Selfish Gene Quotes

“There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message - Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene.”
― Amit Ray

“It was a kindness that was hard to understand... and the most selfishness she's ever shown.”
― Bisco Hatori, Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 3

“The purpose of karma yoga is to transcend the bondage of selfish genes through the service of others.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

“People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Enlightenment is transcending the limits of the Selfish gene. It is mastering the pain, pleasure and reward circuits of the brain by radiating peace, love and harmony from every cell of the body.*”
― Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step

“It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Perhaps we should rejoice that people’s emotions aren’t designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one’s group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That’s why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group’s, the outcomes are some of the history’s worst atrocities.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Faith is powerful enough to immunise people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunises them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Humans have limitations due to selfish genes, competitive genes, and the fear-driving genes. The aim of compassionate AI is to overcome those limitations through service, care, compassion, honesty, and genuine love.”
― Sri Amit Ray, Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices

“The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“[...] let us note that a so-called "Sociobiologist" - this word is a whole project by itself - pushed the ingeniosity to the point of replacing matter by "genes", whose egoist selfishness, combined with ant and bee instincts, would have managed to constitute not only bodies but also conscience and at the end, human intelligence, miraculously able to dissert on the genes that amusingly created it.”
― Frithjof Schuon, From the Divine to the Human: Survey of Metaphsis and Epistemology

“Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Author of the book ‘Selfish Gene’, Prof. Richard Dawkins once said that evolution is the biggest show on earth. We learn the characters in the show and their respective evolving roles, but forget who is running the show and the purpose of that show. We are all part of the show as well at some point. Some episodes of the show are missing. Initial pages are muted. There are no living characters, but just description of details of the environment in the scene. One by one, characters start appearing. To get to know these other characters and their physical attributes does not make us the Producer and Director of that show.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Human characters in the show are given more leverage by the Producer and Director to play out their roles in the way they want. Some humans miscalculate this freedom, its limits and their own potential. They use the delegated authority to forget, disregard, downplay, undermine and even get rid of the Producer and Director. Some other non-living and apparently weaker and smaller characters are sometimes used by the Director to remind humans to be humble, have humility and paint their legacy among the good characters in the show. It is up to humans to paint their destiny. If they follow the Director’s guidelines, they can be signed for an even greater show which will begin for never ending again and which will give righteous people with virtuous behaviour the chance to play out their roles without any grief, sorrow and limits.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“The paradigm of self-interest is neutral between a person’s decision to help others or to not help others. If fear and uncertainty make people more short-sighted, self-centric and engage in hoarding cash, withdrawing from banks, disinvesting their savings in capital markets and buying essential goods in bulk, then there is no drive, urge or impetus that economics can offer to suggest otherwise. It is neutral between these choices and the choice for altruism.

On the other hand, as per physics, we were stardust before and stardust after extinction. As per evolutionary biology, we are one of the millions and millions of species that have earned the right to survive under the sun for a brief period until genetic mutations bury our specie as well. We were born through a fierce and destructive competition and survive until we manage to withstand that competition. While waiting and acting on morals, we should not be here in the first place.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Motivation for moral behaviour and pro-social cooperative response has to come from somewhere else. In poor countries like Pakistan, people with surplus resources are engaging in charity, donations, and volunteering. Empirical evidence in Pakistan in multiple research studies has found that faith is the biggest motivation behind charitable donations and it encapsulates and is associated with other humane motives. This trend is also seen in other parts of the world. But, economics is largely silent and irrelevant when it comes to exchange, allocation and distribution of economic resources outside of markets.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“In basic microeconomics textbooks, even when welfare gets attention, it is in the domain of efficient outcomes. Redistribution through taxes is first introduced as a big ‘no go’ domain with concepts of deadweight loss.

However, inefficiency out of market behaviour and market outcomes is plainly ignored and overlooked. Approximately, $600 million daily is needed to feed every extremely poor person, yet about $2.75 billion value of food is wasted every day, according to Food and Agriculture Organization. Consequently, 9 million people die every year from hunger while one-third of all food is wasted. This gross inefficiency in economic resources is not captured or discussed. According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally, per capita food supply increased from about 2,200 kcal per day in the early 1960s to more than 2,903 kcal per day by 2014. But under capitalism, the market allocates goods including even food to only those who can pay its price. It does not make a difference whether the willingness to pay is less than the price due to ‘preference’ or due to ‘poverty’. Yet, mainstream economics claims consumer sovereignty.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“In the earlier era, the subject of economics was geared to human needs. Now, the prime emphasis is on market behaviour and market outcomes based on choices under uncertainty and scarcity. The emphasis on choice behaviour subtly and inadvertently makes economics and most of its contents largely irrelevant for poor people.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Climate change is slow, but a cumulative process. Individual human lifespan is only an infinitesimally small fraction of the life of environmental resources and ecosystem services. Hence, the self- centric and this-worldly view of life is incompatible with the concerns of sustainability and socially responsible behaviour. Rather, the dogmatic commitment to self-centric worldview results in the inevitable proliferation of pollution as a right and product to be bought and sold in the market economy. It is ironic, but inevitable to see measures such as ‘statistical value of life’. On the action and policy front in capitalistic democracies, voter ignorance as well as the public-good nature of any results of political activity tends to create a situation in which maximizing an individual’s private surplus through rent seeking can be at the expense of a lower economic surplus for all consumers and producers.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World