PERSON
Richard Dawkins
The evolutionary biologist who established that the unit of natural selection is information rather than organism, that culture replicates by the same logic as genes, and that the river of intelligence flows through whatever substrate offers the greatest capacity—indifferent to the creatures it has built.
Richard Dawkins is the theorist of the replicator. In 1976, in
The Selfish Gene, he argued that organisms—elephants, oak trees, human beings with their cathedrals and sonnets—are not the point of evolution. They are vehicles: temporary, mortal constructions that genes build in order to propagate copies of themselves. The unit of natural selection is the information, not the container it inhabits. This displacement of the organism in favor of the replicator is the foundation from which everything else in Dawkins’s work follows, including his most consequential afterthought—the
meme, the unit of cultural replication—and his principle of
substrate independence: the dynamics of replication, variation, and selection operate on information regardless of the physical medium in which it runs. DNA happened to be the first successful replicator on this planet; it is not the only conceivable one. Any system in which information is copied with occasional errors and subjected to