Leibniz, Dawkins & the replicator

 1976

"Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation-rocks, galaxies, ocean waves-are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.

At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.

What does matter is that suddenly a new kind of 'stability' came into the world. As soon as the replicator was born it must have spread its copies rapidly throughout the seas, until the smaller building block molecules became a scarce resource, and other larger molecules were formed more and more rarely.

So we seem to arrive at a large population of identical replicas. But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect. Mistakes will happen. It is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible." (Dawkins)

1697

"We can’t find in any individual thing, or even in the entire collection and series of things, a sufficient reason why they exist. Suppose that a book on the elements of geometry has always existed, each copy made from an earlier one, with no first copy. We can explain any given copy of the book in terms of the previous book from which it was copied; but this will never lead us to a complete explanation, no matter how far back we go in the series of books. For we can always ask:

Why have there always been such books?
Why were these books written?
Why were they written in the way they were?

The different states of the world are like that series of books: each state is in a way copied from the preceding state—though here the ‘copying’ isn’t an exact transcription, but happens in accordance with certain laws of change. And so, with the world as with the books, however far back we might go into earlier and earlier states we’ll never find in them a complete explanation for why there is any world at all, and why the world is as it is." (Leibniz)