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’.
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.
But if we set selection pressures on one side, we can say something about the half-life of a replicator on the basis of its length alone. If the stretch of chromosome we choose to define as our replicator of interest is long, it will tend to have a shorter half-life than a shorter replicator, simply because it is more likely to be broken by crossing-over. A very long portion of chromosome ceases to deserve the title of replicator at all.
Evolutionary psychologists have noted the particular eagerness with which new babies are scanned for resemblances to their paternal, as opposed to maternal relatives – for the obvious reason that it is harder to be confident of paternity than maternity.
Physics appears to be a complicated subject, because the ideas of physics are difficult for us to understand. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child-rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds.
Scientists who use such language, whether at the level of the individual or the gene, know very well that it is only a figure of speech. Genes are just DNA molecules. You’d have to be barking mad to think that ‘selfish’ genes really have deliberate intentions to survive!
Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death.
The behaviour of physical, nonbiological objects is so simple that it is feasible to use existing mathematical language to describe it, which is why physics books are full of mathematics.
Just by chance, you could happen to give all your mother’s versions to your child, and none of your father’s. In this case, your father would have given no DNA to his grandchild. Of course such a scenario is highly unlikely, but as we go down to more distant descendants, total non-contribution of DNA becomes more possible.
Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of eons past.
I am not in favor of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religions in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defense. What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?