Quotes About Replicators

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. . . . We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

An organism is the physical unit associated with one single life cycle. Replicators that gang up in multicellular organisms achieve a regularly recycling life history, and complex adaptations to aid their preservation, as they progress through evolutionary time.

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.*

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Evolution is the external and visible manifestation of the differential survival of alternative replicators (Dawkins 1978a). Genes are replicators; organisms and groups of organisms are best not regarded as replicators; they are vehicles in which replicators travel about.

Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators

Replicators may be classified in two ways. They may be 'active' or 'passive', and, cutting across this classification, they may be 'germ-line' or 'dead-end' replicators.

Most of the DNA molecules in our bodies are dead-end replicators. They may be the ancestors of a few dozen generations of mitotic replication, but they will definitely not be long-term ancestors.

The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.

If replicators exist that are active, variants of them with certain phenotypic effects tend to out-replicate those with other phenotypic effects. If they are also germ-line replicators, these changes in relative frequency can have long-term, evolutionary impact.

It is these phenotypic effects that we see as adaptations to survival. When we ask whose survival they are adapted to ensure, the fundamental answer has to be not the group, nor the individual organism, but the relevant replicators themselves.

Replicators need not last forever. They need only last long enough to produce additional replicators [fecundity] that retain their structure largely intact [fidelity]. The relevant longevity concerns the retention of structure through descent. Some entities, though structurally similar, are not copies because they are not related by descent.

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival.

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc.

Most of the replicators in the world have won their place in it by defeating all available alternative alleles. The weapons with which they won, and the weapons with which their rivals lost, are their respective phenotypic consequences

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group.

Two kinds of factor will affect this half-life. Firstly, replicators whose phenotypic effects render them successful at their business of propagating themselves will tend to have a long half-life. Replicators with longer half-lives than their alleles will come to predominate in the population, and this is the familiar process of natural selection.

Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection.

replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Active replicators have some effect on the world, which influences their chances of surviving.

It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.

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'