The Selfish Gene

Is there a meaning to life ? What are we for ? What is man ? The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely. ~ G. G Simpson

The interesting part of the book The Selfish Gene is that it talks about Evolution and Natural selection in a way that can to impose on fields outside of biology.

Purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. Evolution is good of the individual or gene than towards species. The predominant quality of successful gene is ruthless selfishness. So universal love, welfare of the species as a whole does not make evolutionary sense.

One of the important aspects of Darwinian evolution is that it starts from simplicity to explain complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they endup manufactoring people. He explains it through servival of the fittest.Basically it is survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atom that is permanent enough and common enough to deserve a name.

Social Insects

Social Insects like bees, ants, wasps, termites has to be though in a different way. They are not just individuals, they are colonies. The queen is responsible for reproduction where as rest take care of all other stuffs. Even though we classify them as workers, soldiers, etc. They are like neurons in a brain. They work in sync to make the colony survive.

The queen is the only one who reproduces. The workers are sterile. Which gives us a sense that they are working for the queen and not for themselves. But workers have a lot of influence of the offspring of the queen. As they manage the food, the temperature, the humidity, the ventilation, the protection, the nursing, the feeding, etc. They are the ones who are responsible for the survival of the colony. So they are not working for the queen, they are working for the survival of the colony. They are working for the survival of the genes that they share with the queen

In scenarios where the colonies lost the queen, the workers selects a female egg and feed it with royal jelly to make it a queen.