The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins was written for the professional biologist but so impos- ing and understandable is Dawkins’s writing that even an outsider who is prepared to reason hard can follow the arguments, and appreciate the depth and refinement of the issues. Dawkins shows how our traditional way of thinking about organisms should be replaced by a richer vision in which the boundary between organism and environment first dissolves and then gets (partially) rebuilt on a deeper foundation - extended phenotype: "an animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ the behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it".

In the book’s afterword, Daniel Dennett, a philoso- pher, says: "It is science, certainly, but it is also what philosophy should bez and only intermittently is: a scrupulously reasoned argument that opens our eyes to a new perspective, clarifying what had been murky and ill-understood, and giving us a new way of thinking about topics we thought we already understood".