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Can it be because he is not talking about evolutionary biology? He is taking a wider view of human evolution.

To me, it is more of a metaphor stretched past its breaking point. Is reading books really just an extension of the process of biological evolution? To me, it seems a very different kind of thing, and conflating it with biological evolution confuses more than it clarifies.

I don't think you have to be an evolutionary biologist to understand it or find patterns in evolution across timescales. Hawking is a brilliant man and I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff outside physics.

Argument from authority? Hawking's seems quite muddled but not all his remarks are entirely "out there" (see Pagel's "Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator", for example).