## Metadata - Author: [[Richard Dawkins]] - Full Title: The Selfish Gene - Category: #books ## Highlights - Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=543)) - 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. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup’ in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. ([Location 3795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=3795)) - So far I have talked of memes as though it was obvious what a single unit-meme consisted of. But of course it is far from obvious. I have said a tune is one meme, but what about a symphony: how many memes is that? Is each movement one meme, each recognizable phrase of melody, each bar, each chord, or what? I appeal to the same verbal trick as I used in Chapter 3. There I divided the ‘gene complex’ into large and small genetic units, and units within units. The ‘gene’ was defined, not in a rigid all-or-none way, but as a unit of convenience, a length of chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. If a single phrase of Beethoven’s ninth symphony is sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony, and used as the call-sign of a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station, then to that extent it deserves to be called one meme. ([Location 3822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=3822)) - Memes seem to have nothing equivalent to chromosomes, and nothing equivalent to alleles. I suppose there is a trivial sense in which many ideas can be said to have ‘opposites’. But in general memes resemble the early replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments. ([Location 3851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=3851)) - If any genes of an organism, such as a human, could discover a way of spreading themselves that did not depend on the conventional sperm or egg route, they would take it and be less cooperative. This is because they would stand to gain by a different set of future outcomes from the other genes in the body. ([Location 4690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=4690)) - There are fragments of DNA that are not incorporated in chromosomes but float freely and multiply in the fluid contents of cells, especially bacterial cells. They go under various names such as viroids or plasmids. A plasmid is even smaller than a virus, and it normally consists of only a few genes. Some plasmids are capable of splicing themselves seamlessly into a chromosome. So smooth is the splice that you can’t see the join: the plasmid is indistinguishable from any other part of the chromosome. The same plasmids can also cut themselves out again. This ability of DNA to cut and splice, to jump in and out of chromosomes at the drop of a hat, is one of the more exciting facts that have come to light since the first edition of this book was published. ([Location 4694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=4694)) - The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. ([Location 4883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=4883)) - One important thing about a ‘bottlenecked’ life cycle is that it makes possible the equivalent of going back to the drawing board. ([Location 4976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000SEHIG2&location=4976))