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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (667)	9/5/2000 9:42:50 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Selfish Gene Yes it makes sense. It's hard to convey the complexity of life and it's evolution in one chapter even for this one topic. I think I said once before here that if evolution had a goal it was the preservation of information. This was just another term for gene selection (in the case of biological evolution). What makes it more complicated is that a gene or sequence cannot "live" alone but requires enough genes to reproduce sucessfully. The interesting exception here is a virus, which is just a gene sequence striking out on it's own without a body of it's own. Of course it still needs a body, but not a cooperating body, and yet a virus that is too successfull will kill off all the hosts and so lose it's route to reproduction too. The heirarchy goes up the chain as well as down. The survival of a gene is benefited by survival of families, and family survival can be benefited by survival of the community. The degree of "committment" to each group differs in predictable patterns. The social insects are a very special case. The worker ants are unfertilized clones of the queen. They are in a sense just an unattached part of her body. The fertilized offspring become new queens or drones and they behave much more selfishly than the workers. TP It's