[i_phish_cats]

Selfish gene is a popular science book, not a text book. You want to learn something? Get a dense, highly-regarded text book with lots of problems and work through the problems. Supplement it with lectures, or more importantly, office hours at a prof or grad student who knows the subject cold. Maybe even get a mentor to give you a real problem and struggle through it for several years (aka go to graduate school). That's how its been done for centuries because it works. Why else do you think there are so few self-taught (real) engineers and (real) scientists out in the wild making an impact.