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 to independent segregation. And the high prevalence of horizontal gene transfer in bacteria and archaea means that genomic combinations of these asexually reproducing groups are also transient in evolutionary time: "The traditional view, that prokaryotic evolution can be understood primarily in terms of clonal divergence and periodic selection, must be augmented to embrace gene exchange as a creative force." The gene as an informational entity persists for an evolutionarily significant span of time through a lineage of many physical copies. In his book "River out of Eden", Dawkins coins the phrase "God's utility function" to explain his view on genes