Quotes About Survival

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve.

The evolutionary importance of the fact that genes control embryonic development is this: it means that genes are at least partly responsible for their own survival in the future, because their survival depends on the efficiency of the bodies in which they live and which they helped to build.

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'

Natural selection favours genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.

Kamikaze behaviour and other forms of altruism and cooperation by workers are not astonishing once we accept the fact that they are sterile. The body of a normal animal is manipulated to ensure the survival of its genes both through bearing offspring and through caring for other individuals containing the same genes.

The gene's extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.

Los depredadores parecen bellamente diseñados para cazar a sus presas, mientras que las presas parecen igual de bellamente diseñadas para escapar de ellos. ¿De qué lado está Dios?.

Within each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so that the inheritable traits (genes) of the reproductively successful become more numerous in the next generation. This is natural selection: the non-random differential reproduction of genes.

What makes a gene good? As a first approximation I said that what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival machines—bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene.

Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.

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.

Any effect that a meme has on the behaviour of a body bearing it may influence that meme's chance of surviving.

It is, of course, true that 'Memes are utterly dependent upon genes, but genes can exist and change quite independently of memes' (Bonner 1980). But this does not mean that the ultimate criterion for success in meme selection is gene survival.

We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design. Each species is well fitted to its particular way of life.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes.

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.

Good' genes are blindly selected as those that survive in the gene pool.

If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn't the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years?

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

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

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.