![]() ![]() This challenges Dawkins’ gene-centred view. Wilson for the latter’s advocacy of group selection: the idea that natural selection works at the level of groups of organisms (and presumably at other levels in the biological hierarchy from gene to ecosystem). ![]() Perhaps Dawkins’ most trenchant statement to that effect was in an attack on Harvard biologist E. But the fundamental premise on which it is built – DNA as replicator – seemed always to be sound. ‘We are,’ he famously said, ‘all survival machines for the same kind of replicator – molecules called DNA.’ Battles have been fought over whether this is a good use of metaphor (and as with the ‘selfish gene’ itself, metaphor was all it was ever meant to be). ![]() Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The selfish gene, which topped a poll last year for the most inspiring science books of all time, has set the agenda for how we think about genes and DNA. ![]()
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