The Selfish Gene

17 Feb 2022 06:28 - 10 Dec 2022 01:40
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    • book by Richard Dawkins and a well-known example of agential refactoring. What the title means is not that genes are selfish in a moral sense, we can't judge them, they are SELFish in the sense of being the real units of natural selection, that is, they are effectively agential.
    • Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.