For most of human history, the diversity of life was explained by one simple idea: species are fixed, created once, unchanging.A rabbit begets a rabbit. An oak begets an oak. Wo...
In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed something radical: species are not fixed.They change, slowly, over generations — new species arise from old ones through an entirely natur...
Replication + Variation + Selection = EvolutionDarwin never used these three words this way — but this is the abstract engine hiding inside his argument.Three ingredients....
Something must be copied from one generation to the next.Offspring resemble parents — not perfectly, but closely enough that traits persist.Darwin did not know about DNA. ...
No copy is perfect.Within any population, individuals differ — in size, colour, behaviour, shape.Some of this variation is heritable: it gets passed on, imperfections and ...
Not every variant survives. Not every survivor reproduces equally.Resources are limited; environments are demanding.Whatever traits make an individual slightly better at survivi...
In 1835, Darwin collected small birds across the Galápagos Islands — a few hundred kilometres off the coast of Ecuador.Back in London, ornithologist John Gould iden...
The beaks matched the food available on each island: hard seeds, soft fruit, insects, nectar.Darwin's explanation: all the finches descended from a single ancestral species that...
The finches are not proof of evolution by themselves — but they are an unusually clean illustration of the engine in action, isolated on real islands, at a scale a visitor...
Darwin described biological evolution. But notice: nothing in the three-step engine mentions DNA, cells, or carbon chemistry.It only requires: entities that are copied, imperfec...
The pattern shows up again and again, once you know to look for it:your immune system selects among antibody variants for the ones that bind an intruder;computer scientists bree...
In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene — and reframed the whole story.It is not organisms that are the true unit of selection, he argued. It is the gene.&ldqu...
Two roles, easy to confuse:Replicator — the thing that gets copied. The gene.Vehicle — the thing that is built, survives, and reproduces, carrying replicators inside...
If the gene is just one possible kind of replicator……could there be others? Things that are copied, vary, and are selected — but are made of neither DNA nor ...
“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet… I shall call it a meme.”— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976Tunes,...
We began with finches on volcanic islands and ended with an idea that may be living, right now, inside each of you.If memes are real replicators, then minds are their islands &m...
