Selfish Gene Theory Quotes

It shouldn't surprise us that members of the same culture that gave us capitalism as the dominant economic model - based as it is on the insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy human communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot) - would give us variants of the selfish gene theory as the dominant biological model - based as it is on the equally insane notion that selfish individuals all attempting to maximally exploit each other will somehow create stable and healthy natural communities (never mind that it never has and functionally cannot). Both are justifications for what the dominant culture does: steal from everyone else. Absent ~ Derrick Jensen

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies. ~ Richard Dawkins

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We've repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for wha ~ Max Tegmark

That is my theory to explain the I don't knows. It's human. ~ Gene Weingarten

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. ~ Richard Dawkins

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. ~ Richard Dawkins

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. ~ Ernst W. Mayr

It was a kindness that was hard to understand ... and the most selfishness she's ever shown. ~ Bisco Hatori

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.* 12 ~ Richard Dawkins

I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles. ~ Richard Dawkins

There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message - Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene. ~ Amit Ray

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. ~ Richard Dawkins

But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies. ~ Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that. ~ Charles Jencks

An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine. ~ Richard Dawkins

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness. ~ Richard Dawkins

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. ~ Richard Dawkins

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The ~ Michael Crichton

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't - and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally. ~ Daniel Quinn

Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment ... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator - an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus. ~ James Gleick

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. ~ Matt Ridley

A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness. ~ Richard Dawkins

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. ~ Richard Dawkins

Nature, red in tooth and claw. ~ Alfred Tennyson

No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. ~ Richard Dawkins

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. ~ Steven Pinker

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods. ~ Gene Kim

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. ~ David Deutsch

Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord.

The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong.

The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene. ~ Arthur Koestler

Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. ~ Limor Shifman

The sad thing is most people have to check with someone before they do the things that make them happy. We're all passing through; the least we can do is be happy, and the only way to do that is by being selfish. ~ Gene Simmons

I never understood the theory, once popular among doctors, that blamed mental disorders on too little or too much mother love. My own mother was my darling. ~ Gene Tierney