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b_b  ·  4558 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Biology for Liberals
Anyone who thinks that Dawkins' ideas have anything whatsoever to do with Rand's has no idea wtf Dawkins was talking about. Dawkins was using the term "selfish gene" as a metaphor for a mathematical construct that helps to explain how the relative abundance of an inherited unit can evolve over time. This has exactly nothing in common with Rand's thesis. To compare them is not even wrong; its conceptually incoherent. In fact, Dawkins wrote an entire book (The Extended Phenotype) as a rebuttal to all of the critics who labeled him as an advocate for cynical selfishness, and he added a chapter to the next edition of The Selfish Gene explicitly advocating for social cooperation. This author should maybe read more than the first line of Dawkins' Wikipedia page before he decides he's an expert and spouts this nonsense for everyone to read.