Replicator Term Analysis

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

Each entity must exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the copies must be potentially capable of surviving—in the form of copies—for a significant period of evolutionary time. Small genetic units have these properties: individuals, groups, and species do not.

[A] gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? […] Obviously I do not know, but if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet.

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is starting us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.

An organism has a frequency of one, and therefore cannot ‘serve as a unit of natural selection.’ Not in the same sense of replicator anyway.