The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicle.
Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust- storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time. Populations may last a long while, but they are constantly blending with other populations and so losing their identity.
We don’t usually see this happening but, like detectives arriving on the scene after a crime, we can piece together what must have happened from the evidence that remains.
The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy ‘to do your believing for you’. The de luxe model is advertised as ‘Capable of believing things they wouldn’t believe in Salt Lake City’.
I define a replicator as anything in the universe of which copies are made.
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
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.
This is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religious book. I have done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again.
Listen to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University: ‘AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.’121.
To describe the forests of the world as its ‘lungs’ does no harm, and it might do some good if it encourages people to preserve them. But the rhetoric of holistic harmony can degenerate into a kind of dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism.
A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.
An active replicator is any replicator whose nature has some influence over its probability of being copied. For example a DNA molecule, via protein synthesis, exerts phenotypic effects which influence whether it is copied: this is what natural selection is all about.
A passive replicator is a replicator whose nature has no influence over its probability of being copied.
A further important point is that Maynard Smith was seeking the ‘best’ strategy in only a special sense. In fact he was seeking an ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’ or ESS.
Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical ‘hurt’ professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan against the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed carrying a banner reading ‘God Bless Hitler’. In.
If a program or strategy is successful, this means that copies of it will tend to become more numerous in the population of programs and will ultimately become almost universal. It will therefore come to be surrounded by copies of itself. If it is to remain universal, therefore, it must be successful when competing against copies of itself, successful compared with rare different strategies that might arise by mutation or invasion.
Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God’s existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable.
I shall be using the name ‘history-deniers’ for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.
To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.
The whole purpose of our search for a ‘unit of selection’ is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.