The Selfish Gene Another criticism of the book is its treatment of morality, and more particularly altruism, as existing only as a form of selfishness: The philosopher Mary Midgley has suggested this position is a variant of Hobbes' explanation of altruism as enlightened self-interest, and that Dawkins goes a step further to suggest that our genetic programming can be overcome by what amounts to an extreme version of free will. Part of Mary Midgley's concern is that Richard Dawkins' account of "The Selfish Gene" serves as a moral and ideological justification for selfishness to be adopted by modern human societies as simply following
Gene-centered view of evolution for the evolution of social characteristics such as selfishness and altruism. The formulation of the central dogma of molecular biology was summarized by Maynard Smith: The rejection of the inheritance of acquired characters, combined with Ronald Fisher the statistician, giving the subject a mathematical footing, and showing how Mendelian genetics was compatible with natural selection in his 1930 book "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright, paved the way to the formulation of the selfish-gene theory. For cases where environment can influence heredity, see epigenetics. The view of the gene as the unit of