According to one popular account of evolution, genes are self-replicating entities that compete with each other through adaptations that enhance their own replication. They live "safe inside gigantic lumbering robots," wrote Richard Dawkins of Oxford University in The Selfish Gene, back in 1976. "We are their survival machines." Dawkins attacked any view that attributed biological adaptations to the operation of selection processes at higher levels of organization-organisms, groups, populations, or species.
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