Fascinating. Reminded me of the The Selfish Gene, especially the part discussing the opposing objectives of the mother and offspring.
However, "Selfish" genes can do some rather unequivocally selfless things. E.g. symbiosis.
Even if you mean altruism though, a gene for altruistic behavior can still be selfish. For example, if Gene X causes an organism to sacrifice something for another organism that carries also carries Gene X, the gene will be promoting its own survival.
You seem to be arguing completely based on the title of the book, which itself makes clear that the title is provocative but not entirely accurate, which makes me think you have not read it.
E.g. when given choice, humans tend to help each other much more than a selfish gene model would behave, i.e. help people and strangers you have no connection with.
It's difficult to defend a book's premise from someone who hasn't read it and just wants to debate the meaning of the title.
But I don't want to debate its title, instead its reductionist view of people nothing more as vehicles for the immortal DNA.
Anyway here is the part that I was referencing:
The self-selecting process predicted by the selfish-gene model
becomes quickly skewed when correlations in reproduction
exist which give rise to less than complete mixing of alleles
in the gene pool. This may occur through several mechanisms,
including mate selection and partial geographic isolation.
The gene-centered view, Dr. Bar-Yam points out, can be
applied directly only to populations in which sexual
reproduction causes complete allelic mixing. (Such
populations are called "panmictic" in biology.)
Many organisms are part of populations that do not
satisfy this condition. Thus, the gene-centered view and
the concept of the "selfish gene" does not describe the
dynamics of evolution, Dr. Bar-Yam concludes.
>But I don't want to debate its title, instead its reductionist view of people nothing more as vehicles for the immortal DNA.
The problem is that the book does not expound this reductionist view; it is only your conception of the book (likely based on the title) that does.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly
programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Cherry picking quotes out of the context of an entire book can get you to any conclusion you want to come to, especially if you don't know the rest of the contents of the book.
I encourage you to read the book before taking a side that you read an article about.
EDIT: Started reading it:
The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in...
We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA—but there are many...