In its most general form, natural selection must choose betweenalternative replicators. A replicator is a piece of coded informationthat makes exact copies of itself, along with occasional inexactcopies or 'mutations'. The point about this is the Darwinian one.Those varieties of replicator that happen to be good at gettingcopied become more numerous at the expense of alternativereplicators that are bad at getting copied. That, at its most rudi-mentary, is natural selection.

The God Delusion On page 188 Monday, November 5, 2012 @ 1:54pm