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.
When we talk of a program as ‘doing better’ or as being ‘successful’ we are notionally measuring success as capacity to propagate copies of the same program in the next generation: in reality this is likely to mean that a successful program is one which promotes the survival and reproduction of the animal adopting it.
Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others.
Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected.
He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in.
What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope?
But religious faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation, which usually seems to trump all others. This is mostly, I suspect, because of the easy and beguiling promise that death is not the end, and that a martyr’s heaven is especially glorious. But it is also partly because it discourages questioning, by its very nature.
The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.
The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all.
A DNA molecule in the germ-line of an individual who happens to die young, or who otherwise fails to reproduce, should not be called a dead-end replicator. Such germ-lines are, as it turns out, terminal. They fail in what may metaphorically be called their aspiration to immortality. Differential failure of this kind is what we mean by natural selection.
But whether it succeeds in practice or not, any germ-line replicator is potentially immortal. It ‘aspires’ to immortality but in practice is in danger of failing.
Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?
Particular interest attaches to one of the four, the active germ-line replicator, for it is, I suggest, the ‘optimon’, the unit for whose benefit adaptations exist.
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.
Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine.
Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.
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.
Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?
By the way, it had to happen – a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.35.
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.