The Selfish Gene changed me. Reading it, I realised I didn’t have to indulge the “wishes” of my genes. I could have wishes of my own, and that felt enormously freeing.
Richard Dawkins asks you to look at evolution from the genes’ point of view. Genes “use” organisms to get themselves copied; natural selection can favour variants whose effects make that more likely. The “wishes” of genes are a metaphor, of course. They don’t sit around making plans for me.
That perspective also helps explain altruism. Helping a relative can help copies of the same genes survive, even when the helper pays a cost. Worker bees raising sisters are a familiar example, though the degree of relatedness depends on how many males the queen mated with, and the benefits and costs of helping matter too.
Understanding why a desire might exist didn’t oblige me to follow it. Something could have a perfectly plausible evolutionary explanation, and I could still decide that I wanted something else.
