About a decade ago, at the request of Psychology Today magazine, I had an amusing debate with Richard Dawkins about testicles. Dawkins had famously proposed the metaphor of the "selfish gene" to explain how traits in organisms can be understood from the imagined point of view of a gene wishing to propagate itself. The underlying logic of the metaphor is compelling, yet it doesn't always seem to work gracefully—as in the case of human male genitalia.
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