The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

 The selfish gene explain by Richard Dawkins

 The gene is immortal. In fact a publisher once, when I showed him the first couple ofchapters of the "Selfish Gene" he said: you shouldn't call it that... you should call it the"Immortal Gene". and perhaps I should have done. ahm Genesare immortal in the sense that the coded informationthey contain is reproduced, is replicated with almost total fidelity... significantly, not absolutely totalfidelity. Generation, after generation, aftergeneration... such that there are genes which are identical towhat they were tens of millions of years ago... Houndreds of millions of years ago in a few cases. ahm... so genes are immortal... not... not the DNA,of course that's not... that turns over in a very short space of timebut the coded information is potentially immortal and that means that the differencebetween a successful gene and unsuccessful gene, really matters it's going to matter for millions of years. So... the genes that make it through thosemillions of years are the ones that are good at it and good at it means good at buildingbodies good at controlling the processes and Embryology to make bodies which have what it takes to preserve those genes and pass them on.So I use this phrase: "survival machine" a body... an individual is a is a survival machine and that's byfar the most powerful way of interpreting what an individualorganism is. An individual organism is a throwawaysurvival machine for the self-replicating coded information which it contains. Andthe fate of that coded information is crucially bound up with the fate ofthe body in which it sits. If the body in which it sits dies beforereproducing than that coded information is not goingto go on to the next generation, and the next and potentially for tens ofmillions of years so the genes that are in the worldtoday, distributed as they are in bodies of millions of different... different species... are here todaybecause they were good at what they did in the past. They've come through, an... literally, unbroken line of successfulancestors where unsuccessful non-ancestor have beenlittered by the by the... by the wayside. And so the genesin a swallow, or in a kangaroo or in a hedgehog or in a human... Are all very, very good at making swallows, or hedgehogs, or kangaroos, or... or... or humans. They had to be good at itor they wouldn't have come through the generations... Ahm... Today. Now that, I think, is aninspiring vision: and that's what fired me up... about... about... the very idea of the SelfishGene it in my... When I first red Hamiltonand then when I... when I wrote it down in my... first in my lectures and then... and then in the in the Selfish Gene.- So the idea... The genesis of the idea comes in the mid-sixty's from,from bill Hamilton any then it sort of lies... not... not ignored, but... not... not really researched further and then some peoplelike Bob Travers picks it up and... -Yes, I mean... actually to be fair... I mean,its... its inherent in the neo-darwinian synthesis of the 1930's, actually... Ahm... in Fisher and... and... and Holding. And Hamilton... particularly applied it to the problemof the relationship between kin between... Ahm... but but it wasn't onlykin it inspired me it was the... the very idea of the survival machine... of...of... immortal genes. Which goes back to thenineteen thirties, I think ...or should I call you: clint? - Oh come on... ok... - So Richard Dawkins, asit says on page one of your autobiography... - I have to read what the...nobody will get the joke unless... unless I... - Well... apparently you are called: Clinton.