Replicators Quotes & Sayings

You never conquer a mountain. You just stand on the top a few moments. Then the wind blows your footprints away. — Arlene Blum

There's no poetry in me, Reginleit. No fine words." He stared down at her, his gaze seeming to consume her. "I come to you as a man unfinished. — Kresley Cole

Beauty attached to God is sacrament, cut off from God it becomes an idol. — Frithjof Schuon

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn't thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares. — Charles Stross

Disappointment is temporary. Only your thought about it is permanent. Change your mind about what has disappointed you and you will change your life — Neale Donald Walsch

All of human civilization had been built out of the ruins of what had come before. Life itself was a grand chemical improvisation that began with the simplest replicators and grew and collapsed and grew again. Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next. You — James S.A. Corey

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. — Richard Dawkins

I was living on Earth, where everything anyone needs pops out of replicators. Lack of professional credentials isn't really a big issue in the heartland of the Federation the way it is in other places, after all. — Michael A. Martin

Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. — Richard Dawkins

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

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves - the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers - brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer. — Richard Dawkins

So, you want to see the house?" he asked, standing up. "Sure. Any cool futuristic gizmos you can show me? Food replicators or a holodeck or something?" "Funny. It's not Star Trek. — Brenda Hiatt

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — Richard Dawkins

For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that ... — Dave Barry

Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous bacteria could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies. — K. Eric Drexler

PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley. — Terry Pratchett

Meme A term introduced by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined memes as small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread from person to person by copying or imitation. Examples of memes in his pioneering essay include cultural artifacts such as melodies, catchphrases, and clothing fashions, as well as abstract beliefs. Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. At any given moment, many memes are competing for the attention of hosts; however, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct. — Limor Shifman

Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. — Dalai Lama

For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. — Richard Dawkins

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators — Richard Dawkins

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? — Charles Stross

The replicators that exist tend to be the ones that are good at manipulating the world to their own advantage. But other replicators are also successful otherwise they would not be common. The world therefore tends to become populated by mutually compatible sets of successful replicators, replicators that get on well together — Richard Dawkins

When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell. — Richard Ben-Veniste

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival. A large number of adaptations are of this type. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see 'altruism', parental care, etc. To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group. — Richard Dawkins

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us - from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator - molecules called DNA - but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. — Richard Dawkins

In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music. — John Maynard Smith

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12 — Richard Dawkins

I think the Social Office is really the office where East meets West. For those that don't know, the East side is typically the First Lady's side of the house. The West side is typically the President's side of the house. — Desiree Rogers

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language. — Susan Blackmore

Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. — Yanis Varoufakis

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators?
They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. — Richard Dawkins

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This — David Deutsch

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise. — K. Eric Drexler