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Originally Posted by Boogster
Frankly, I find the idea that reproduction is the central motivation of human behaviour a little difficult to grasp.
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You haven't lived.
Seriously though, while I would be reluctant to say anything is "the" central motivator in human behaviour it seems fairly obvious from looking at human cultures generally that reproduction is (directly and indirectly) _one_ of the central motivators that influences pretty much everything we do. Sometimes it's crude and obvious (i.e. someone wearing a particular type of clothing to attract a partner) other times it's not necessarily clear (even to the person who is performing the action) - e.g. career choice.
I would say that at the level of complexity of human beings enjoy, one-to-one mapping between sets of genes and behaviour is unlikely to be sufficient for explaining most things. Some of the evo-psych theories which use adaptationist explanaitons for everything suffer from being unnecessarily over-confident. In many cases, rather than positing just-so stories, it'd be more honest to say that we simply don't know. However, a just-so story is perfectly valid if someone thinks a behaviour is proof against Darwinian theory (e.g. "gay genes" or something like that).
The "selfish" gene theory taken it's most basic form is pretty much a truism, but I find the name unhelpful as it implies a range of things which Dawkins decidedly did not mean.