Can't We All Just Get Along?

The New York Times headline for a profile of Richard Dawkins is "A Knack For Bashing Orthodoxy." Really? Is that what he's known for?

He rose to prominence with his best-selling The Selfish Gene. As the Times puts it:

In his landmark 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” he looked at evolution through a novel lens: that of a gene. With this, he built on the work of fellow scientists and flipped the prevailing view of evolution and natural selection on its head.

I'm not sure how much it changed the prevailing view.  He emphasized the gene over the individual as the unit of selection, but as he noted in the book, it's another way of looking at the same thing--genes create the inviduals who then carry and pass on the genes.  The Times explains further:

At the time, the predominant popular view of evolution was that animals and insects worked together, albeit unconsciously, and that natural selection acted on individuals to do what was good for their species. Cooperation, again unconscious, seemed woven into nature.

Professor Dawkins’s voice slides playfully into High David Attenborough style as he mimics the mellifluous tone of BBC documentaries of the time: “The dung beetle is the refuse collector of the natural system, and where would we be without them? And male deer fight but take care not to kill each other.”

He stops. “That sort of thinking was pretty dominant in the culture.” Artful pause. “And it’s plain wrong. I wanted to correct that ubiquitous misunderstanding.”

I read The Selfish Gene more than a decade after it was published.  It seemed to me an elegant and arftul book, just not controversial.  Perhaps the landscape had been so changed by the book that by the time I read it its ideas were widely accepted.  But I have to wonder how widespread the idea that animals worked for the good of the species was back then among biologists.

Oh, I know it was popular among lay people, but did experts think this way? We know that cooperation can develop because it can benefit both parties (or, as Dawkins notes, the genes of both parties), but just how popular in the classroom back then was the idea that living things made sacrifices for the good of the species? You don't need a lot of math to figure out that, generally speaking, genes that make an individual sacrifice itself for non-kin is not the kind of gene that does well.  Other more "selfish" individuals will simply say "thanks for your sacrifice" and then pass their own genes along to future generations.

So Dawkins may seem scientifically controversial to some, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover, even from the start, he was considered mainstream.  I met him years ago.  If I ever meet him again, I'll have to ask him about this.