> Doesn't this statement kind of contradict the whole of evolutionary
> psychology, since morality and empathy presumably evolved as a way of
> perpetuating the selfish gene?
>
> Not if the environment changes faster than the genome does, which
> sounds like what's happened the past several thousand years.
>
Chris is talking about one school of evolutionary biology, which would hold that we evolved to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya," and of which Dawkins takes a dim view. In one of his more sweeping statements on the question, he wrote:
"I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of *A Devil's Chaplain*) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, *The Selfish Gene*, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics."
http://www.richarddawkins.net/articles/2488
This is actually one of the rare occasions when I agree with Dawkins, or at least find his perspective more plausible than the other options.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."