Off-topic: my spouse is an expert in forensic genetic genealogy and wouldn't mind having a chat with a geneticist. Mind if I share your Mastodon handle?
@mjg59 I was just asking because I enjoyed reading "The blind watchmaker" and "The selfish gene" and am not in a position to verify what he's saying. B
ut those are from quite a while ago I guess. Not sure what he's currently up to tbh.
@FSMaxB As a geneticist I disagree about the books not contributing to the field: they changed the thinking around the functional unit of inheritance for a lot of geneticists. I consider them highly influential. The individual ideas were not his own but the way he expressed them and combined them in The Extended Phenotype was original and important — not just for popularisation but for science itself.
It goes without saying that this is regardless of his current behaviour.
@mjg59@FSMaxB Maybe so, but he changed/helped a lot for me to understand how evolution works and how/why it clashes with religion. As a non-academic/scientist. I would never be able to read one of your phd articles. Really no offense meant, I'm just offering a view from a different perspective.
@mjg59@FSMaxB Check question: is that a problem in the grand scheme of things? Or is that only a problem for specific technical evolution aspects? From a popular science point of view (educating a larger, ignorant audience, me included) the latter problably doesn't matter much.
@KoosPol@FSMaxB The problem with popular science is that you get to just make your own claims without them being reviewed by other experts, so things like "The gene is the unit of selection" end up as part of popular understanding despite it not being accurate
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