The Selfish Gene was amazing to me when I first read it in the early 2000s and after reading The God Delusion I dove into his back catalog and followed his publications for a while but it honestly felt like throughout his books he largely kept re-hashing the same ideas with little novel insight, only occasionally refining his rhetoric or looking for new ways to present what he had already said. In retrospect, I struggle to even define what distinguished one book from another when it comes to everything he published after The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.
It felt a bit like he took the "publish or perish" approach from academia to publishing. It also feels like his decline in academic publishing (according to Wikipedia, his last academic papers seem to have been published in 2004 and his last popular articles in 2008) correlates with his infatuation with his then-celebrity status during the New Atheism wave and his eventual descent into anti-progressivism (or more charitably: Twitter drama) and his hyperfixation on Islam (which incidentally mirrors the development of a lot of more mundane content creators who got their start in "debunking" creationists and in some cases have come full (semi?) circle to Christian conservatism and anti-atheism).
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The Selfish Gene was amazing to me when I first read it in the early 2000s and after reading The God Delusion I dove into his back catalog and followed his publications for a while but it honestly felt like throughout his books he largely kept re-hashing the same ideas with little novel insight, only occasionally refining his rhetoric or looking for new ways to present what he had already said. In retrospect, I struggle to even define what distinguished one book from another when it comes to everything he published after The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.
It felt a bit like he took the "publish or perish" approach from academia to publishing. It also feels like his decline in academic publishing (according to Wikipedia, his last academic papers seem to have been published in 2004 and his last popular articles in 2008) correlates with his infatuation with his then-celebrity status during the New Atheism wave and his eventual descent into anti-progressivism (or more charitably: Twitter drama) and his hyperfixation on Islam (which incidentally mirrors the development of a lot of more mundane content creators who got their start in "debunking" creationists and in some cases have come full (semi?) circle to Christian conservatism and anti-atheism).