From Ian Gilbert
Elaine Morgan is unfair to Richard Dawkins and to many readers (22 July, p 53). She says that the presentation in The Selfish Gene of “the gene’s eye view, which Dawkins originally propounded only as one possible way of looking at things, has come to be regarded as the only way of looking at things”. She speaks of this book’s “impact on millions of non-academic readers”. The remainder of her review implicitly assumes that The Selfish Gene is all that Dawkins wrote on the subject.
She makes no mention of Dawkins’ 1982 book, The Extended Phenotype, which he has said he considers to be his most original contribution. This argues powerfully for what Morgan claims is the “territory” of Denis Noble, author of The Music of Life: Biology beyond the genome, that is, it describes “the highly complex ways that genes interact with other genes, with the tens of thousands of different proteins they generate, with the cellular environment and with the wider environment of the organism”. Noble’s book was, however, published 24 years after The Extended Phenotype.
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