You needn't take my word for it. The oracular Dennett thinks he knows the answer to Wolpert's question. Since the answer is worth a trip to Stockholm, we should see what evidence he provides. I have stared long and hard at the quoted phrase, but simply cannot figure out what it means. Nobody really knows if even this part of cell division is recursive.
Humans are here by the luck of the draw. . . .
But Dawkins and Dennett are not prepared to buy such constraints. Convergent evolutionary examples won't wash here, precisely because the immense conservatism of evolution means that we are already talking about a single, highly restricted trajectory. You can't have your tape and rewind it too. But surely by now we can do better than serving up warmed-over Fisherian gradualism. Indeed, it is ironic that the very champions of the purely gene-centered view, who know very well that genetic variation provides the jet fuel that evolutionary change burns, continue to adamantly reject even the smallest deviation from Fisher's canon.