The more I learn about the book world–the world of popular non-fiction, book reviews, title-dropping commentary piecesm and people who blog in reaction to all of the above–the more I suspect that all that really matters about a book is its title. Exhibit A: this Massimo Pigliucci post about a new philosophy of science book.

Massimo’s post spends a paragraph on how some scientists, including Dawkins, are wrong in how they think of genes, because genes get broken up by recombination. The other five paragraphs of the post are about how the “selfish gene” idea is wrong, but as a comment from the author of the book in question makes clear, the claim is not that Dawkins is wrong about anything in particular, just that it’s a misleading metaphor, able to mislead even very smart people who get that it’s a metaphor.

The discussion at Massimo’s contains a lot of the smarter things I’ve seen said about Dawkins’ first book, but it’s still weirdly superficial. The main part of the post contains no actual disagreement with Dawkins, and it’s not clear that the first paragraph does either: in the edition of The Selfish Gene that I read* Dawkins mentions the issue of recombination, and proposes defining a gene as a unit of genetic material small enough that the chances of it being broken up by recombination are generally negligible. Maybe the book being reviewed presents evidence that this chance is never negligible, but given how well traditional genetics has worked for the past century or so, I would be surprised if recombination of the smallest bits of genetic material turned out to be important outside special contexts.

This kind of “lets find something Dawkins can be wrong about” nitpicking is especially tiresome because there are much more interesting questions discussed in The Selfish Gene: Why do animals form dominance hierarchies? Why do lemmings make suicidal dashes into the sea? Why do peakcocks have such ridiculous tails? Dawkins takes some very sophisticated theoretical analysis of these questions, stuff that no other popular science writer will touch and that I’ve otherwise mainly heard discussed in 600-level biology courses, and makes it all sound super-simple. That’s the greatness of the book, not all the critics’ hallucinations about how Dawkins thinks genes are little demons secretly controling us. The title refers only to the fact that Dawkins takes a “what genes will get passed on?” approach to these questions, rather than a “what’s good for the species approach”–and most biologists realize he’s right on this point.

Why do are so many discussions of TSG so weird? Why are they incapable of discussing what the book is actually about? If the thesis of this post is right, it’s all about the title: the book is called “The Selfish Gene,” not “Of Peacocks and Pecking Orders.” Thus, all anyone can be expected to think about when they think of TSG is, well, the idea of a “selfish gene.”

You notice a similar pattern with Dawkins’ other books: the three most important things Dawkins says in The God Delusion are: (1) we can look at the question of God’s existence rationally (2) the most widely-used arguments for God’s existence don’t work (3) God’s existence is highly improbable because any being capable of creating something as complex as the universe would have to be even more complex than the universe it created. But most dicussions of TGD center around “Dawkins called God a delusion! What a big meanie!” Especially weird, given that Dawkins’ official explanation of why he calls God a delusion was a bit of a cop-out. Relatively speaking, it’s a mark of sophistication when someone seems to have heard once that Dawkins thinks sciene and religion are in conflict, even though this isn’t what his main argument against the existence of God says.

It says a lot that these are the two most famous Dawkins books, and they are the only two books in the Dawkins corpus that you can discuss while knowing nothing about the book except its title: “Is God a delusion? Discuss. Is the gene selfish? Discuss.” His next most famous book is probably The Blind Watchmaker, which can be discussed only knowing the title and the fact that it’s about how life on Earth came to be: “Is life on Earth the creation of a blind watchmaker? Discuss.” In contrast, to intelligently discuss The Extended Phenotype or The Ancestor’s Tale, you actually have to understand what the book is about. From this, we can count on Dawkins’ forth coming The Greatest Show on Earth (which isn’t about circus animals) to be a failure.

The idea behind this post isn’t original. A couple years ago, a book came out called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and though I haven’t read it,** from reading the reviews I think the point of the book was that the significance of a book isn’t what’s actually in the book, but what people say about it in places like book reviews. This isn’t really surprising. There will always be more people who’ve heard of a book than have actually read it, so a book’s importance will be determined by what people who’ve heard of it think, not by what people who’ve read it think.

But the problem may or may not go beyond what How To Talk About Books highlights, because the problem isn’t just with ordinary people who’ve only heard of a book, the problem is with the ordinary people’s sources of information: the reviewers, the pundits, the public intellectuals, who’ve supposedly read the book. Even they seem frequently incapable of getting beyond the book’s title. Probably, this is because many of these people aren’t reading the books: for evidence, see Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer, this confession posted at The American Scene, or the anecdote about a journalist who was asked “have you read it?” and relplied “let me put it this way: I reviewed it.” This shouldn’t shock us as much as it does: for an amature like me writing is a calling, but for a professional it’s a job, and they’re going to be as ready to bullshit their way through a book review as I am* to bullshit my way through a boring assignment in a 200-level class.

Of course, there are other explanations: maybe commentators care about quality work, but don’t have the skills to understand a book beyond its title, or they don’t understand how important accuracy is to producing quality work, so they don’t put in the effort on that point. I kinda like those explanations, because, as opposed to the overworked book reviewer hypothesis, those are things you can rail against and maybe correct. But does anyone else have better thoughts on solving this problem?

*Though this was the 30th anniversary edition, which I know contained at least one major edit refining Dawkins’ views, namely about costly signaling.
**Yes Virginia, I did just guilt myself into putting it on my to-read list.
***Was, actually. Hooray for graduate school and never having to take another 200 level class ever again. Except, maybe, for language courses. Damn you, grad school language requirements.