It seems to me that Richard Dawkins' talk of the selfish gene is an attempt both to acknowledge that we act in a manner that--viewed from a first-person perspective--transcends selfishness but at the same time give a kind of primacy to selfishness in explaining how noble motivations arise from a metaphorically selfish gene. But isn't it a sign of desperation that he has to resort to metaphor in order to maintain the primacy of selfishness?
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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