on the selfish gene
In the introduction:
Which level in the hierarchy of life will turn out to be the inevitably "selfish" level, at which natural selection acts? The selfish species? The selfish group? The selfish organism? The selfish ecosystem? Most of these could be argued, and most have been uncritically assumed by one or another author, but all of them are wrong.The selfish level itself being inevitable because if you are to accept natural selection/"survival of the fittest" (a phrase which Dawkins rarely used...) the logical conclusion is that selfish actors must win over non-selfish actors. Something that deserves (and receives) much explanation is how you can end up with "altruistic" behavior from organisms whose fundamental constituents are selfish. Plus, optimally selfish behavior doesn't actually look like ravenous totalitarian uncompromising destruction and domination of everything in one's path. The strategies that happened to favor the long term outcome ended up outlasting the more colloquially "selfish" ones. and evolution's been going on for a long time
In chapter 2, The Replicators
The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation — rocks, galaxies, ocean waves — are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.With a teleological view of these stable patterns in nature, one might ask, why are these systems arranged the way they are?, as if they were set up to serve some purpose. In nature, structures exist as we see them because many stochastic "attempts" arose, and the unstable ones didn't last.
In chapter 3, Immortal Coils
A gene that made old bodies develop cancer could be passed on to numerous offspring because the individuals would reproduce before they got cancer... senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.Why don't organisms live forever? That is a difficult scenario to imagine, if you dig in. The discussion at the end of the book of splurge-weed and bottle-wrack may be relevant here. Organisms having successive generations where individuals start "from scratch" and have tweaks made to their genes have the advantage of adaptation over the course of generations. At a deeper level, it all started with replicators, not accumulators. The former succeeded because it actually produced enough (imperfect) replicas to outcompete any kind of centenarian strategy. It was more important for many copies to be made than for individuals to live for extended periods.
In chapter 6, Genesmanship
When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on."Something functionally equivalent" jumped out at me here. I think this isomorphism may be difficult to make (and this may not be important, but as a recently inducted disciple of GEB, I am contractually bound to be particular about the "functional equivalence" of brains and other computational devices). Where does this "sense" that we have — something like hand-eye coordination — come from? I don't think there is math being done at all in the brain, consciously perceptible or otherwise. Of course things can be described mathematically in the brain, by other brains. ultimately what converts visual input into the precise movement of the arm to catch an object is a chemical reaction. What converts the input to a math function into its outputs is a set of laws and axioms in the abstract (right?)
In chapter 10, You Scratch My Back, I'll Ride on Yours
Stotting, far from being a signal to the other gazelles, is really aimed at the predators. It is noticed by the other gazelles and it affects their behavior, but this is incidental, for it is primarily selected as a signal to the predator. Translated roughly into English it means: "Look how high I can jump, I am obviously such a fit and healthy gazelle, you can't catch me, you would be much wiser to try and catch my neighbor who is not jumping so high!"Apparently a pretty selfish behavior.
There is a temptation to wax mystical about the social insects...An incredible phrase. I have seen similar forms before, where an adjective is used like an adverb, so I don't think this is an error. I wonder about the origins of this (you'd expect "wax mystically")
Of particular interest are 'subtle cheats' who appear to be reciprocating, but who consistently pay back slightly less than they receive. It is even possible that man's swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.
In chapter 11, Memes
(I
didn't realize it was in this book that the term was coined!)
The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence.This chapter had a different character, which I embarrassingly admit to noticing, due to the common modern usage of the word. Now, to most, it cheaply refers to a funny image on the internet. Though occasionally it shows a hint of going deeper when used to classify a trend in online behavior, like a joke and all its clever variants and subversions. Many would call a joke which gets snowcloned into many unexpected contexts a "meme".
Perhaps we could call a church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written traditions, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes.This defines a memetic analog of the biological organism, which is indicated to be a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting genes. Companies and governments also come to mind as examples of memetic organisms, but these can surely also exist on smaller scales
In chapter 12, Nice Guys Finish First
To be non-envious means to be quite happy if the other player wins just as much money as you do, so long as you both thereby win more from the banker.The context of this is a technical description of strategies for the Prisoner's Dilemma, but it obviously applies more generally. I think a zero-sum view of the world is one of the most acutely destructive forces on happiness
The shadow of the future must be long. But how long must it be?how far ahead should you plan?
It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the first two operational atomic bombs were used — against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them — to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.The concept could have been demonstrated - - and the point communicated - - without killing anyone. the physicists, if Einstein is representative, were generally pacifistic
In chapter 13, The Long Reach of the Gene
All that genes can directly influence is protein synthesis. A gene's influence upon a nervous system, or, for that matter, upon the color of an eye or the wrinkliness of a pea, is always indirect.Everything beyond protein synthesis is an indirect effect of the genes. So the boundary of the organism's main is somewhat arbitrary — the extended phenotype includes the living and inanimate elements of the organism's environment
Other notable excerpts
The caddis lives inside its house, and the parasites live inside their hosts
We can see the gene as sitting at the center of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power. And an object in the world is the center of a converging web of influences from many genes sitting in many organisms.
Mole rats are homocoprophagous, which is a polite way of saying that they eat one another's faeces (not exclusively: that would run foul of the laws of the universe)