Richard Dawkins did not invent the gene’s-eye view of evolution. W. D. Hamilton and George C. Williams worked it out in the 1960s, and John Maynard Smith gave it game theory. What Dawkins did in The Selfish Gene (1976) was make it the common frame. Selection acts on replicators, the genes. Bodies are the vehicles genes build to copy themselves.
The gene’s-eye view settles what an adaptation is for. It serves the replication of the genes that build it, not the individual, the group, or the species. Once that is settled, the mind looks like a set of adaptations with jobs to do. That footing is what evolutionary psychology stands on, and it is why the mental programs of John Tooby make sense as programs. Daniel Dennett draws out what the same idea does to meaning and design.
I also read him for how he writes. His prose is poetic, rare in science, and still compellingly rational, with no lovely sentence carrying an argument the evidence will not. Unweaving the Rainbow is his answer to the charge that explaining a thing kills its wonder, and the book is its own evidence.
He is also one of the Four Horsemen, and After New Atheism says what I think that argument achieved.