Group selection accustomed to group selection thinking that he did not realize his views "contravened orthodox Darwinian theory". The ethologist Niko Tinbergen praised Lorenz for his interest in the survival value of behavior, and naturalists enjoyed Lorenz's writings for the same reason. In 1962, group selection was used as a popular explanation for adaptation by the zoologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards. In 1976, Richard Dawkins wrote a well-known book on the importance of evolution at the level of the gene or the individual, "The Selfish Gene". From the mid 1960s, evolutionary biologists argued that natural selection acted primarily at the level of the
The Selfish Gene gene is the object of selection, usefully completes and extends the explanation of evolution given by Charles Darwin before the basic mechanisms of genetics were understood. According to the ethologist Alan Grafen, acceptance of adaptionist theories is hampered by a lack of a mathematical unifying theory and a belief that anything in words alone must be suspect. According to Grafen, these difficulties along with an initial conflict with population genetics models at the time of its introduction "explains why within biology the considerable scientific contributions it ["The Selfish Gene"] makes are seriously underestimated, and why it is viewed mainly as