A Dash of Perspective

Vocabulary Ch.2:

Stable thing: a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.

Primeval soup: chemical conditions of the seas before the coming of life.

Replicator: molecule with the property of being able to create copies of itself.

Survival Machines: robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

Humanity never ceases to amaze me when finding ways to put its existence in different perspectives. First they use numbers. There are 6,840,507,003 people living in this earth, theres a total of 1,740,330 existing species, imagine the number of individuals wandering around, and you, my friend are just one tiny speck of dust in the midst of eternal filthiness. Our existence is reduced even more if we talk in spatial terms. The size of our earth, our neighboring planets, "our" solar system, The Milky Way, and infinite space, represent dimensions so grand, they are hard even to imagine. Nevertheless, Richard Dawkins has proposed the most eye opening, ego diminishing way of perceiving our existence. That we are survival machines for selfish molecules looking to prolong their existence. That the preservation of these genes is "the ultimate rationale for our existence" (Pg.20) 

Well, this saves a whole lot of reflection on the purpose of life. As we and every other species in this earth is ultimately just a survival machine for replicators (genes). 

Upon understanding this and henceforward, very simple terms sum up life and history.

Where do we come from? Primeval soup.

How did things come to be the way they are? Cumulative mistakes in the replication process.

Where are we going? Wherever these mistakes take us.

I find Dawkins' selfish gene theory simultaneously baffling and comforting. Comforting because any explanation is comforting, as is Creationism, or Reincarnation, they all provide an answer. Whether true or not, is irrelevant, what is the truth anyway?  I find it baffling, because when a survival machine can acknowledge that it is a survival machine, then it has discovered the meaning of its existences, meaning it is no longer just a survival machine for selfish genes.

Let me expand. In his book, Dawkins arguments that every living creature in our planet is but a survival machine for selfish genes. As I said before, Dawkins puts our existence in a different perspective. Now I do not know if pigs, ferns, or yeast knows they are mere survival machines, but I’m going to assume they don’t. Yet humans do, and if it is true then we have come to know the reason why we exist, backed up with scientific facts!

By trying not to play God, he ends up doing just that. Because the fact that he claims to know the reason we exist, rips us of our condition of survival machines, and gives us the power to play with it.

Without wanting, (or perhaps he did) Dawkins joined the group of human beings that claimed to be a superior species.