In my headcanon the downvotes are from dudes that read The Selfish Gene in high school and got some feeling of epiphany, and now did a bit of web searching that angered them.
Dawkins is a radical genetic reductionist, this book is his defense of this position. In the face of criticism he has moved on from the conclusions he presents in it towards a focus on phenotype reminiscent of older biological paradigms.
One obvious critique is that if he was correct in the book, evolution would have played out much differently and most likely not moved on from single cell organisms. This is why his loyalists over time has moved from studying animals to find something that seems like evidence to preserve the conclusions, to studying bacteria.
Another is that the most well known expression of genetic selfishness in humans would be cancer, which is clearly not the dominant mode of cellular reproduction.
There are more cleanly scientific objections, famously locusts, i.e. epigenetics.
He wrote at a time when the last remnants of aristotelian views of animals withered away, leaving an ideological vacuum. Previously the entire animal was thought to be the evolutionary atom, similar to an aristotelian form, against which Dawkins proposed his radical genetic reductionism.
The main reason that the book has been as influential as it has, is that it is aimed at laypeople and cherrypicks and frames things to drive home a political view that is much easier to understand and accept than the mess we're actually in.
Can you please edit out swipes and putdowns from your posts here? Your comment contains some interesting information and would be much better without that first sentence.
We've had to ask you this more than once recently:
