Moral In The Selfish Gene

Today in class some people said that The Selfish Gene was a didactic book, at first I thought: "sure why not? it has examples,"but obviously I was forgetting what didactic meant.  Once I remembered the meaning I thought: "what was I thinking?" and that is the clear response you should have towards The selfish gene being didactic, there is nothing moral about this book. As Dawkins himself said: "I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved"(2).

To make my point clearer I will make you see chapter 8 as if it had any moral, to see if it makes sense. We will omit what Dawkins said in chapter one.

Lets start with a complete scenery of the situation:

Sammy is in Mr. Tangen's Pre-Ap English class. He is a very influential kid who likes to learn new things from books. He  got home, tired of school. And started preparing your mind for the everlasting 8th chapter of The Selfish Gene. He wanted to understand how evolution has contributed to human behavior, and tried to find some useful ideas for life (once again, he has omitted the first pages of chapter 1). Sammy read the following: "Using our metaphor of the individual as a survival machine behaving as if it had a purpose of preserving its genes, we can talk about a conflict between parents and the young, a battle of the generations"(131).  As soon as Sammy read this his mother came in. Sammy wanted a new cellphone and he knew that it was his time to start begging for one. Suddenly his mind recalled something from The Selfish Gene: "The battle is a subtle one, and no holds are barred on either side. The child is too small and week to bully its parents physically, but it uses every phycological weapon at its disposal: lying,cheating,deceiving, exploiting [...](131)." As soon as his mind came to this quote, he started bribing his mom on doing more chores and on lying about how his grades have been better so he could obtain his "purpose of preserving his genes" which in Sammy's case they will help him preserve the social genes.

As you can see dear old Sammy ended up quite influenced with the selfish gene, that is why what Dawkins meant was just for evolutionary reasons. If the book were moral and influenced people as much as it did for Sammy it would make the human behavior even worse than it is now. If we did not question our existence as we have done for the past few decades, what Dawnkins said would be completely normal, we would have an animal mentality that would just go on with life. But we have tried to avoid this seeing the world in a different perspective, and clearly this way of life, proposed in the book (if it were moral) is not the right path, at least for the hope of making humans ethical creatures. 

So I just thank Dawnkins for writing: "This Book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would extract a moral from it, read it as a warning"(3). There are a lot of Sammys in the world, imagine if this was nit written.