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
Alternatives to evolution by natural selection 1969 paper by Jack Lester King and Thomas H. Jukes, provocatively but misleadingly titled "Non-Darwinian Evolution". It provided a wide variety of evidence including protein sequence comparisons, studies of the Treffers mutator gene in "E. coli", analysis of the genetic code, and comparative immunology, to argue that most protein evolution is due to neutral mutations and genetic drift. According to Kimura, the theory applies only for evolution at the molecular level, while phenotypic evolution is controlled by natural selection, so the neutral theory does not constitute a true alternative. The various alternatives to Darwinian evolution by natural selection were not