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.
Social darwinism is wrong. The human will show itself in all its beautiful complexity despite dumb simplified theories.
Social Darwinism is wrong, yes, but the Selfish Gene does not promote that theory and, if memory serves, it specifically calls out such theories as being wrong.
Perhaps you're misremembering what it's about on account of the title, which can be confusing. It's not about a gene that causes selfish behaviour. It's about the gene itself being a "selfish" entity in so far as the only thing that evolution cares about is that the gene promotes its own replication. It's an anthropomorphisation of the gene as a metaphor to understand the mechanism of evolution when viewed from a gene's-eye-view instead of the usual contextualisation of evolution around the individual animal.
The Nature article is about plain darwinian evolution though.
The selfish gene is about applying a darwinian solution to humans. It's where the memetic experience comes in. The Nature reporter themselves talks about the "Replicator".
I've read it twice, the last time being 2021, but maybe I'll have to read it again to resist this shit mainstream Science is trying to feed the world.
Are we talking about the same book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene ? What on Earth is a "darwinian solution"?
I don't have to get past the preface to read things like:
" I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi’s idea that altruistic donation might be a ‘Potlatch’ style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!"
But don't worry, I'll read the entire book and highlight what I think is most despicable. Is it just a Lemmy post? Yes, but this matter is important to me.
I'll think of it as if I were writing a scientific article of low reach.
Edit: Further down the PREFACE:
"Similar feeble thoughts have been strung together to produce the impression that Darwinian social theory is reactionary in its political implications. "
. He calls his theory a Darwinian social theory! This is a joke!
Moving on.
Yeah the 70s were totally the pinnacle of science.