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“Darwinian Natural Selection is all about the differential survival of replicators. There are various kinds of replicators of which genes are some and memes are others, and they engage in a kind of tussle which each other to survive as replicators using vehicles which are bodies and which are brains and which are all sorts of other artefacts…
Our separate genes, although we unite them together under one word, genome, are similar to viruses in that they are changing their partners in every generation and you can regard the whole genome as a massive collection of viruses, of independently tussling replicators who survive better because they go around together as a gang.”
– Richard Dawkins
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What to say about this? It is structural and mechanistic. It lacks an aesthetic. It mis-assigns ‘will’ as an insecure and immature accident of design. It might be better described as a World Speculation rather than a World View because the things with which it deals cannot be seen by the human eye but can only be posited by the human mind. A ‘World Vision’, then? As a ‘World Vision’ it is heartless. Our vision of Charles Robert Darwin clambering aboard HMS Beagle, with all the mysteries of a Natural World before him, calling for exploration, is full to brimming with heart…
Stuart France 