imo the interesting part isn’t whether the gene is selfish, but how selfinterest shows up in human behavior. We naturally seek people and environments that benefit or protect us, and I think classism can be one expression of that. we want safety, belonging, and advantage. After all, maybe what looks like selfishness is sometimes just "selfish' interest trying to protect itself
If Huemer believes that moral behavior doesn’t comes from this non natural thing and it affects our behavior, then how exactly does it interact with the world? He might say something about our rationality but there was clearly moral behavior before any kind of reflection on it.
Why would making copies of oneself be even metaphorically selfish, anyhow? Replicators replicate through physical causation. Is a rock selfish when it rolls down a hill instead of up?
I think there are two ways to read the title, with different pronunciations.
The SELFISH gene (a book about the gene/s for selfishness, which is loosely adjacent in meaning to the false idea that evolution inevitably leads to selfish organisms - but this view requires a massive misreading of the entire book).
The selfish GENE (a book about the causal fulcrum of evolution, which can be seen as benefiting a blind molecule without foresight or moral agency, which is itself forced to be 'selfish' in its algorithmic expansion, but can - under the right conditions - create altruism in the organisms it creates.)
It is not enough to argue, as some commenters to your note have, that kin selection is not itself unselfish or moral, implying that Dawkins was wrong. What's important is whether structures that are evolutionarily adaptive can include behaviours and cognitive biases that overlap with altruism. It could well be the case that there is an advantage for neural circuits that engage in limited altruism because of kin selection, and there is a spillover effect such that we often help unrelated strangers. We end up being better moral agents than a perfectly selfish approach to reproduction would suggest, because evolution mediated by analogue neural circuits deals with broad instincts, not finely crafted precise genetic calculations.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins did not claim that shared genes would cause general altruism. He said that individual selfishness was the general expectation, although he might now be backing off from those claims. Specifically, he said:
"Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to."
Now he repudiates that claim -- but why? What is the argument? I don't think he has one. I think he is just dodging the implications of his own theory, due to a changing moral climate.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued for kin selection theory, which predicts a very selective type of altruism toward close relatives. This is not the kind of altruism considered "moral" in modern Western morality -- far from it.
His argument for kin selection theory, and the theory itself, are bogus. So is the "selfish gene" concept, which is based on a misleading metaphor. Evolution selects for reproductive selfishness at the individual level, not the gene level. Dawkins was wrong, and the selfish gene is a huge blunder in evolutionary biology.
But that's another story.
If you accept the concept of the selfish gene as originally presented, then you should expect mostly individual selfishness at the organism level, with maybe some altruism toward kin based on relatedness.
And yes, the book was about selfishness. It was about both selfishness and genes. In Chapter 1, he specifically set up an opposition to group selection theory, which predicts altruism toward members of the same species.
From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues. I don’t see how Huemer is misinterpreting Dawkins here.
It does not. Huemer’s remarks about distinguishing group selection from selection at the individual or genetic level just indicates further misunderstanding on Huemer’s part, and serves to explain how he made the error I correctly described in the first place.
Huemer seems to expand on the claim that The Selfish Gene (which favors a gene-centric approach) predicts “selfishness” by, first, correctly recognizing that Dawkins rejects group selection, but then mistakenly taking group selection to (by implication) predict altruism/non-selfish behavior, but a gene-centric approach to predict selfishness. This is indicated by Huemer saying this:
“Basically, the group selection model is wrong. Evolution does not select for behaviors that benefit the group, right, it selects for behaviors that benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene that’s being selected, so genes tend to predominate in the population when that gene causes individuals who have it to produce more copies of it.”
He then continues:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
This is categorically false. Huemer is conflating selection at the level of genes with behavior at the level of individual organisms. Dawkins is very clear about this, and goes to great lengths to draw a distinction between genes as the unit of selection and organisms as the “vehicles” genes construct, in cooperation with one another, to produce more copies of himself.
Huemer appears to have mistakenly taken group selection, which has been proposed as an explanation for altruism/non-selfishness, to be representative of such a prediction, and, by negation, taken a gene-centric approach to not similarly make such a prediction. But this is just wrong. And the fact that it is wrong is something Dawkins explicitly states in the introduction of the book and is made abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the text. One of the central purposes of the book is to show how altruistic and non-selfish behavior is completely consistent with and predicted by the gene-centric approach. Huemer clearly doesn’t understand this.
Second, you said this: “From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues.”
You appear to be taking the quote you provided as a clarification of the claim about evolution predicting selfishness. But that isn’t what it was. It’s not that when Huemer says, “You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene,” that all he means is that natural selection operates at the level of individuals/genes. Rather, the quote you provide is an explanation for *why* the gene-centric approach predicts selfish behavior at the level of individuals (which, again, it doesn’t). If this weren’t what he was doing, the remarks that immediately follow this, where he says:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
…wouldn’t make any sense. What Huemer is doing is saying group selection predicts non-selfishness, gene selection predicts selfishness. And that’s incorrect and is not what Dawkins claims at all.
Thanks for elaborating evermore. To be clear, I am not attempting to know what Huemer himself meant with what he said, and I agree with you that hopefully he can shed light on that aspect. My goal is to add the context which makes what he said make sense, at least to me. In regard to the last quote, he adds:
"Or maybe you know even more you'd expect them to have the view that the good is reproduction . . . that everybody's main goal in life should be to produce as many offspring as possible."
I think selfish genes would lead to exactly this as the moral good if that is where our morality came from. An individual altruistic account of an organism would sacrifice itself to save offspring or kin or whatever in order to increase reproduction in the long run. Fwiw, I also think most egoists would value their friends as well as their kin, so I don't see how ethical egoism is excluded from the biological explanation found in The Selfish Gene.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make, for example he says:
"A question that sociologists and psychologists sometimes ask is why blood donors (in countries, such as Britain, where they are not paid) give blood. I find it hard to believe that the answer lies in reciprocity or disguised selfishness in any simple sense. It is not as though regular blood donors receive preferential treatment when they come to need a transfusion. They are not even issued with little gold stars to wear. Maybe I am naïve, but I find myself tempted to see it as a genuine case of pure, disinterested altruism."
One of the more depressing aspects of revealed morality is how frequently it has taken two inconsistent and often antithetical forms, depending on whether the context is "us" or "them". This is something which seems to present more of a problem for moral realism than it does for the notion that a capacity for moral judgement may have arisen, contingently, as a response to evolutionary pressure, as the latter would have been inherently local (physically and culturally) in scope.
In *slight* defense of Huemer, I think what he’s talking about from the beginning of your excerpt to 7:40 is somewhat defensible. Namely, group selection (of genes) vs individual selection (of genes). It is the individual reproducing individuals that pass on their genes and are selected for by other individuals, not the group. This is a point of disagreement in evolutionary biology where most scientists (as far as I can tell!) side with individual selection, not group selection.
So in this regard, I think 1) You’re slightly misunderstanding him but also 2) He’s still wrong!
He is correct in that individual selection is likely the mechanism of selection (over group selection) but he’s wrong that this would predict egoism being the baseline expected moral psychology. As you correctly point out, this does not mean that our moral psychology is selected for selfishness.
I’m not a biologist, but I imagine group selection may be a thing in insects colonies because of a sort of “hive mind” aspect of socialization. Similarly, on the other side of the spectrum, carnivorous reptiles like snakes are probably maximally egoist, and so individual selection is obvious. Mammals are somewhere in the middle, but because of the varied social environment, group selection is still probably true (because we aren’t as collectivist as insects). That’s my impression of why evolutionary biologists favor individual selection explanations in humans.
To get a little more specific, the human(s) that mutates a sense of benevolence or altruism and aligns those senses with their own egoist interests will cooperate better with other humans, helping them meet goals, including surviving and reproducing. But this strategy will not be “all or nothing,” because there will still be circumstances where selfish behavior is rewarded with survival and reproduction.
But still, there are possible “group selection” dynamics that may have happened in our evolutionary history. I can’t remember the biologist who put forward this idea, but the idea is that we domesticated ourselves as a species, using capital punishment to remove our more aggressive and violent members of our species, where over time we shaped our culture and moral intuitions to be more cooperative and less violent.
What’s more, contra Huemer, we can test some of these theories! We can find external datapoints of other species who we have domesticated, comparing them to cousin or ancestral species, and look for parallel anatomical characteristics, and how we differ from our cousins and ancestral species who were more violent and less social. For instance, dog teeth, size, strength, biting, and other characteristics aren’t nearly as dangerous as wolves, their cousins and ancestors. The same is true of human teeth, size, strength, biting, etc relative to our primate cousins. What’s more, when you observer human behavior relative to other primates (I think it may be bonobos who are the exception that are more social than us), as well as dogs relative to wolves, you clearly see that the more domesticated species has an easier time cooperating than the others.
None of this is to say that humans or dogs don’t have the capacity to be selfish or downright sociopathic or dangerous to other humans/dogs, but most dogs and humans you can train to not bite you unless they feel threatened. For non-domesticated species, this is not a true! A wolf may be tame but it will bite you!
Immediately following (from about 7:08-7:30) he elaborates on what that means in terms of group selection vs individual selection. As far as I can tell, that’s correct. I think his framing of the issue as selfishness is wrong, as is the subsequent commentary he provides. I.E if we’re talking about evolution selecting or “selfishness” and defining selfishness as individual selection, then that’s correct, but if we’re defining it as selfish behavior/egoism, it’s not correct. I think the fact that he’s conflating all of these terms suggests he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but on the specific point about group selection vs individual selection he’s not wrong (though I haven’t read the selfish gene in years, I can’t remember what Dawkins says about it, though quite a few others books I’ve read on it agree on group selection/individual selection).
My point is that there's an entire passage of what Huemer is saying, and in the spirit of charity, we should look at that entire context to flesh out why he is wrong. Your original post only looks at one sentence, which I concurred was wrong. My point was to elaborate on his wrongness to help educate people who know less about moral/ev psychology. Namely and more specifically, elaborating on group selection, why Huemer is right on that factual point about group vs individual selection, but elaborate why his conclusions were false (because non-egoist moral psychology is compatible with individual selection).
I think it's clickbait dunking to just say "HUEMER HASN'T EVEN READ THE SELFISH GENE" which you know, may be true, but I was just adding a comment that just added a little nuance. I wasn't even contradicting you.
I don't know if you're just neurodivergent or socially awkward, but this confrontational yet defensive and pedantic style is really annoying. There wasn't any implication that I was contradicting you or saying you were wrong. Meanwhile you're liking comments that disparage my comments or my actual understanding, when you clearly don't understand what I'm saying.
A lot of people misinterpret his words on purpose to use it for their own means. Funny coincidence I’m literally listening to him talk about the title as I saw your article. I’m listening to “Books do furnish a life”. Aside from the selfish part being misunderstood, Sapolsky suggested it should have been called the Selfish Genome.
Regardless of all of this, The Selfish Gene is one of the most paradigm shifting books/ideas I’ve heard. Thinking of life forms as conduits for the genes they have.
I really do think the title was a mistake. Many people lock in on the names of things. The title was too clever. It should have been more direct and explicit, and I think Dawkins has come to realize this. Then again, in a strange way, perhaps the misleading title prompts misinterpretations and corrections in a way that has increased the book's reach.
imo the interesting part isn’t whether the gene is selfish, but how selfinterest shows up in human behavior. We naturally seek people and environments that benefit or protect us, and I think classism can be one expression of that. we want safety, belonging, and advantage. After all, maybe what looks like selfishness is sometimes just "selfish' interest trying to protect itself
I like this
If Huemer believes that moral behavior doesn’t comes from this non natural thing and it affects our behavior, then how exactly does it interact with the world? He might say something about our rationality but there was clearly moral behavior before any kind of reflection on it.
Why would making copies of oneself be even metaphorically selfish, anyhow? Replicators replicate through physical causation. Is a rock selfish when it rolls down a hill instead of up?
I find this misinterpretation frustrating.
I think there are two ways to read the title, with different pronunciations.
The SELFISH gene (a book about the gene/s for selfishness, which is loosely adjacent in meaning to the false idea that evolution inevitably leads to selfish organisms - but this view requires a massive misreading of the entire book).
The selfish GENE (a book about the causal fulcrum of evolution, which can be seen as benefiting a blind molecule without foresight or moral agency, which is itself forced to be 'selfish' in its algorithmic expansion, but can - under the right conditions - create altruism in the organisms it creates.)
It is not enough to argue, as some commenters to your note have, that kin selection is not itself unselfish or moral, implying that Dawkins was wrong. What's important is whether structures that are evolutionarily adaptive can include behaviours and cognitive biases that overlap with altruism. It could well be the case that there is an advantage for neural circuits that engage in limited altruism because of kin selection, and there is a spillover effect such that we often help unrelated strangers. We end up being better moral agents than a perfectly selfish approach to reproduction would suggest, because evolution mediated by analogue neural circuits deals with broad instincts, not finely crafted precise genetic calculations.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins did not claim that shared genes would cause general altruism. He said that individual selfishness was the general expectation, although he might now be backing off from those claims. Specifically, he said:
"Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to."
Now he repudiates that claim -- but why? What is the argument? I don't think he has one. I think he is just dodging the implications of his own theory, due to a changing moral climate.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argued for kin selection theory, which predicts a very selective type of altruism toward close relatives. This is not the kind of altruism considered "moral" in modern Western morality -- far from it.
His argument for kin selection theory, and the theory itself, are bogus. So is the "selfish gene" concept, which is based on a misleading metaphor. Evolution selects for reproductive selfishness at the individual level, not the gene level. Dawkins was wrong, and the selfish gene is a huge blunder in evolutionary biology.
But that's another story.
If you accept the concept of the selfish gene as originally presented, then you should expect mostly individual selfishness at the organism level, with maybe some altruism toward kin based on relatedness.
And yes, the book was about selfishness. It was about both selfishness and genes. In Chapter 1, he specifically set up an opposition to group selection theory, which predicts altruism toward members of the same species.
From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues. I don’t see how Huemer is misinterpreting Dawkins here.
The part I quoted is a clear misinterpretion.
The “evolution selects for selfishness” quote? That seems to be exactly clarified by the quote I provided.
It does not. Huemer’s remarks about distinguishing group selection from selection at the individual or genetic level just indicates further misunderstanding on Huemer’s part, and serves to explain how he made the error I correctly described in the first place.
Huemer seems to expand on the claim that The Selfish Gene (which favors a gene-centric approach) predicts “selfishness” by, first, correctly recognizing that Dawkins rejects group selection, but then mistakenly taking group selection to (by implication) predict altruism/non-selfish behavior, but a gene-centric approach to predict selfishness. This is indicated by Huemer saying this:
“Basically, the group selection model is wrong. Evolution does not select for behaviors that benefit the group, right, it selects for behaviors that benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene that’s being selected, so genes tend to predominate in the population when that gene causes individuals who have it to produce more copies of it.”
He then continues:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
This is categorically false. Huemer is conflating selection at the level of genes with behavior at the level of individual organisms. Dawkins is very clear about this, and goes to great lengths to draw a distinction between genes as the unit of selection and organisms as the “vehicles” genes construct, in cooperation with one another, to produce more copies of himself.
Huemer appears to have mistakenly taken group selection, which has been proposed as an explanation for altruism/non-selfishness, to be representative of such a prediction, and, by negation, taken a gene-centric approach to not similarly make such a prediction. But this is just wrong. And the fact that it is wrong is something Dawkins explicitly states in the introduction of the book and is made abundantly clear to anyone familiar with the text. One of the central purposes of the book is to show how altruistic and non-selfish behavior is completely consistent with and predicted by the gene-centric approach. Huemer clearly doesn’t understand this.
Second, you said this: “From watching the YouTube clip, Huemer appears to say explicitly that evolution selects for behaviors that “benefit the individual or more specifically that benefit the particular gene”. The more specific claim appears to be exactly what Dawkins argues.”
You appear to be taking the quote you provided as a clarification of the claim about evolution predicting selfishness. But that isn’t what it was. It’s not that when Huemer says, “You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene,” that all he means is that natural selection operates at the level of individuals/genes. Rather, the quote you provide is an explanation for *why* the gene-centric approach predicts selfish behavior at the level of individuals (which, again, it doesn’t). If this weren’t what he was doing, the remarks that immediately follow this, where he says:
“So now if you understand that then what you would anticipate from people’s moral values is you would think that everyone should be an ethical egoist.”
…wouldn’t make any sense. What Huemer is doing is saying group selection predicts non-selfishness, gene selection predicts selfishness. And that’s incorrect and is not what Dawkins claims at all.
Thanks for elaborating evermore. To be clear, I am not attempting to know what Huemer himself meant with what he said, and I agree with you that hopefully he can shed light on that aspect. My goal is to add the context which makes what he said make sense, at least to me. In regard to the last quote, he adds:
"Or maybe you know even more you'd expect them to have the view that the good is reproduction . . . that everybody's main goal in life should be to produce as many offspring as possible."
I think selfish genes would lead to exactly this as the moral good if that is where our morality came from. An individual altruistic account of an organism would sacrifice itself to save offspring or kin or whatever in order to increase reproduction in the long run. Fwiw, I also think most egoists would value their friends as well as their kin, so I don't see how ethical egoism is excluded from the biological explanation found in The Selfish Gene.
Lastly, I think Dawkins himself argues that the biological explanation he provides does not account for moral choices humans make, for example he says:
"A question that sociologists and psychologists sometimes ask is why blood donors (in countries, such as Britain, where they are not paid) give blood. I find it hard to believe that the answer lies in reciprocity or disguised selfishness in any simple sense. It is not as though regular blood donors receive preferential treatment when they come to need a transfusion. They are not even issued with little gold stars to wear. Maybe I am naïve, but I find myself tempted to see it as a genuine case of pure, disinterested altruism."
One of the more depressing aspects of revealed morality is how frequently it has taken two inconsistent and often antithetical forms, depending on whether the context is "us" or "them". This is something which seems to present more of a problem for moral realism than it does for the notion that a capacity for moral judgement may have arisen, contingently, as a response to evolutionary pressure, as the latter would have been inherently local (physically and culturally) in scope.
In *slight* defense of Huemer, I think what he’s talking about from the beginning of your excerpt to 7:40 is somewhat defensible. Namely, group selection (of genes) vs individual selection (of genes). It is the individual reproducing individuals that pass on their genes and are selected for by other individuals, not the group. This is a point of disagreement in evolutionary biology where most scientists (as far as I can tell!) side with individual selection, not group selection.
So in this regard, I think 1) You’re slightly misunderstanding him but also 2) He’s still wrong!
He is correct in that individual selection is likely the mechanism of selection (over group selection) but he’s wrong that this would predict egoism being the baseline expected moral psychology. As you correctly point out, this does not mean that our moral psychology is selected for selfishness.
I’m not a biologist, but I imagine group selection may be a thing in insects colonies because of a sort of “hive mind” aspect of socialization. Similarly, on the other side of the spectrum, carnivorous reptiles like snakes are probably maximally egoist, and so individual selection is obvious. Mammals are somewhere in the middle, but because of the varied social environment, group selection is still probably true (because we aren’t as collectivist as insects). That’s my impression of why evolutionary biologists favor individual selection explanations in humans.
To get a little more specific, the human(s) that mutates a sense of benevolence or altruism and aligns those senses with their own egoist interests will cooperate better with other humans, helping them meet goals, including surviving and reproducing. But this strategy will not be “all or nothing,” because there will still be circumstances where selfish behavior is rewarded with survival and reproduction.
But still, there are possible “group selection” dynamics that may have happened in our evolutionary history. I can’t remember the biologist who put forward this idea, but the idea is that we domesticated ourselves as a species, using capital punishment to remove our more aggressive and violent members of our species, where over time we shaped our culture and moral intuitions to be more cooperative and less violent.
What’s more, contra Huemer, we can test some of these theories! We can find external datapoints of other species who we have domesticated, comparing them to cousin or ancestral species, and look for parallel anatomical characteristics, and how we differ from our cousins and ancestral species who were more violent and less social. For instance, dog teeth, size, strength, biting, and other characteristics aren’t nearly as dangerous as wolves, their cousins and ancestors. The same is true of human teeth, size, strength, biting, etc relative to our primate cousins. What’s more, when you observer human behavior relative to other primates (I think it may be bonobos who are the exception that are more social than us), as well as dogs relative to wolves, you clearly see that the more domesticated species has an easier time cooperating than the others.
None of this is to say that humans or dogs don’t have the capacity to be selfish or downright sociopathic or dangerous to other humans/dogs, but most dogs and humans you can train to not bite you unless they feel threatened. For non-domesticated species, this is not a true! A wolf may be tame but it will bite you!
It comes across that you haven’t read the selfish gene, read it.
I will actually go so far to say I've read more evolutionary psychology and moral psychology than you have Jon.
I've read the selfish gene and I'm not actually contradicting Lance point. Get better at reading comprehension.
He says this:
"You learn from evolutionary theory that evolution selects for selfishness. This is what you learn if you read great books like The Selfish Gene."
...This is what I am saying is false. I don't know what this has to do with group selection, so I'm not sure what you think I am not misunderstanding.
Immediately following (from about 7:08-7:30) he elaborates on what that means in terms of group selection vs individual selection. As far as I can tell, that’s correct. I think his framing of the issue as selfishness is wrong, as is the subsequent commentary he provides. I.E if we’re talking about evolution selecting or “selfishness” and defining selfishness as individual selection, then that’s correct, but if we’re defining it as selfish behavior/egoism, it’s not correct. I think the fact that he’s conflating all of these terms suggests he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but on the specific point about group selection vs individual selection he’s not wrong (though I haven’t read the selfish gene in years, I can’t remember what Dawkins says about it, though quite a few others books I’ve read on it agree on group selection/individual selection).
I'm not sure how what I've said has to do with group selection.
My point is that there's an entire passage of what Huemer is saying, and in the spirit of charity, we should look at that entire context to flesh out why he is wrong. Your original post only looks at one sentence, which I concurred was wrong. My point was to elaborate on his wrongness to help educate people who know less about moral/ev psychology. Namely and more specifically, elaborating on group selection, why Huemer is right on that factual point about group vs individual selection, but elaborate why his conclusions were false (because non-egoist moral psychology is compatible with individual selection).
I think it's clickbait dunking to just say "HUEMER HASN'T EVEN READ THE SELFISH GENE" which you know, may be true, but I was just adding a comment that just added a little nuance. I wasn't even contradicting you.
I don't know if you're just neurodivergent or socially awkward, but this confrontational yet defensive and pedantic style is really annoying. There wasn't any implication that I was contradicting you or saying you were wrong. Meanwhile you're liking comments that disparage my comments or my actual understanding, when you clearly don't understand what I'm saying.
Okay.
A lot of people misinterpret his words on purpose to use it for their own means. Funny coincidence I’m literally listening to him talk about the title as I saw your article. I’m listening to “Books do furnish a life”. Aside from the selfish part being misunderstood, Sapolsky suggested it should have been called the Selfish Genome.
Regardless of all of this, The Selfish Gene is one of the most paradigm shifting books/ideas I’ve heard. Thinking of life forms as conduits for the genes they have.
I really do think the title was a mistake. Many people lock in on the names of things. The title was too clever. It should have been more direct and explicit, and I think Dawkins has come to realize this. Then again, in a strange way, perhaps the misleading title prompts misinterpretations and corrections in a way that has increased the book's reach.