Deluded Dawkins - Survival Machines

We are survival machines , robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.

What I have always found astonishing about this paragraph is the way in which it brings in metaphors - most notably the idea of the machine - and treats it as an exact simplification of the complexity of living creatures. The use of "selfish" at this stage - before he has even explained what he means (or thinks he means) is also a very poor metaphor, especially as later on in the book, he sloppily uses it in various senses, mixing them all up. Just look at this sentence!

I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Later, when taken to pieces by Mary Midgeley for such a sloppy piece of writing, he would say that he was using "selfish" in a purely technical sense; Dawkins, in his response to her review, claimed that she "no good point to make" and argued that the details of her criticisms were incorrect because they were based on a misunderstanding and misapplication of a technical language! That has to be a most pathetic piece of avoidance strategy when a thinker is caught out using sloppy language. What is purely technical about the phrase "ruthless selfishness"?