The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins  ## Metadata - Author: **Richard Dawkins** - Full Title: The Selfish Gene - Category: #books - Tags: #biology ## Highlights - The stinging behaviour of worker bees is a very effective defence against honey robbers. But the bees who do the stinging are kamikaze fighters. In the act of stinging, vital internal organs are usually torn out of the body, and the bee dies soon afterwards. Her suicide mission mayhave saved the colony's vital food stocks, but she herself is not around to reap the benefits. Byour definition this is an altruistic behavioural (Page 6) - The stinging behaviour of worker bees is a very effective defence against honey robbers. But the bees who do the stinging are kamikaze fighters. In the act of stinging, vital internal organs are usually torn out of the body, and the bee dies soon afterwards. Her suicide mission mayhave saved the colony's vital food stocks, but she herself is not around to reap the benefits. Byour definition this is an altruistic behavioural act (Page 6) - Killing people outside war is the most seriouslyregarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however.Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. Ahuman foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba (Page 10) - Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals (Page 10) - Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us away in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever (Page 12) - Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us away in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people (Page 12) - It is differences that matter in the competitive struggle to survive (Page 37) - The cornerstone of the argument, as given earlier, was the assumption that genes are potentially immortal (Page 40) - The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting. Human typistswill be needed for many decades yet. (Page 49) - Each one of us knows,from the evidence of our own introspection, that, at least in one modern survival machine, this purposiveness has evolved the property we call 'consciousness'. I am not philosopher enough to discuss what this means, but fortunately it does not matter for our present purposes because it is easy to talk about machines that behave as ^/motivated by a purpose, and to leave open the question whether they actually are conscious (Page 50) - Computers do not yet play chess as well as human grand masters (Page 51) - Afor Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot is (Page 53) - One of the most interesting methods of predicting the future is simulation (Page 57) - The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjectiveconsciousness. Why (Page 59) - Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives. But as brains became more highly developed, they took over more and more of the actual policy decisions, using tricks like learning and simulation in doing so. The logical conclusion to this trend, not yet reached in any species, would be for the genes to give the survival machine a single overall policy instruction: do whatever you think best to keep us alive. (Page 60) - Tags: #biology #evolution - all the five strategies I have mentioned are turned loose upon one another in a computer simulation, only one of them, retaliator, emerges as evolutionarily stable.* Prober—retaliator is nearly stable. Dove is not stable, because a population of doves would be invaded by hawks and bullies. Hawk is not stable, because (Page 74) - If all the five strategies I have mentioned are turned loose upon one another in a computer simulation, only one of them, retaliator, emerges as evolutionarily stable.* Prober—retaliator is nearly stable. Dove is not stable, (Page 74) - Tags: #game-theory - An arbitrary label like a green beard is just one wayin which a gene might 'recognize' copies of itself in other individuals (Page 89) - We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution (Page 194) - animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of thegenes 'for'that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animalperforming (Page 253) - An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of thegenes 'for'that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animalperforming it (Page 253) - If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successiveyears in scientific journals (Page 325)