The Smallest Units of Life Struggle Mindlessly to Survive.

One of the most basic principles of natural selection is that living things which successfully breed to pass on their survival advantages will begin to outnumber other things that don't—(unless those other things come up with different survival advantages). This leads to survival of a species. Many people eagerly embrace this idea. But over a hundred years after Darwin, Dawkins asks the question, "at what level of life does this push survival push originate?" In 1976, when this book is published, the question is reasonable because scientists are able to see and study tiny life forms that Darwin never could have seen and because they are able to understand DNA.

Richard Dawkins believes the survival mechanism starts at the smallest units of life that can pass on traits, or at the gene level. This seems to make sense because...