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
The Selfish Gene unit of heredity." However, he continues in a later chapter: Dawkins' later formulation is in his book "The Extended Phenotype" (1982), where the process of selection is taken to involve every possible phenotypical effect of a gene. Stephen Jay Gould finds Dawkins' position tries to have it both ways: The view of "The Selfish Gene" is that selection based upon groups and populations is rare compared to selection on individuals. Although supported by Dawkins and by many others, this claim continues to be disputed. While naïve versions of group selectionism have been disproved, more sophisticated formulations make accurate predictions in