LIF<sub>E</sub> IS INFORMATION
But the conflation of network technology and nature is more than casual and metaphoric, as evident from “Revolutionary Evolutionist” (Schrage 1995), an exposition to the work of Richard Dawkins, the author of the best-selling The Selfish Gene (1976), an oft-cited book on the pages of Wired.<sup>1</sup> I will leave the “selfish” aspect of the argument aside and focus here on the nature and technology nexus. According to the article, Dawkins’s book argues that “living things are little more than corporal vessels impelled to heed the primal dictates of selfish genes hellbent on their own replication and propagation.” Taking this reductionism a little further, Dawkins argues that “genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own productive end” (Schrage 1995; emphasis mine).
Life’s dynamics, Dawkins argues, are determined not at the level of “animals,” “beings,” or “society” but at the much simpler and smaller level of genes, which are nothing more than an informational code. “All life,” he argues, “at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer” (Schrage 1995). Information and communication are the backbone not simply of computer programs, social life, or global financial institutions; they are in fact the backbone of life itself. Dawkins’s theory shifts the focus “away from the individual animal as the unit of evolution” to the gene and to the group (or network) communication of genes. He concludes that the way genes behave over time “is the very definition of an evolution based on the flow of information” (Schrage 1995). The article hails Dawkins for redefining “the fundamental doctrines of ‘natural selection in ways that transform the vocabulary ofevolutionary biology into the new realms ofdigital media” (Schrage 1995; emphasis mine).
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Criti<sub>q</sub>ue
187