Now that I look back at it armed with many years of research into biological history, it appears less harmless. The rigid fatalism inherent in the book’s “gene’s-eye view” bothers me, alongside how passive living things appear in Dawkins’s narrative as merely a “vehicle” or a “replicator”. The implication: that traits such as aggression are hard-wired into people. Happily, during the last twenty years or so, novel instruments, innovative models and researchers across various fields have started adopting biological complexity as it truly exists. People who want to comprehend contemporary earthly existence would be wiser to pick up volumes offering a wider perspective.
So wrote Nathaniel Comfort, an associate professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, in a recent piece for Nature evaluating Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Comfort claimed that the book is outdated, outmoded, and best left on the shelf in favor of frameworks promoting the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” (EES). That view argues the neo-Darwinian view of evolution that fused natural selection and Mendelian genetics is wrong and needs replacement with a new theory.
Why the Gene’s-Eye View Remains Core to Evolutionary Biology
As Why Evolution Is True reported, Dawkins’s main point was that the unit of evolution by natural selection was the gene, or “replicator”: a bit of DNA that can reproduce itself from one generation to the next. The unit is not the individual, the group, or the species, but the replicator, which can be seen as “selfish” because those genes that replicate faster than their alternative forms will be the ones most represented in the future. Faster replication can, for example, be effected by building bodies (“vehicles”) that last longer and leave more offspring than others. This mechanism accounts for transposable genetic elements that spread through a species not by enhancing an organism’s adaptation, survival, or reproduction, but their own reproduction.
Organisms are not acting with independent agency; their behavioral features are products of those very same replicators. Far from implying that human beings are hard-wired for aggressive behavior, Dawkins repeatedly emphasized that kin selection and reciprocal altruism allow genes to spread even when individual bearers sacrifice their own direct reproductive success for relatives or groupmates. The modern synthesis handles these phenomena without requiring a revolutionary new theoretical framework.
Evaluating the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Directional Complexity
Proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis point to epigenetic modification, niche construction, behavioral and morphological plasticity, and what is called “natural genetic engineering” to challenge standard evolutionary theory. Yet evolutionary biologist Doug Futuyma demonstrated that nearly all these phenomena fit comfortably within the existing modern framework. While environmental factors can alter DNA, modified DNA drives evolutionary change only when it produces selfish modified DNA that replicates faster than unmodified DNA.
Comfort also pointed to work by journalist Philip Ball in How Life Works (2023) and biochemist Nick Lane regarding the second law of thermodynamics, arguing that life is driven toward complexity. But complexity is not a universal rule of evolution.
Navigating the Texts on Modern Evolution
Biologists seeking a high-level accounting of contemporary evolutionary science can turn to standard foundational literature rather than wholesale paradigm shifts. Doug Futuyma and Mark Kirkpatrick published the fifth edition of their textbook, Evolution, in 2022. That text details how evolutionary theory continues to incorporate new discoveries without discarding the core mechanics of natural selection.
