I'm not really up on the history of these ideas, but my impression is that The Selfish Gene was a contribution in the same sense that Einstein's paper on specia

I'm not really up on the history of these ideas, but my impression is that The Selfish Gene was a contribution in the same sense that Einstein's paper on special relativity was a contribution. Neither really changed what one would predict the result of any experiment to be (the Lorentz transformation had already been produced before Einstein, by, err, Lorentz...), but rather in the perspective by which one views the field, which does affect future research.