For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that evolution is driven by genes competing to replicate themselves.
Stephen Jay Gould presents a perspective on evolution that emphasizes the role of genes in the evolutionary process. He suggests that organisms are not the goals of evolution but rather temporary vessels for genes, which engage in a relentless competition to ensure their replication and survival. This view shifts the focus from individual organisms to the genetic material that drives biological diversity and adaptation.
In practice
In a lecture on evolutionary biology, I might quote Gould to emphasize the role of genes in shaping life.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
I think we need to move to the moons of Mars and learn how to control robots that are on the surface. It's not the impatient way of getting there, but Mars has been there a long time.
The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
A full understanding of what happens in our everyday lives needs to take into account what happened at the Big Bang. And not only is that intrinsically interesting and just kind of cool to think about, but it's also a mystery that is not given much attention by working scientists; it's a little bit underappreciated.
There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
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