The Selfish Gene kontroversy: Dawkins, Mackie, Migley and Dawkins

This is about the kontroversy that hapened after Dawkins published his The Selfish Gene book.

I was reeding Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea wen i saw a referens to the kontroversy (p. 362). Having diskused it befor (with the mod on FRDB with the unrememberable name that begins with A), i resently diskovered that i hav akses thru my university to akademik papers. I used that akses to download the relevant papers and reed them. Il post them here in kase anyone els in interested/kurius about that kontroversy.

The outline is this:

It is interesting to note that the komonly used frase “the law of the jungle” (DA “jungleloven”), was aktualy populaized as meening somthing els than wat we use it to meen today. Mackie mentions this, but see also Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Law_of_the_Jungle

A benefit of reeding the texts of this kontroversy (i red Dawkins’ book years ago), was to (re-)diskover this nise quote about metafors:

“At times, gene language gets a bit tedious, and for brevity and vividness we shall lapse into metaphor. But we shall always keep a sceptical eye on our metaphors, to make sure they can be translated back into gene language if necessary.” (p. 45 in The Selfish Gene)

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