Even that was not enough. Dawkins's intellectual adventure went well beyond the ethology of genes and memes to explore an even more radical insight into the nature of evolutionary dynamics. This idea, too, was astonishingly simple, but it offers a powerful intellectual framework for a new understanding of life as an information process. They are replicators. This was apostasy to Darwinian evolutionists, who took it as dogma that the dynamics of natural selection cared only for the fitness of individual organisms and absolutely nothing else.
Evolution is really the story of replicators ber alles.
Dawkins aggressively evolved this replicator concept. He noted that discussing the evolution of birds without looking hard at the evolution of their nests, or at beavers without considering the evolution of their dams would be prima facie ridiculous. Each is essential to the survival of the other. It is the combination of bird and nest, the combination of beaver and dam, that gives a competitive edge to the animals who build them. Not only does the body of an organism march to the orders of its genes, but so do the artifacts the organism builds or uses.