Selfish Gene Extended

In evolutionary biology, generally genes are considered more "selfish" than individuals. An individual organism will sacrifice itself to protect a gene pool similar to itself. This is why people often risk their life to protect their family and tribe. For any given gene an individual may contain, the tribe may have roughly a half-dozen or so other individuals with that same gene. Thus, from a numbers perspective, sacrificing one instance to save 6 other instances is considered worth the trade.

This idea can perhaps be extended to ideas. We collectively protect ideas that fit our genes, such as defending paradigms that fit the way we personally think. If we protect Foo Oriented Programming, then we are also protecting genes, like our own, that work better under Foo Oriented Programming.

As an analogy, let's say there is a village of people who live between tree groves on each side, one of which grows fruit A and the other fruit B on the other side. Due to flooding, the village must move. Members whose digestive system favors fruit A (less gas, for example) will lobby to move to grove A, and vice versa. The gene set that prefers fruit A is trying to protect itself.

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Related:

RichardDawkins - TheSelfishGene -ISBN 0199291152 (introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation)

Principia Cybernetica Web

• http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/memes.html
  • Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
  • A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991)