Richard Dawkins’ first work has thrilled fans and frustrated critics for five decades. The science has moved on, but any writer looking to supplant its place must learn its lessons

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was not predicted to be a success. Its initial print run, published this week in 1976, was just 5,000. It went on to sell millions, and is perhaps the most influential work of pop-science ever. For 50 years, it has been the go-to resource for the layperson seeking to understand evolution.

What accounts for its enduring power? Prof Dawkins’ central claim, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” was provocative, stripping the messy stuff of human and other life down to a simple law. And yet the book is primarily concerned with proving that complex, selfless behaviour such as altruism in animals can emerge from these basic “selfish” drives, satisfyingly resolving an apparent paradox. Prof Dawkins – a zoologist by training – also succeeded in conjuring entertaining, vividly drawn vignettes of the lives of animals, from lions and ants to hawks and honeybees, to make his points.

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Wes Streeting says overseas suppliers of defence contracts will need to spend the equivalent amount in the UK

Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, was on the interview round this morning, announcing a new aspect of defence procurement policy. The Ministry of Defence is now saying that, if overseas suppliers win UK defence contracts, they will be required to spend the equivalent amount in the UK.

Explaining the policy, the MoD says:

British workers, businesses and apprentices will benefit from major changes which will see more defence work carried out in the UK thanks to the launch of a world-leading Offsets policy.

Under the new rules, overseas companies that win significant UK defence contracts will be required to invest back into Britain, through new British jobs and apprenticeships, opening UK factories, investing in domestic suppliers, transferring technology and innovation know-how.

Every pound we invest in defence should be judged by what it does for Britain. That’s why we are backing British by buying British wherever we can.

Even when that is not possible, we are acting to ensure that any investment brings jobs, skills and investment back home, strengthening our national security by boosting our domestic industry.

The prime minister has made devolution a central focus for his government. However the UK government must ensure that any devolution proposals respect devolution in Scotland. That means working with the Scottish government.

The Scottish government has put forward substantive proposals to the UK government on areas where further devolution would help grow Scotland’s economy and I will press the prime minister, and his government, to work with us to deliver those proposals.

Sale makes ‘Jodi’, a smaller relative of T rex, the ‘second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction’, Sotheby’s says

A rare skeleton of a Nanotyrannus, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, sold at auction in New York this week for $47.3m, making it one of the world’s most expensive fossils.

The skeleton, named “Jodi” after the person who found the remains in 2019, sold at Sotheby’s on Tuesday for $47.3m, “after a twelve-minute bidding battle that saw six bidders compete online and over the phones, before ultimately selling on the phone”, Sotheby’s said in a statement.

Dick Cole is quitting Mebyon Kernow, which campaigns for greater self-rule for Cornwall, after 29 years at the helm

There will be no great fanfare when Dick Cole steps down as party leader in a few days’ time.

“We’ll have an official handover at our party conference,” Cole said. “Hopefully it will be a nice event. We’ll go to the pub afterwards and have a few beers. I expect I’ll breathe a big sigh of relief.”

The prime minister says he wants to focus on tackling the cost of living

Burnham spoke of Ravenscraig, once the pride of Scotland’s steel industry that employed tens of thousands of people before it closed in 1992.

He said:

When it closed, it wasn’t just a works that shut, it was a whole community which saw the pillars underneath it just taken away, collapsed beneath it.

That was a decision taken hundreds of miles away without any real consequences for what that would mean for people here, taken by people who would never have to live with those consequences, or see those consequences.

I was the MP there for 16 years from the early 2000s, just after the pits had shut in the 1990s. It broke my heart to see the old miners shuffling into my surgery, carrying oxygen bottles, still struggling to get compensation for the damage that was done to their lungs.

It pained me to drive past the wasteland around Bickershaw Colliery, one of the last pits to close in Leigh. Nobody asked Leigh what was going to come next either.

I care about Scotland a lot, and I am coming today with a big offer and in search of common ground.

When I walked into Downing Street in July, I said I wanted to do politics differently. Place first, not party first. Honestly, I meant it, and I arrive here in that spirit because people in Scotland, in my view, deserve better from politicians and politics.

Die Forscher Henri Kagan, 95, und Kenso Soai, 76, haben einen Weg gefunden, wie man Moleküle in der gewünschten Gestalt herstellen kann. Davon profitieren auch Patienten.

Die Forscher Henri Kagan, 95, und Kenso Soai, 76, haben einen Weg gefunden, wie man Moleküle in der gewünschten Gestalt herstellen kann. Davon profitieren auch Patienten.

It’s a powerful analogy that captured the popular imagination, but the biological reality is quite different

Humans have a cognitive quirk for the number three. Think of the many stories that use it, from The Three Little Pigs to Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Musketeers. Public information and political campaigns use it for impact and ease of recall (“Stop, look and listen”; “See it. Say it. Sorted”; “Reduce, reuse, recycle”). And then there are psychological or philosophical frameworks: Freud with his id, ego and superego; Plato’s three parts of the human soul; the Holy Trinity.

Well, it turns out neuroscience isn’t immune from tri-mania. In 1959 Paul D MacLean set out a new way of thinking about the evolution and function of the brain, which he christened the “triune” – three-in-one – model. It quickly became one of best known and most enduring concepts in human biology. His idea was that a trio of distinct brains are layered inside our skulls, one on top of the other, all fighting to generate our feelings and thoughts.

Labour wants to make sure mayors and council chiefs in England can be held to account for extra revenues devolved to them

Ministers are mulling over how to ensure that England’s regional leaders do not misuse their newfound spending muscle, as Whitehall prepares to devolve more revenue to local levels.

Ideas under consideration include a new select committee in Westminster, enhanced reporting rules and a new audit body focused on local and regional government.

PM, in first speech to party conference as leader, insists his plans are a ‘good deal’ for older people

• Burnham to signal willingness to look at scrapping pension triple lock to fund social care

Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, has apparently confirmed that Andy Burnham will float the prospect of getting rid of the pensions triple lock to help fund the creation of an NHS-style care service.

Asked about the prospect on Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Rayner said that Burnham was “absolutely right to start the conversation” and that he was being “brave”.

The high principle on this is that people have paid in all their lives. They are willing, I think, to look at that.

What they don’t want is what they consider to be, quite frankly, incompetent politicians that are going to take something from us to fill a black hole.

When we met with Andy [Burnham] this week, it certainly wasn’t mentioned.

But I do think that it’s important that Labour make sure that working-class people know that they’re on their side, and this would be a direction of travel that would say the opposite to that.

What I understood the national care service to be was a universal benefit: everybody paid in and everybody gets out, and that is what actually the principle of that is.

Going to a group of people who are getting around £12,500 a year in order to pay for it to take away their security is wrong.

The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

From Mozart to Madonna, dim sum to doughnuts, Shakespeare to Sartre – not all forms of life need DNA

On Mount Athos, in northern Greece, a monk rises before dawn to sing the same office that has been sung on that mountain for more than 1,000 years. He learned it from older monks who came before him, who learned it in turn in an unbroken chain stretching back to Athanasios the Athonite, in AD963.

Over the centuries, individual monks have come and gone, and yet their chants, prayers, oaths, costumes and ceremonies endure. This persistence is remarkable and revealing: cultural traditions endure because they share a fundamental property with biological organisms. They are alive. Not metaphorically, but literally.

It’s something akin to a quiet earthquake: home nations jointly declaring their wish to be freed from English domination. A big move needs a big response

Monday must have been a historical first. Never before have three of the four “nations” of the United Kingdom jointly demanded freedom to vote for its dissolution. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have lost confidence in England. They declared in Cardiff that the unionist government at Westminster is “coming to an end”.

There was no such Celtic alliance against the Normans, Edward I or Cromwell. Celtic MPs have never formed a voting coalition in parliament. The Victorian Liberal party advanced “home rule for all”, but that was not independence and it got nowhere. Ireland rebelled, but it did so alone. When this eventually succeeded, Britain said good riddance, kept hold of Belfast and continued to centralise power in London.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

In an interview about the donations, he said they are compliant with the law ‘today’

Andy Burnham has cancelled engagements today and tomorrow following the death of his father Roy, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, the Press Association reports.

Burnham has spoken about his father’s illness which meant that he did not know his son had become prime minister.

[We] will continue bringing forward further reforms to strengthen confidence in our democracy.

Following on from the previous minister for democracy’s letter to you of 10 July 2026, we wanted to reiterate the government’s concerns, shared by many members of the public and parliamentarians, about the rise in the volume and concentration of money in UK politics. We have to limit the way financial power can end up dominating political power, to get to a politics that works for all people in all places.

We believe spending limits on parties and candidates are too high, and ought to be reduced.

Call for constitutional change in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales likely to challenge Burnham’s devolution agenda

The first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are to affirm their countries’ right to seek independence from the UK at a summit that is likely to challenge Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda.

The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Scottish National party leader, John Swinney, and the Sinn Féin vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding at a landmark conference in Cardiff on Monday that will call on Westminster “to prepare, plan and facilitate constitutional change in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the first non-Labour Senedd leader, questions Westminster’s willingness to relinquish powers

Andy Burnham has to be serious about devolution and understand that Wales is a nation and “not a region in England”, according to the country’s first minister.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, who is the first non-Labour leader of the Senedd since devolution, told the Guardian that while he was encouraged by initial discussions with the new UK prime minister, he was wary about Burnham being captured by a consensus Westminster view against relinquishing further powers.

Many mayors welcome power to impose tourist tax but industry warns of ‘irreparable harm’ and job losses

Ministers are facing a backlash from the hospitality industry after they announced mayors in England would be given sweeping powers to levy taxes on holiday accommodation such as hotels and Airbnbs.

The plan, presented on Thursday by Angela Rayner, the local government secretary, will allow mayors to impose a “tourist tax” without a cap on how much they can charge and with few controls on how they can spend it.

Vital accountability mechanisms have withered as English devolution has evolved. The government should take note

Andy Burnham has criticised Britain’s “unaccountable state” that is at once too powerful and too distant from everyday life. He has made English devolution the central idea of his premiership, but his plan to give England’s mayors unprecedented power and money will have to confront a number of tricky realities, not least a landscape in which scrutiny of local government is vastly diminished.

As England’s devolution map has evolved, vital accountability mechanisms have withered. The abolition of the Audit Commission in 2015 deprived Whitehall of information about local government spending. The decision, taken by the then Tory prime minister David Cameron during his “bonfire of the quangos”, coincided with a period when cash-strapped councils were selling off assets and making risky investments. A succession of bankruptcies and scandals have since exemplified the dangers of governing in darkness, including the questions raised at Teesworks, the development led by Ben Houchen, a Tory mayor, where a “culture of excessive confidentiality” has prevailed, according to a damning 2024 government report.

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Like France, the UK has always been centralised – and imposing a new political structure brings huge risks

Devolution in England is going to be messy and slow, and brings with it huge risks that Andy Burnham ignores at his peril.

The prime minister’s devolution push will be messy because Whitehall’s ingrained anxiety about handing over money and power will lead to piecemeal deals, starting with a deal for Cornwall that will lack the much-promised driving force of a newly minted mayor.

PM says he has a ‘clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ with UK, and pays tribute to Keir Starmer after his predecessor quit parliament

My colleague Richard Partington, the Guardian’s senior economics correspondent, grew up, like Andy Burnham, in the Warrington suburb of Culcheth. He has been home to find out what people there are saying about the new PM.

Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch announced a reshuffle, replacing Mel Stride with Andrew Griffith as shadow chancellor and Priti Patel with Tom Tugendhat as shadow foreign secretary.