P1: My purpose is to examine the biology of selfish & altruism. A predominate quality expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.
. . ...there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.
. . Let us try to teach altruism, because we are born selfish.
. . Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.
. . A crystal such as a diamond can be regarded as a single molecule.
. . In the hemoglobin molecule, there are 574 amino acid molecules.
. . There is no need to think of design or purpose or directedness.
. . Lab simulations of [pre-life times] have yielded organic substitutes called purines & pyrimidines. These are ... building blocks of ... DNA itself.
. . P25: One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives thru a large number of successive bodies.
. . A gene is defined as any portion of a chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.
. . A gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.
. . The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.
. . In sexually-reproducing species, the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection.
. . Long legs are not neccessarily an asset. To a mole....
. . A gene that cooperates well with other genes that it is likely to meet in successive bodies ... will tend to have an advantage.
. . Ancestors just don't die young!
. . Reflect that a caterpillar & the butterfly it turns into have exactly the same set of genes!
. . ...senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal & semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip thru the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.
. . A greenfly female may give birth to a daughter & a grand-daughter simultaneously, both being equivalent to her own identical twins.
. . W, F. Bodmer: Sex "facilitates the accumulation in a single individual of advantageous mutations which arose separately in different individuals."
. . There are even genes --called mutators-- that manipulate the rates of copying-errors in other genes.
. . I prefer to think of the body as a colony of genes, & of the cell as a convenient working unit for the chemical industries of the genes.
. . P 59: the evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness.
. . The traditional story of ethologists is that communication signals evolve for the mutual benefit of both sender & recipient.
. . An Evolutionarily Stable Strategy --ESS-- is defined as a strategy, which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternate strategy.
. . ...parental care is just a special case of kin altruism.
. . in order for altruistic behavior to evolve, the net risk to the altruist must be less than the net benefit to the recipient multiplied by the relatedness.
. . ...they express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, & a natural method is exactly what they're going to get. It's called starvation.
. . 113: Even in apperently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male's territory, rather than him personally. Winning a territory is therefore .. like winning a ticket or licence to breed.
. . Instead of fighting ... for females ..., [male] individuals fight for social status, then accept that if they do not end up high on the social scale, they are not entitled to breed. ...so populations do not grow so fast.
. . But any altruistic system is unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
. . ...the difference between the abrupt change of life in women, & the gradual fading out of fertility in men, suggests that there is something genetically "deliberate" about the menopause --that it is an adaption. ["grand-mother effect"]
. . ...In one study of Elephant Seals, 4% of the males accounted for 88% of all the copulations observed.
. . 145: The strategy of producing equal numbers of males & females is an ESS, in the sense that any group departing from it makes a net loss.
. . In its long journey down the generations, therefore, an average gene will spend approximately half its time sitting in male bodies, & the other half sitting in female bodies. ...we can expect the gene to make the best use of the opportunities offered by that sort of body.
. . A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes.
. . The female sex is exploited, & the fundamental basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms. [investment.]
. . 148: [why a male might want a long engagement period] Provided he can isolate her from all contact with other males, it helps to avoid being the unwitting benefactors of another male's children.
. . Paradoxically, a reasonable policy for a female who is in danger of being deserted, is to walk out on the male *before he walks out on her. ...genes for deserting *first could be favorably selected simply because genes for deserting *second would not be.
. . ...could something equivalent to driving a hard bargain evolve by natural selection? . 2: The domestic-bliss strategy, & the he-man strategy. Domestic-bliss defined as: females look the males over & try to spot signs of fidelity & domesticity in advance.
. . Could females force males to invest so heavily in their offspring *before they allow copulation that it would no longer pay the males to desert *after copulation? ... Our two female strategies will be called coy & fast, & the male two: faithful & philanderer.
. . As long as the deserted former wives have any chance of bringing up some of the children, the philanderer stands to pass on more of his genes than a rival male who is an honest husband & father. Genes for effective deception by males would tend to be favored in the gene pool.
. . In species where the [he-man] policy is adopted, the females, in effect, resign themselves to getting no help from the father, & go all out for good genes instead. The females are allowing just a few males to get away with the ideal selfish-exploitation strategy which all males aspire to, & but they are making sure that only the best males are allowed this luxury.

[endnote: it's as tho the males are forced by the females to evolve thermometers [health-meters] permanently sticking out of their mouths, clearly displayed for females to read.
. . p 162: There are therefore two conflicting selection pressures: predators tending to remove brightly-colored genes from the gene pool, & sexual partners tending to remove genes for drabness. ... Eggs are a relative-value resource, so a female does not need to be so sexually attractive as a male does in order to ensure that her eggs are fertilized. ... Even if a male has a short life because his tail attracts predators, or gets tangled in the bushes, he may have fathered a large number of children before he dies. What shall it profit a male, if he shall gain the whole world, & lose his immortal genes?
. . A female who mates with a super-attractive he-man is more likely to have sons who are attractive to females of the next generation, & who will make lots of grand-children for her. [ with her genes]
. . ...The investment by the mother in the rearing of a mule is totally wasted from the point of view of her genes.
. . Where incest taboos exist, we should expect females to be more rigid in their adherence to the taboos than males.
. . Since the female produces a limited number of eggs, at a relatively slow rate, she has little to gain from having a large number of copulations with different males. [? yes she does!] A male has everything to gain....
. . 181: A lichen ...appears to be individual. It's an intimate symbiotic union between a fungus & a green alga. ...more intimate & we would no longer be able to tell ... [it] was a double organism at all. Perhaps, then, there are other double or multiple organisms which we have not recognized as such. Perhaps even we ourselves?
. . Recently, it has been plausibly argued that mitochondria are, in origin, symbiotic bacteria who joined forces with our type of cell, very early in evolution. I speculate that we will come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. ... the other side of this coin is that viruses may be genes that have broken loose from "colonies" such as ourselves. [!]
. . It is even possible that man's swollen brain, & his predisposition to reason mathmatically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, & ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. [!]
. . 192: MEMES should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically, but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
. . Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king's genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction. Socrates may or may not have a gene alive in the world today ... --but who cares? the meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Kopernigk & Marconi are still going strong.
. . 200: even tho a "conspiracy of doves" would be better for every single individual than the ESS, natural selection is bound to favor the ESS. ...even if we look at the dark side, & assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight --our capacity to simulate the future in imagination-- could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. ... We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a "conspiracy of doves", & we can sit down together & discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth, &, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tryanny of our selfish replicators. [genes]

CHAPTER: NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST. The Prisoner's Dilemma. Tit-for-tat strategy.
. . Replicators don't "behave", they don't perceive the world, don't catch prey or run from predators; they make vehicles that do all those things. (organisms) (Biologists see at the level of the vehicle.)
. . 259: The life-cycle of the broad & bulky elephant both begins & ends with a narrow bottleneck. (sperm/egg)
. . [in non-sexual reproduction], mutation will make it unlikely that the cells within a plant are genetically identical, so they won't collaborate wholeheartedly with one another in the manufacture of organs & new plants. Natural selection will chose among cells rather than "plants".
. . [w sex,] all the cells within a plant are likely to have the same genes ... & will happily collaborate...

ENDNOTES: P59: Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. [!!]
. . Why don't male mammals lactate?!
. . Darwinian selection can function only if there's a good supply of genetic variation to work on. [? island evol!]
. . Any growth process, where rate of growth is proportional to size already attained, is called exponential growth. [example: epidemic]