[taneq]

I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.

[TeMPOraL]

Huh, you're right, scribes copying texts are actually a great analogy for evolutionary perspective on life! The information in the books is what matters, and from the POV of a scribe, a book is useful only so that it can be copied, and afterwards, with new copies safe and in circulation, the old ones may just as well rot or burn.

The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).

Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.