While I think The Selfish Gene was a groundbreaking book, it propagated a truly unfortunate human tendency to anthropomorphize the external natural world of which we’re a part. And by erroneously projecting human values beyond us, it’s all too easy to mistake the behavior of the external world for an absolute validation of certain values. Dawkins was by no means the progenitor of this fallacy, nor despite his own character flaws do I think he intended the metaphor as an endorsement of human selfishness. But it can be seen since the earliest sloppy science of social “Darwinism” and has a more sinister aspect is racist pseudoscience.
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