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selfish genes

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?
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