You're Selfish, Gene! a modern fairy tale by Hans Dawkins Anderson |
Once upon a time, when the earth was new, there was this inorganic chemical. Let's call him Gene. Now Gene was rater simple as chemicals go, as he was made up of only a few simple strands of molecules. Existing as he did in an antidiluvian broth, life was, or rather non-life was tough for entities like Gene. Unpleasant things like sunshine, lightning bolts, and temperature extremes always shook up his solution, resulting in unfortunate fractures in his molecular chain. Without thinking, Gene soon came up with an answer to his predicament. He would simply evolve a molecular shell to protect himself from all those nasty events, a survival machine of |
of sorts to provide him a way to inertly repose and from time to time replicate. It came natural to Gene that he would make something out of himself, although when he went about the process he was quite divided. Pretty soon Gene was all over the place as he continued to divide and divide. This Gene pool soon became very crowded, and it was impossible to replicate further without the necessary raw materials. So Gene evolved a new version of his molecular shell that enabled him to cannibalize all his other duplicates that weren't so well equiped. Having done so, Gene again began to divide and divide. The other Genes however weren't going to take this lying dormant, and soon they evolved their own molecular add-ons that provided them |
Electron Microsope view of Hungry Gene |
with a tougher shell, higher mobility, or cannibalizing capabilities of their own. To meet this growing competition, Genes began to cooperate by linking up with one another, with each Gene assigned a specific job. Naturally, certain Genes would do their jobs better than others, and a way was need to select those genes that could best contribute to the Gene team. Soon, Gene chains were meeting regularly to exchange genetic material. This allowed each chain to test out new combinations of Gene talent in the ever more competitive game of life. The evolution of the periodic genetic exchanges, which is also known as sex, caused a veritable explosion in the complexity and type of survival machines. More and more genes came together in ever lengthening communities, and soon the world was well populated with a growing assortment of lumbering and colliding molecular robots. Now Gene was a naturally passive and inert sort, and each robot, when constructed and wound up, would only follow preset instructions that it was originally given. Gene couldn't modify these instructions when situations rapidly changed, as they surely would; and he needed some apparatus to provide a kind of automatic pilot for his aimlessly cavorting robot. So Gene naturally selected an array of sensors to be attached to the outside shell. These sensors were reactive to a variety of changing stimuli such as water pressure, sound, and light, and were hooked up by a series of molelcular strings which wound about the machine. This 'nervous system' gave Gene the means to automatically coordinate the increasing complexity of his survival machine. Yet, even when equipped with a wide range of reflexes, the Gene machine could only react when it confronted a new situation, and not before. To react before a situation occurs demands that the probabilities of certain events be calculated before a certain movement is made. To do this, an internal simulation of the outside environment has to be performed that would give the machine the foresight to react to impending events. A computational device was obviously needed. In short, Gene needed his own PC, or person cerebrum. since Gene needed to model external events internally, that meants that his PC had to categorize and classify all of the information that he received from his sensors. Larger PC's and sensory modems gave Gene increasing |
capabilities to process and receive ever greater amounts of information, and soon Gene's centralized nervous system became very specialized. Marvelous optical, acoustical, and olfactory devices were evolved as attachments to the PC. These knob like devices, also called the eyes, ears, and nose, were hooked up in close proximity to the PC, which was by then encased in a bone colored shell that was able to swivel about on its vertebrate stand. Soon the PC was able to make extremely detailed models of the outside world in three dimensions, and in living color. These models were stored in memory, and the PC was able to call up former memories at will and project out all sorts of what-if situations. As the PC's memory grew, it became able to perform an ever increasing array of mental tricks, such as controlling many thousands of operations at once (multitasking), and making models of the models of the models it created. The PC itself was able to perceive itself perceiving, and soon it became quite conscious of this fact. The PC thought, therefore it was, and it became oblivious to the fact that it was after all just a machine built to seve Gene. Some gratitude! The latest version of the PC, called the homo-sapiens, was hampered by this pesky self consciousness, yet it nonetheless followed Gene's programmed imperative and shortly became the PC standard. Soon other non-human PC's were destroyed to make room for the new model, or else they were consigned to PC museums (zoos) for the instruction of young homo-sapiens. The current model of the homo-sapiens PC most commonly in use is the PC-XT, or short for Xtra threatening. This PC is equipped with external memory storage devices (books) which allow it to access more information than ever before. With such information available, homo-sapiens is able to construct for itself a near infinite array of devices to improve its mobility (the car), hallucinatory powers (TV), and competitive capabilities (guns and nuclear missles). In spite of the PC's unpredictable hijinks, Gene still retained control over the important PC programs that were crucial to his continued duplication. The most important was the automatic orientation and duplication mechanism, or in other words, the sex drive. Sex was obviously a more complicated trick for Gene than in the good, old, old days, when all that was needed was a cup of nutrient broth and a willing cell or two. For the homo sapiens gene machine, special input and output ports had to be designed for the easy transfer of genetic material, and triggering mechanisms had to be in place to signal when the gene machines were to hook up. Random coupling was undesirable given the homo-sapiens PC''s ability to visually sort out prime reproductive candidates To do this, the PC was programmed with special pattern recognition subroutines which were directly hooked up to the sex drive. Upon recognition of a suitable form, the PC would orient towards the object, input port at the ready, in preparation for a possible interface leading to coupling. For the male of the species, this form takes an hour glass shape, with special attnetion drawn to two round bulges located in the front anterior. For the female, a more blockish shape is preferred, with special emphasis on rippling striated musculature. For both sexes however, Gene was quite unadventurous regarding facial features, preferring to link up with those males and females who had rather regular and bland facial designs.Gene had always had his best success by staying with tried and true designs, and these extended to a uniformity in thos optical, acoutstical, and olfactory knobs, which when set to an oval form, make something rather ordinary looking. However, to the homo-sapiens, it was beautiful. The homo-sapiens is complex, and takes about nine months to construct. The female homo-sapiens is provided with an internal factory which builds to order new gene machines from DNA blueprints, half of which are kindly ported over by the male. The internal duplication factory takes up most of the resources of the female, whereas the male can continue to hop from female to female making genetic deliveries. If he's good, he'd soon become a captain or should we say father of industry, and have many factories humming along merrily and at little cost to himself. Naturally, the female can't go hopping about like the male, as she needs a full time male to help take delivery of her bundle of joy. If the gene machine was male, then Gene could theoretically leverage out his genetic blueprints to make literally thousands of baby gene machines in his image. Not so for the female gene machine, which can only make a few machines in her lifetime, and raise them only with the help of the male. Depending upon whether he dwelled in a male or female machine, Gene would be at an advantage or disadvantage relative to his peers. To help solve this problem, Gene became sexists. The male gene continued to impart operating instructions which spelled no limit to acquistion and merger activity. All that was needed for a 'go' signal was the right visual signal, of hourglass shape of course, that denoted the reproductive potential of the female. For the female, the visual image of a male didn't so obviously denote the characteristics which were crucial to her and her offspring's survival. She could ill afford to respond so reflexively to the male form, so she took her time in examining the male, and favored traits that demonstrated the male's reliability, power, and devotion to her. Now all this demanded time and deliberation by the female PC, yet Gene quite reasonably couldn't wait forever. So he gave the PC a little shove which turned ambivalence into action. He did this by making the PC into a drug addict. Now Gene was a quite sensible drug pusher, wanting only that the PC opt to fantasize about devotion and coupling before he would give it a pleasurable high. Even the male gene got into the act, and to make the male PC compromise its own worldly ways, drugged it from time to time as well. This drug induced stupor was called 'falling in love', and it served Gene by putting an abrupt halt to the sexual dilly dallying that could make male and female gene machines circle each other endlessly in fruitless negotiationn. It was quite an underhanded tactic of course, but Gene would do anything to survive; it came of course quite naturally. Gene had developed a marvelous personal cerebrum, or PC, to attend to his large and ever growing infromation processing needs. But what was behind this trend towards greater personal computing? Obviously, there was very little the homo-sapiens could do with his onboard equipment except swing his arms about and wiggle his pinkies. Yet by being equipped with flexible hands, stereoscopic vision, and a PC with rudimentary memory, Gene gave the early homo-sapiens the ability to manipulate all sorts of devices which extended many fold the functionality of the homo-sapiens. These devices were called tools, and even the most primitive of them, like a sharp stone, could be put to a multitude of uses. These varied and often complex functions were infinitely numerous, but each function was useful only in very specific and changeable circumstances. Gene placed the instructions for programming them in RAM (readily absent memory). Thus, functions like home building weren't pre-wired into the PC's memory like say, a birds, but had to be programmed into memory through the use of programming languages like English, French, or any number of others. With the advent of programming languages and external storage devices (books), an extensive library of software was soon developed for the PC. With the right programming, the homo-sapiens was able to accomplish all sorst of specialized and complicated roles. He could be a homo-sapiens mechanic (doctor), PC repairmen (neurosurgeon), systems analyst (psychologist), or he could specialize in developing procedural languages of meaningless complexity (lawyer). The most popular programs are utility programs. These progrmas assist the homo-spaiens in forming social networks, and establish a standardized set of response patterns for everyday situations. These local area networks are collectively known as 'society', and allow the homo-sapiens to work in harmony for the greater good of the entire PC network. Sometimes a PC receives programming which places it at odds with society, hence forcing the latter to disconnect the PC from the network and place it in a reprogramming center (prison). Usually, just the threat of partial disconnection (embarrassment) is enough to bring an errant homo-sapiens in line, since as we shall soon see, reprogramming can be a difficult task indeed. The wide range of software available to the PC inevitably led to the popularization of many software packages that either were superb in handling their desired functions, or else were the first on the market and were able to become a de faco standard. Many of these programs were copied down from generation to generation, and are known collectively as 'culture'. A curious thing about cultural programming is that it represents chains of information that exists, replicates, and grows ever more complex. But unlike Gene, these entities don't dwell in the real world, but achieve a different sort of reality in minds. So, how would Gene confront this new sort of reality if imagination permits a friendly introduction? Gene meets Mimi (Pr: Me-me) Mimi was just a good idea waiting to happen, and when man began to think, Mimi felt right at home. Now Gene was a modest, relaxed, and undemanding sort who rarely called attention to himself. He built the mind that Mimi moved into, and scarcely complained when Mimi started to arrange his mental space in her image. Mimi |
was flexible, changeable, and rather flighty, and she could move about from one mind to another with breathtaking speed. Often, Mimi would move against Gene's better instincts, and sometimes Mimi would prevail, sometimes not. This was indeed a strange pairing. Wherease Gene loved to tinker about, and make over the eons Gene machines of wondrous diversity, Mimi was the very embodiment of philosophy, literature, and the fine arts. Gene loved hardware, whereas Mimi was always out shopping for the latest in software. Soon, as education opened up a vast Bloomingdale's full of ideas, Mimi began decorating the PC with dozens of ideas of every shape and hue. She lived for such things, and indeed wouldn't be without them. Soon her influence was overwhelming, and she made sure that any baby homo-sapiens would have the benefit of all her mental decorative ideas. Many of these ideas Mimi was quite fond of, as they encouraged the homo-sapiens to behave better, entertain itself better, and even to think about life without Gene. So the homo-sapiens now only lived to eat and reproduce, but to rever modesty, truth, and other humanly virtues, enjoy the music of Mozart, and wonder about the possibilities of existence without a physical body and mind. Gene became more and more a forgotten influence, as the purpose of man was merged into a symphony of ideas. Soon the whole world marked nothing less than this cultural legacy. The world was indeed in his image, the image of his mind. |
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