EVENT
The Selfish Gene Critique
Midgley's 1979 confrontation with Richard Dawkins over the selfish gene metaphor — the paradigm case of a useful scientific description being inflated into a destructive cultural myth.
In 1979, Mary Midgley published a review essay in Philosophy titled 'Gene-Juggling,' attacking Richard Dawkins's 1976 The Selfish Gene with characteristic bluntness. She argued that Dawkins had taken a useful piece of technical shorthand — the description of how natural selection operates at the genetic level — and inflated it into a metaphysical claim about what living things fundamentally are. The phrase 'selfish gene' had escaped the laboratory and become a cultural myth, a story people told themselves about their own nature: deep down we are selfish, our genes made us this way, altruism is illusion. Midgley's critique was not that the gene-selectionist framework was wrong as biology. Her critique was that its metaphorical packaging was performing metaphysical work the biology never authorized — and that the work was damaging public understanding of what it means to be a living creature.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The exchange became one of the landmark intellectual confrontations of the late twentieth century. Dawkins responded