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Author Topic:   Original Sin - Scripture and Reason
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 148 of 203 (668886)
07-25-2012 2:28 PM
Reply to: Message 147 by Stile
07-25-2012 2:06 PM


Re: we are in part, by nature, selfless beings.
People get hung up on this, which is bizzarre because obviously "selfish gene" is just a metaphor. The point is that there's a certain evolutionary imperative to pass on one's genes at the expense of others, but, apparently paradoxically, some people engage in self-sacrificing altruistic behaviors. "The Selfish Gene" is about how there are at least some conditions under which what appears to be self-sacrificing altruism really does serve one's own interest in passing along one's genes. The description "selfish gene" describes such a situation, and makes it clear that the individual survival of the gene's host is not always the optimum strategy for the expansion of that gene in the population. Sometimes it's worth looking at a population not as a collection of discreet organisms, but slantways, as a collection of statistically-distributed individual genes.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 147 by Stile, posted 07-25-2012 2:06 PM Stile has seen this message but not replied

  
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