is thought to be possible if organisms reproduce only asexually if they copy the nucleotide bases comprising their DNA with an error rate less than the reciprocal of the DNA length - a result which was first clearly stated by Manfred Eigen. As Ridley explains, this is because mistakes will accumulate over many generations unless at least half the offspring have error-free DNA. There is an important, though probably quantitatively minor caveat: the mistakes must be deleterious (and the extent to which they are deleterious affects the error threshold above which Darwinian evolution fails). Obviously, this idea is not easy to convey, even though it makes intuitive sense, and unsurprisingly Ridley does not quite succeed in explaining it. But it's such an important idea, and Ridley does quite well, that I have to give him a high grade - an A-. I feel he could have shown one of Eigen's classic graphs, even if it would require some hand-holding.
He does not really address the dependence of this issue on the rate of environmental change, though he hints at it. In an unchanging environment, one expects the mutation rate to be minimized, perhaps to the level that is physically attainable. Indeed, prokaryotes seem to operate in this regime (possibly because they reproduce rapidly, so their environment appears to change slowly).
He then points out that complex organisms do not seem to conform to this theory, and he (correctly in my view) surmises that this is precisely why they are complex: they have astonishingly large genomes, and yet copy their DNA no more accurately than the asexually reproducing prokaryotes. He then suggests that complex organisms can do this (i.e. defy Eigen) because they reproduce sexually. Indeed, he argues that the life that is familiar to us, and in some ways "real life", is only possible because of sex. In a nut-shell, sex IS life! I think this idea is correct, but it is rather surprising, and Ridley does not quite convince.
It's well known (except fortunately by creationists) that it's very difficult to explain how sex persists despite its twofold cost. Ridley believes (again I think correctly) that there is a huge, outweighing, advantage to sex: it allows an apparently impossibly high mutation rate because it greatly increases the power of natural selection. In particular, he favors Kondrashov's idea that sex allows one to more efficiently remove deleterious mutations, because it brings them together in the same, sacrificial, offspring genome. To make this idea work, one has to assume that bad mutations interact synergistically, and one probably also has to assume that the environment is changing rapidly in time and/or space (an aspect that Ridley does not address well). Ridley mentions fleetingly Hamilton's parasite sex theory, and disappointingly doesn't explain why he does not like it, or why it is not just a special case of the Kondrashov theory (i.e. the environment changes rapidly because parasites rapidly co-evolve, a la Red Queen). I believe there is no clear consensus amongst biologists on these important issues, and Ridley does not quite convey the complexities and confusions of these debates - perhaps wisely. But nevertheless I wish he had tackled them more head-on.
The next part of the book is very good, and here he seems much more at home. In particular his account of the difficulty of preventing selfish genes from subverting the new opportunities offered by Mendelian sex is superb. But while fascinating this is not really the nub of the matter.
In summary, this is one of the best accounts anywhere of crucial aspects of Darwinian evolution that are often concealed by the experts (perhaps because they do not want to admit that the whole structure is surprisingly rickety). I believe that despite appearances the structure is indeed sound, but even this admirable book does not provide completely convincing evidence.

Read "Selfish Gene"? You have to read this book!