Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is 30 years old this year. It remains a seminal argument for the gene as the fundamental unit of selection, and the evolutionary implications that follow from this. But it also seems to have gained a reputation as the book to turn to if you want to disabuse yourself of the notion that life is worth living. The Sunday Times has published an edited extract of the foreword that Dawkins has written for the 30th-anniversary edition, in which he writes about the anniversary and the reaction to the book. Here’s an example of one reader’s despair:

On one level, I can share in the sense of wonder Dawkins so evidently sees in the workings-out of such complex processes…But at the same time, I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade…Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper—trying to believe, but not quite being able to—I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quite a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.

Now there’s a book with impact.

Dawkins responds:

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposed to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.