Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of usfrom bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicatormolecules called DNA but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.
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About Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins was a contemporary British evolutionary biologist and author. Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Science — Discovery, inquiry, and the wonders of the natural world