Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene Quotes
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.
It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities
What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?