Shades of the ridiculous adulation of Darwin, here’s some ridiculous adulation of Dawkins, the current ultra-Darwinist in chief, as the “prophet of the selfish gene”:
Andrew Read opens the volume with an account of how his view of life was changed after reading The Selfish Gene on a lonely mountaintop in New Zealand. My own first reading had less of Mt. Sinai in it but was still special. I was in the flats of Michigan in my first year of grad school, and Richard Alexander and John Maynard Smith were already laying waste to the false idol of uncritical group selection. Alerted by Maynard Smith to the imminent appearance of The Selfish Gene, I watched for it, snapped it up immediately, and, though I am neither a night owl nor a rapid reader, I had devoured it whole by the early hours of the next morning.
These people are beyond parody, which saves me work. You have to pay to read the rest of the glowing testimonial, including how author Queller and his dad both seen da light and now realize that the selfish gene governs everyone’s behavior …  ÂÂ
Naw, I couldn’t make this stuff up.