Re:Why books don't work (2019)
by radford-neal on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @12:20PM
(#24556372)
I'm not really up on the history of these ideas, but my impression is that The Selfish Gene was a contribution in the same sense that Einstein's paper on special relativity was a contribution. Neither really changed what one would predict the result of any experiment to be (the Lorentz transformation had already been produced before Einstein, by, err, Lorentz...), but rather in the perspective by which one views the field, which does affect future research.
It's not that it isn't serious. Pop science doesn't have to be BS. But it often risks conveying to readers that they have a better grounding than they actually have, which The Selfish Gene has also done. Pop science books are good ways to attract young readers to the sciences and to keep older readers engaged in it, but they are not in and of themselves contributions to the field.