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Survival Machines
Primeval soup is an environment in which very simple replicators have formed. In the natural world, primeval soup is the simplicity of the universe in its very early stages, when it would have just been a bunch of atoms floating around in space. In the cultural world, primeval soup describes ideas floating around in consciousness. Importantly, just like an actual bowl of soup, there’s a finite amount of primeval soup. As a result, the components of the soup are competing for finite resources. This condition is important because the scarcity of resources create the requirement for competition that is necessary for evolution to occur at all. In nature, some atoms combined into molecules that could make copies of themselves by attracting other atoms to latch onto them in the same patterns (these are replicators, and the ancestors of DNA). Once in a while, a copy was slightly off, which meant that two slightly different replicators were competing for the limited atoms in the “soup.” If one of the slightly-wrong copies was better at getting atoms to latch onto it, it would use up all the atoms floating around in the “primeval soup,” and then take atoms from other replicators. Effectively, a better replicator will have replaced a slightly worse one. This process is evolution. Importantly, Dawkins thinks evolution can only occur in an environment where replicators compete for finite resources (or, in primeval soup). He argues on this basis that genes (little bits of DNA) are the things evolving, and not species.
Primeval Soup Quotes in The Selfish Gene
The The Selfish Gene quotes below all refer to the symbol of Primeval Soup. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 11
Quotes
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is starting us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.
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Primeval Soup Symbol Timeline in The Selfish Gene
The timeline below shows where the symbol Primeval Soup appears in The Selfish Gene. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: The Replicators
...experiments, scientists who took these chemicals and exposed them to energy discovered that a weak primeval soup of more complex molecules formed. These were purines and pyramids: the building blocks of DNA.
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...are copied, something might get copied a tiny bit wrong once in a while. The primeval soup would then have slightly different replicators competing for free atoms. This sets up the conditions...
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...break down protein walls so that it could eat up the most molecules in the primeval soup and become abundant, until another miscopy created a replicator that could make a stronger, more...
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Chapter 11: Memes: The New Replicators
...new kind of replicator has emerged on earth.” It’s still in “infancy,” floating around in primeval soup , but it’s happening at an astonishingly faster pace than genetic evolution. The new soup...
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