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  • Book Review
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Genes get diabolical

Nature Genetics volume 39, page 577 (2007)Cite this article

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Genes in Conflict: the Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements

  • Austin Burt &
  • Robert Trivers
Harvard University Press, 2006 632 pp., hardcover, $35 978-0674017139 | ISBN: 978-0-67401-713-9

It has been nearly three decades since Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene popularized the notion that genes could act in their own self-interest, sometimes at huge cost to the organism encoding them. Now, in a meticulously assembled, thought-provoking and sometimes deliciously speculative textbook, Burt and Trivers' Genes in Conflict documents the selfish genetic elements that populate eukaryotic biology. Reading this book from a narrow viewpoint, one could see it as a recurrent tale of genetic conflict, but even from that perspective, the staggering variety of selfish strategies it discusses alone makes it worth reading. A broader view of this compilation is as a recurrent tale of genetic opportunity, revealing the innovative and insidious nature of genes as they vie with each other in complex sociogenetic negotiations for evolutionary survival.

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  1. Harmit S. Malik is at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington 98109-1024, USA. hsmalik@fhcrc.org,

    Harmit S Malik

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  1. Harmit S Malik
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Malik, H. Genes get diabolical. Nat Genet 39, 577 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0507-577

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