ABSTRACT
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was well received by many but it also attracted a great deal of criticism. Zoologists, sociologists, biologists, and even philosophers attacked many aspects of the book. A major criticism of the book was Dawkins's reductionist—overly simplified—viewpoint: the explanation of behavior as nothing more than a consequence of genetic influence. Dawkins's argument that genes are the units of natural selection was also criticized from a biological point of view. Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould believed strongly, like most other scientists at the time, that natural selection operates at the level of the individual. Criticism came from another direction as well. In a strong critique in 1979 philosopher Mary Midgley attacked Dawkins for what she understood to be a political statement about human behavior. The fact that the second edition of The Selfish Gene was published with few changes in 1989 seems to suggest Dawkins was not taking the criticism on board.
