The book provides the practicing neuroscientist ample food for thought, but it is also accessible to the educated layperson. The neurobiology is only moderately detailed, and the writing style is lucid and elegant.
It is not that there is no “watchmaker”; there is no “watch.” Looking for one frames the problem the wrong way.
The system of inheritance of ideas is independent of the system of inheritance of genes. All this is pointing steadily to a difference in being human, to a complex mind indeed adapted for culture, that is, to a distinctive human genius.
The fundamental claim is that selfish people out reproduce unselfish ones, but superimposed on that is the claim that (really) selfish people who are self-deceived into thinking they are unselfish out reproduce selfish people who know their own selfishness.
Since genes are not moral agents, they cannot be selfish, and, equally, they cannot be altruistic. But genes can transmit information.
Each organism is in pursuit of—that is, values—its own proper life, which is all that the (nonhuman) individual organism either can or ought to pursue. It turns out, however, that values can be held intrinsically only as they are inclusively distributed.
Having demonstrated that the ambiguous modern scientific and technological enterprise has its origin in something as ignoble as religion, David Noble apparently expects us to join with him in disowning it.