Even without physical abduction, isn’t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?
Real science can be hard but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle.
In principle, we may consider any portion of chromosome as a potential candidate for the title of replicator.
Root of All Evil?
The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not ‘meant’ to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, ‘But we’re working on it.
Natural selection may usually be safely regarded as the differential survival of replicators relative to their alleles.
The other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the overweening confidence with which the religions assert minute details for which they neither have, nor could have, any evidence. Perhaps it is the very fact that there is no evidence to support theological opinions, either way, that fosters the characteristic draconian hostility towards those of slightly different opinion, especially, as it happens, in the very field of Trinitarianism.
We are fundamentally interested in natural selection, therefore in the differential survival of replicating entities such as genes. Genes are favoured or disfavoured relative to their alleles as a consequence of their phenotypic effects upon the world. Some of these phenotypic effects may be incidental consequences of others, and have no bearing on the survival chances, one way or the other, of the genes concerned.
Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally ‘respected’.
Social habits that are universal among all peoples, such as laughing, smiling, weeping, religion, and a statistical tendency to avoid incest, are likely to have been present in our common ancestors too.
The word allele is nowadays customarily used of cistrons but it is clearly easy, and in the spirit of this chapter, to generalize it to any portion of chromosome.
As another aside, it has occurred to various people, including Robert Graves in his epic novel King Jesus, that poor Judas Iscariot has received a bad deal from history, given that his ‘betrayal’ was a necessary part of the cosmic plan. The same could be said of Jesus’ alleged murderers. If Jesus wanted to be betrayed and then murdered, in order that he could redeem us all, isn’t it rather unfair of those who consider themselves redeemed to take it out on Judas and on Jews down the ages?
H. L. Mencken, again with characteristic cynicism, defined conscience as the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
Per quanto noi possiamo deplorare una cosa, questo non le impedisce di essere vera.
An arbitrarily defined length of chromosome, or potential replicator, may be said to have an expected half-life, measured in generations.
Phenotypic effects of genes, whether at the level of intracellular biochemistry, gross bodily morphology, or extended phenotype, are potentially devices by which genes lever themselves into the next generation, or barriers to their doing so. Incidental side-effects are not always effective as tools or barriers, and we do not bother to regard them as phenotypic expressions of genes, either at the conventional or the extended phenotype level.
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.
As Germaine Greer wrote, what these people really love and do best is pandemonium.
What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data – a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world.
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.