Contact
Privacy
Book: The Selfish Gene
Quotes of Book: The Selfish Gene
TOP TAGS :rapedcontractsrisking-it-alltravel-writingnicknamesvikingthomas-mertonpurity

  1. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.
    book-quotescience

  2. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.
    book-quote

  3. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
    book-quote

  4. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
    book-quote

  5. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile. Until recently this was true of man too. Most animals die in childhood, many never get beyond the egg stage. Starvation and other causes of death are the ultimate reasons why populations cannot increase indefinitely.
    book-quote

  6. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
    book-quote

  7. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    There is bound to be variation in the population of males in their predisposition to be faithful husbands. If females could recognize such qualities in advance, they could benefit themselves by choosing males possessing them. One way for a female to do this is to play hard to get for a long time, to be coy. Any male who is not patient enough to wait until the female eventually consents to copulate is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband.
    book-quote

  8. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
    book-quote

  9. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
    book-quotememetics

  10. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us-from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator-molecules called DNA- but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.
    book-quotescience

  11. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance
    book-quotescienceignorancerandom

  12. Richard Dawkins _ The Selfish Gene

    For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.
    book-quote
Categories