The Self-ish Gene: Retroactive Tropes in Richard Dawkins’s Evolutionary Logic

ABSTRACT

Building on recent developments in Lacanian rhetorical criticism, this essay demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary theory posits genetic determinism without a clear definition of the gene. It makes this case through close readings of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the landmark text of neo-Darwinian genetics. It demonstrates how Dawkins uses metaphors to substitute a single determinate agent in place of the genome’s essential complexity. Despite Dawkins’s admission that he could not define the gene, his metaphors give his “self-ish gene” a sense of unity and coherence that allows him to describe all other levels of life (organisms, species, ecosystems) as reducible to it. Dawkins’s use of metaphor leverages a broader reductionist logos, one that operates in discourses far beyond the biological. Methodologically, the essay advances the study of scientific metaphor by focusing on the formal properties of metaphor and the ways they afford logical closure.

KEYWORDS:

• Evolution
• genetics
• Jacques Lacan
• metaphor
• Richard Dawkins

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Lori Abeles, Jonnet Abeles, the journal’s editor, and its two anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided valuable advice during this essay’s drafting.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Scholars have frequently attended to The Selfish Gene’s troubling neoliberalism, sexism, and determinism (e.g., Journet; Midgley 3–4, 39–40, 115; Nixon 359–60).