Dawkins’s book became a best-seller in part, I think, because for many people it provided an excuse for human selfishness and cruelty. It was just our genes. We couldn’t help it. At the same time, medicine was revealing the physical causes underlying many psychological disturbances. It was comforting, perhaps, to disclaim responsibility for our bad behavior. I thought back to the stories of sadistic brutality and torture told by Holocaust survivors. Did Dawkins’s theory help to explain how, in a supposedly cultured, civilized country, mass killings and genocide on such a scale could have taken
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