Sat, 27 Mar 2021 06:05 UTC We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene. His selfish gene theory, he remarked in 1989, has become textbook orthodoxy, because it is merely a logical outgrowth of orthodox Neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image.
The image is misleading. Dawkins doesn t literally believe that genes are selfish entities with a will to replicate themselves. If they were, they would be like animating souls. In the Darwinian world where Dawkins lives, genes are not souls, but merely molecules ruled by the determinist laws of chemistry. And they are the result of a series of chemical accidents over millions of years, starting from the first self-replicating protein.
“The staircase was almost leaning out of the building,” Dawkins, 65, recalls by phone. “The house was actually in two parts. It was like an explosion went off and we had to come and put a giant puzzle back together.”
Three decades and much fundraising later, the fixer-upper has flowered into a museum in Columbus on Georgia’s Chattahoochee River. Now Dawkins hopes that the release of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film adaptation of August Wilson’s play starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, will put it firmly on the map.
Davis is magnificently caked in greasepaint and sweat and wears gold teeth and heavy padding, at once pantomime dame and tragic queen: she is capricious and domineering yet bears the weight of generational trauma. “They don’t care nothing about me,” she says of her white record producers. “All they want is my voice.”