You Funny Little Good For Nothing Meme

Here's an article that claims Richard Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" concept is being reconsidered, and scientists are once again looking beyond genes and onto kin and group selection. The trouble is there's nothing in Dawkins suggesting all that matters are genes, even in regard to selection. His idea was merely that rather than focusing on the individual, as most biologists were, it would be useful to look at evolution at the level of the gene and see how things work that way. (And starting with the gene, as Dawkins explained in The Extended Phenotype, the book he thought his most important, the entire world is changed.)

This doesn't mean that evolution can't work on other levels at the same time, any more than physics denies chemistry which denies biology, or microeconomics should replace macroeconomics.

In fact, the trouble with concepts like the "selfish gene," or Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuated equilibrium," is not that they're so radical, but the opposite. They're not especially revolutionary ideas, and fit quite well into how biologists understand evolution. But because they've been popularized, they're sold as being bolder than they are.