“We are survival machines –
Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2025 5:42 am
The book 'The Selfish Gene' (1976) by Richard Dawkins opens with the question why people exist. In search of an answer to this question, Dawkins falls back on the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. The twist that Dawkins gives to it, however, is that he does not look at the organism as a whole, but reasons from the genes that make up the organism. People and animals are nothing more than survival machines, robot vehicles that blindly follow the orders of their genes.
robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
At the end of his book, Dawkins asks whether there are other forms of nepal phone number list evolution besides genes. Are there other replicators that are capable of varying, selecting, and inheriting themselves? According to Dawkins, there is. Besides the primordial soup of genes, there is another soup that is so obvious that we have so far overlooked it: the soup of human culture. Dawkins proposes to call “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission” a “meme .” “Just as genes spread through the gene pool by jumping from body to body in sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves through the meme pool by jumping from one brain to another in a process that, in the broadest sense of the word, can be called imitation.”
In 1986, Dawkins put it this way: “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions. […] If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” Fred Dretske, a philosopher who focuses on the field of self-consciousness, put it another way in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.”
robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
At the end of his book, Dawkins asks whether there are other forms of nepal phone number list evolution besides genes. Are there other replicators that are capable of varying, selecting, and inheriting themselves? According to Dawkins, there is. Besides the primordial soup of genes, there is another soup that is so obvious that we have so far overlooked it: the soup of human culture. Dawkins proposes to call “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission” a “meme .” “Just as genes spread through the gene pool by jumping from body to body in sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves through the meme pool by jumping from one brain to another in a process that, in the broadest sense of the word, can be called imitation.”
In 1986, Dawkins put it this way: “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions. […] If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” Fred Dretske, a philosopher who focuses on the field of self-consciousness, put it another way in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.”