The Englishmen and a Gene
When Prof Dawkins visited the Boston area on October 13, 2019, for a live conversation with the MIT physicist Max Tegmark at the Somerville Theatre, presented by the Center for Inquiry. The Selfish Gene at Fifty In 1976 a young Oxford ethologist published a book with a title so misleading that he would spend the next half-century apologizing for it. The Selfish Gene does not argue that people are selfish, nor that selfishness is admirable, nor that genes harbour anything so dignified as a motive. It argues something stranger and considerably more elegant. That the proper unit of natural selection is not the species, nor the group, nor even the individual lumbering about with its anxieties and its mortgage, but the gene. Organisms, on this view, are the vehicles genes build to ferry themselves into the next round. You are, in the most literal sense available to biology, your DNA’s idea of a good time. I read it in 1986, ten years late, which troubled the argument not at all, sinc...