Two of a Kind

Chapter Two explains the progress of organisms from simple single celled beings to the complex multi celled creations they are now. Dawkins says the reason Darwin’s theory is so popular is that it makes so much sense, while still being simple and acknowledging the fact that we didn’t just spring up from nowhere. The author says that the law of survival of the fittest is more like survival of the most stable, because as soon as something finds a stable form it can survive better and longer. The ones that were “selected” were the stable forms were the others were eliminated. Human existence was a very random chance, but it happened, due to the creation of replicator molecules, which then began to compete with each other, which means they got an outer shell, the basis for cells and from then their competition created more and more complex organisms until making humans. Another important notation is that all that complexity was to safeguard the original genes and perpetuate them, which made replicator copy themselves. It also presents the three things that determine how and how well a thing evolves or is eliminated: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity.