CONCEPT
The Replicator (Dawkins)
The fundamental unit of natural selection — not the organism but the information that copies itself across generations, indifferent to the welfare of its vehicles.
In Richard Dawkins's gene-centered view of evolution, the replicator is any entity capable of making copies of itself — typically DNA, but potentially any substrate that supports replication, variation, and selection. The Selfish Gene (1976) argued that organisms are survival machines built by genes to propagate themselves, inverting the classical view that natural selection acts on organisms. The replicator concept is substrate-independent: what matters is the information and its capacity to persist, not the material medium that carries it. This framework extends beyond biology into memetics, where ideas replicate through minds, and now into AI, where computational patterns replicate through silicon systems. The replicator does not care about the vehicle's welfare — it persists because conditions reward persistence, nothing more.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Dawkins's 1976 innovation was methodological as much as substantive. Where earlier evolutionary theory had focused on group selection or organism-level selection, The Selfish Gene relocated the explanatory center to the gene itself — the stretch of DNA that