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.
I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.
But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.
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