The idea at the core of the book, published in 1976, was thrillingly simple: that a living organism is just a gene’s way of making more organisms that can carry the gene down the generations.
Back then, The Selfish Gene seemed pretty harmless. Dawkins’s ideas tracked with mainstream sociobiology. It was a popular book that covered exactly the sort of ideas that my lecturers were already teaching.
Re-reading it now, with decades of scholarship in the history of biology under my belt, it seems less benign. The determinism baked into the “gene’s-eye view” in the book troubles me, as does the passivity of the organism in Dawkins’s telling — a “vehicle”, a mere “replicator”. The implication: that traits such as aggression are hard-wired into people. Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, new tools, fresh models and scholars in many disciplines have begun to embrace the complex reality of biology. Readers in search of an understanding of life on Earth today would do better to reach for books that take a broader view.
This is why I have a cat