I first read The Selfish Gene in the 1980s, as a graduate student in neurobiology and animal behaviour. I admired the clarity with which biologist Richard Dawkins distilled mid-twentieth-century work in evolutionary biology.

The idea at the core of the book, published in 1976, was thrillingly simple: that a living organism is just a gene’s way of making more organisms that can carry the gene down the generations.

Dawkins’s paradox: dissecting the body’s battle to keep selfish genes in check

Back then, The Selfish Gene seemed pretty harmless. Dawkins’s ideas tracked with mainstream sociobiology. It was a popular book that covered exactly the sort of ideas that my lecturers were already teaching.

Re-reading it now, with decades of scholarship in the history of biology under my belt, it seems less benign. The determinism baked into the “gene’s-eye view” in the book troubles me, as does the passivity of the organism in Dawkins’s telling — a “vehicle”, a mere “replicator”.…