All life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer … The rise of cheap processors and parallel architectures creates the ideal digital ecosystems to spawn software rather than build it. Nature – not rational cognitive planning – becomes the guiding force for the next generation of software solutions.
Predictor: Dawkins, Richard
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Michael Schrage interviews Richard Dawkins, the author of the influential book “The Selfish Gene.” Schrage writes: ”Two decades ago, Dawkins presented a radical evolutionary perspective in a small book called ‘The Selfish Gene,’ … Dawkins proposed that we are nothing but expressions of our selfish genes in the process of making more selfish genes [and] proposed that genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own reproductive end. He extended these notions into culture and described ideas as competing, self-replicating entities he called memes. Dawkins’s most recent book, ‘River Out of Eden,’ extends his life’s work into a unified evolutionary theory arguing that all life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer … When a Dawkins meme smacks into your neurons, your neurons obediently repattern themselves around it … Dawkins’s work has created new contexts for exploring genetic algorithms and has sensitized the growing community of artificial-life researchers to the evolutionary dynamics of their software creations … Computational biology … focuses on using genetic algorithms and other formulas that imitate genetic breeding for replicating the effects of evolution in ordinary computer chips … A-life researchers believe life is an information process that can be ported from one matrix to another. In fact, computational pioneers like Danny Hillis and Stanford University’s John Koza now actively explore software that breeds other software. Instead of software engineering as the paradigm of software design, they want to apply Darwin’s theories to grow software that grows solutions. The rise of cheap processors and parallel architectures creates the ideal digital ecosystems to spawn software rather than build it. Nature – not rational cognitive planning – becomes the guiding force for the next generation of software solutions. With his skillful articulation of evolutionary issues – combined with his digital breeding of biomorphs – many researchers consider Dawkins a conceptual godfather of the artificial life movement … Dawkins intuitively sensed that the computer should be viewed as a medium for evolution. If genes are really all about the transmission of information, what better medium than the computer to simulate how information might evolve? … Dawkins argued for the concept of memes … Memes are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity. A meme for, say, astrology, could parasitize a mind just as surely as a hookworm could infest someone’s bowels. Ideas – like genes – could compete and cooperate, mutate and conserve. They, too, are operated on by natural selection. Human evolution, Dawkins postulates, is a function of a co-evolution between genes and memes … What do genes and memes have in common? Dawkins asked. They are replicators. Through various but distinct coded systems, they reproduce; they effect change in their world so they can propagate, just like viruses in either digital or organic form. Dawkins’s most powerful paradigm is that the unit of evolution is not the individual – the gene – or the meme, but the replicator … By framing life and its evolution in the context of replicators and networks of replicators, Dawkins has forced all of biology to reexamine its assumptions of the fundamental mechanics of living things. Is technology just what our genes want, or is it a cultural conspiracy of our genes and memes? Does human DNA control the technosphere we’ve created and live in and around? What does it mean to say that nerve gas and microprocessors are extensions of selfish genes?”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Revolutionary Evolutionist: For Richard Dawkins, Genes Are Unselfish, the Watchmaker is Blind, and the Mystery of Life is No Mystery – It’s Digital
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/dawkins_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney