Edited sentence: Although the successor of Thomas Huxley and Bertrand Russell in the public imagination, his predecessors were unquestionably intellects of the first rank: Dawkins is in many ways similar to Ernst Haeckel.Dennis Noble provides a more nuanced view from an outstanding working scientist.The evolution of altruism is currently a very hot topic in biology, and by no means fully understood.This is contrary to his unfortunate assertion that we are nothing but "lumbering robots" to propagate our genes which has taken hold in some parts of the popular imagination