"James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
"More curious, perhaps, is Richard Dawkins' intellectual journey. When The Selfish Gene was published, he was widely assumed to be forwarding a socio-biological case for capitalistic self-interest. Now he has become something of a champion of the left."
People who thought that he was a defender of capitalistic self-interest, either never read him, or they misunderstood what they had read. Whether or not one agrees with the gene-centered view of evolution that has been championed by Dawkins (along with William Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Triviers), the only 'selfishness' that they were presupposing was that of replicators - genes and memes, not necessarily of individual organisms. In fact this whole approach to evolution arose out of efforts at understanding altruism. If natural selection is thought of as operating primarily at the level of individual organisms, then one would expect it to have weeded out altruistic tendencies. The fact it hasn't done so, was something that was very much in need of explanation.
Anyway, Dawkins, in his personal politics, has always had liberal/social democratic tendencies. Back in the 1960s when he was a grad student in the US, he was active in the antiwar movement, and he participated in Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination against Johnson, and then Humphrey. In the UK, Dawkins was a long time member of Labour, at least until he had a falling out with Tony Blair over Iraq.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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