Over at the Genetic Literacy Project, editor Kenrick Vezina offers a particularly level-headed and constructive consideration of the debate over the fitness of the selfish-gene metaphor that my Aeon article “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” raised. Violence of the title aside, [Dobbs’s] point was not that we should go out and gather up all the copies of […]
Continue reading →Below is a corrective comment I left below Jerry Coyne’s second of two posts (his first is here) critiquing “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my recent article in Aeon about complaints from some biologists that the “Selfish Gene” framing of genetics and evolution was hindering both public and scientific understanding of genetics and evolution. This is rather a tempest […]
Continue reading →I find this clip amazing and unsettling. I’ve not read David and Goliath, the book they discuss here. But according to reviews and Gladwell’s own description, it follows the template of his prior books, which mine social science and psychology to create seemingly counterintuitive just-so stories about how people behave and society works. There’s often […]
Continue reading →