The Unwanted Mistake

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” - Anonymous


While reading the The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, it made me develop questions that questioned life and its meaning. What if the replicators hadn't made any mistakes? How would things would be different? Would humans even exist? What are actually we designed to do? What's the truth behind all of that? We will never know. 

“Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it from happening.” (Pg. 18) We just happened, God didn't create us in seven days. We began as a mistake, and we are a mistake, that is something we cannot change. We just happened. Humans are survival machines, we are the replicators protection against death. "Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines  for themselves to live in." (Pg. 19) We don't have a different goal in life, but to survive. That's what we were made to do. We only live once, so we should take care of ourselves to live the longest and ensure the survival of our genes and thereby the survival of our species through our descendants. 

Here is where the survival of the fittest theory comes into the picture. Only the fittest, and consequently only the superior ones survive, cleaning the race from any impurities. Humans, just as animals are the  armor replicators have designed in order for the fittest to win. It's not only a race between replicators but between species.By now, it seems like humans are winning the race between specie. Even if we try to paint reality with different colors and stories of how we are destined to love and be happy, science does not lie. We have to embrace the fact of who we are, and what we are destined to do: Fight each other. Be selfish, that is what our anatomy shouts at us, fight others in order to let our race survive, and don't be weak, because the weak die and we shouldn't die.  

Dawkins  crudely reveals to us in a hidden, but simple and straightforward way that we are just plain machines designed to pass on and protect genes. That's our reality and that's just the way things are. Even if we try to hide from it, in the end we all know who we are: Survival machines.