Is the Gene Selfish‪?‬

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene turns fifty. It changed how a generation talks about life — and the word "selfish" is still doing work it was never fit for.

This book takes his logic one step past where he stopped. Not denial; an audit. Split genes, epigenetic inheritance, niche construction and developmental biology have moved the ground under his premises. Some claims fell. Some were loose from the start. Some were only ever metaphors that hardened into claims. And some — intragenomic conflict, genomic imprinting — still stand as the finest work his perspective produced.

Then the harder question. If a gene is not selfish but merely persistent, what is a human being?