Quotes About Competition

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

Unless otherwise stated, 'altruistic behaviour' and 'selfish behaviour' will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.

Natural selection may usually be safely regarded as the differential survival of replicators relative to their alleles.

Time is the currency of this two-bidder auction.

A mutant individual who was prepared to go on just a little bit longer would always win. So the strategy of maintaining a fixed bidding limit is unstable.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves.

The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.' My colleague John Krebs and I have dubbed this the 'life/dinner principle'.

All that happens is that individuals who are accustomed to winning become even more likely to win, while individuals who are accustomed to losing become steadily more likely to lose.

Natural selection is the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other. They do this by exerting phenotypic effects on the world, and it is often convenient to see those phenotypic effects as grouped together in discrete 'vehicles' such as individual organisms. This gives substance to the orthodox doctrine that each individual body can be thought of as a unitary agent maximizing one quantity—'fitness'

The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.

evolutionarily stable strategy, an idea that he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur. A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioural policy. An example of a strategy is: 'Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him; if he retaliates run away.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

In a population of retaliators, no other strategy would invade, since there is no other strategy that does better than retaliator itself.

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.

Selection favours those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes, which in turn succeed in the presence of them.

even with selfish genes at the helm, nice guys can finish first.

Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world championship. Humanitiy needs a lesson in humility.