There is something appealing in Richard Dawkins's conception of humans as throwaway survival machines for genes. It deflates self-importance. It accounts for the way parents come to see their children as more important than themselves: this isn't altruism but extended self-interest, looking after the genes. Still, if genetic survival is the reason for existence, then why am I not content to devoted all my time to watching the children? It doesn't feel like my raison d'être. But, Dawkins would say, there are the memes too. There are two flaws in the notion of the selfish gene: one is selfishness, the other is the gene.
In order to convey new concepts we have to coin new words or use existing ones in different senses: "World" in "The world is all that is the case" is a little eccentric, but acceptable; replace "world" with "elephant" and you have a wilful absurdity. Dawkins, however, tells us that "we can define a word how we like for our own purposes, provided we do so clearly and unambiguously". Of course, one can do what one wants. Alasdair MacIntyre calls his habitual actions leading to virtues "practices"; he would have been at liberty to call them "perversions", but however careful his definition of the term, his readers would then have continued to associate them with vice, not virtue. Dawkins acknowledges that genes have no self-awareness, no intentions; why does he call them selfish? His answer seems to be "trust me, I'm a scientist". Well, he knows his onions, and produces a fine array of information on flora and fauna, but his application of game theory to zoology has two flaws. First, it can explain anything at all, true or untrue; it can explain why an elephant has a trunk; it could also explain why an elephant had wings. Secondly, it explains in terms of bluff and double bluff - it psychologises zoology, compounding the intentional fallacy introduced with the notion of selfishness. Why?
Memes, the mental equivalent of genes, are "propagated not in sperms or eggs, but in newsprint, images or airwaves. Again, bodies and brains are the temporary vehicles, pressed into service by potentially immortal replicators". (Dawkins's review of his own book, The Observer, 15 October 1989). This is culture as mad cow disease. "... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous system of individual men the world over." (The Selfish Gene, 1st ed., p.206) At one level this is paranoid fantasy - an Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As metaphor, though, it has its merits, because ideas (a perfectly acceptable word; no need for this "meme" business) or their expressions, do indeed mutate, get passed on; the meaning or function of the word changes, they get truncated and extended just like genes. But which is the reality here, and which the metaphor? The gene is an intellectual construct. Dawkins's great discovery or definition is that intellectual constructs are like genes. The gene is related metaphorically to the idea, and not by any organic pathway Dawkins has found. So why does he push an ordinary simile to book length?
Look at it from the zoologist's point of view. How does the cuckoo survive? And the honeyguide? Now how does an idea survive? - because it is a matter of survival, not of truth or falsehood: if you can propagate your idea then it becomes true. So you rubbish everything prior to Darwin and other than zoology and dismiss anyone who disagrees. "The true reason for our existence is now beyond educated dispute"(same review). Why does he psychologise genes? In other words, why does he come up with this combination of zoology and utilitarianism? Symbiosis: the zoology gives a scientific air to his views on the meaning of life, which in turn make the science more approachable, more popular.
And lest it all seem too bleak, with spurious human consciousness transpiring as nothing more than interference between grasping genes and ruthless ideas, Dawkins brings in "altruism", his word for what utilitarians called "enlightened self-interest", which was blown out of the water by Dostoevsky. Dawkins's theory, like Thatcherism, is a totalitarian process that excludes human failures, and tries to disguise the fact by appealing to virtues denied by the theory itself: charity in Thatcherism, altruism in Dawkins's zoological Thatcherism.
The child asks "how does it work?", the adolescent asks "what does it mean?", the adult forecloses and asks "what's in it for me?". The Selfish Gene plays on the reader's hopes for an answer to the first two questions, but it's all about the third.