University of Oxford

Oxford University is both the institutional setting of Richard Dawkins’s early career and the place where he developed the argument that became The Selfish Gene. The book associates it with his training in ethology, the interruptions that began the project, and the later editorial choice to preserve the first edition while extending it with new material.

Academic setting and intellectual influences

Dawkins describes himself as an ethologist and says that his approach was shaped by the tradition in which he trained. At Oxford University he worked under Niko Tinbergen for twelve years; he acknowledges Tinbergen’s deep influence on him, while noting that the phrase “survival machine” was not actually Tinbergen’s. The book’s argument also draws on evolutionary ideas developed by G. C. Williams, John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, and R. L. Trivers, bringing newer theoretical approaches into Dawkins’s account of animal behaviour.

The book’s beginnings

Dawkins began writing The Selfish Gene in 1972, when power cuts caused by industrial strife interrupted his laboratory research at Oxford University. The blackouts ended after he had written only two chapters, and he shelved the project. He returned to it during sabbatical leave in 1975, by which time the theory had been extended, notably through work by John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers. Dawkins recalls writing in a fever of excitement, presenting the book’s origin as a convergence of interrupted research, renewed time for writing, and ideas then emerging in the field.

Oxford University Press and the second edition

When Oxford University Press approached Dawkins about a second edition, it rejected the idea of a conventional, comprehensive revision page by page. The first edition, in Dawkins’s view, carried the youthful atmosphere of the period in which it had been written. Rather than revise that text by adding facts and qualifications, the plan was to leave it standing, including its flaws and sexist pronouns, and use endnotes for corrections, responses, and developments.

The second edition instead gained two entirely new chapters, intended to carry forward the earlier book’s sense of intellectual discovery through topics that had become newly important. Dawkins drew inspiration from Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation and from his own The Extended Phenotype. Oxford University Press therefore appears not only as the publisher but as an influence on the book’s form: its editorial decision preserved the original work’s historical character while making room for subsequent developments.

Acknowledgment and institutional context

Dawkins identifies himself as a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of Mew College. The preface also thanks Michael Rodgers of Oxford University Press for criticizing the manuscript and overseeing many aspects of its production. Together, these references place the book within an academic and publishing network, while the narrative of its composition locates its initial writing and training in Oxford.