Primeval Soup Symbol Analysis

Primeval soup is an environment in which very simple replicators have formed. In the natural world, primeval soup is the simplicity of the universe in its very early stages, when it would have just been a bunch of atoms floating around in space. In the cultural world, primeval soup describes ideas floating around in consciousness. Importantly, just like an actual bowl of soup, there’s a finite amount of primeval soup. As a result, the components of the soup are competing for finite resources. This condition is important because the scarcity of resources create the requirement for competition that is necessary for evolution to occur at all. In nature, some atoms combined into molecules that could make copies of themselves by attracting other atoms to latch onto them in the same patterns (these are replicators, and the ancestors of DNA). Once in a while, a copy was slightly off, which meant that two slightly different replicators were competing for the limited atoms in the “soup.” If one of the slightly-wrong copies was better at getting atoms to latch onto it, it would use up all the atoms floating around in the “primeval soup,” and then take atoms from other replicators. Effectively, a better replicator will have replaced a slightly worse one. This process is evolution. Importantly, Dawkins thinks evolution can only occur in an environment where replicators compete for finite resources (or, in primeval soup). He argues on this basis that genes (little bits of DNA) are the things evolving, and not species.