Of course, by good and bad, I am talking about fitness to the organism s environment, not some ethical sense of the word. Cranes not only build living things, but since living things do the building, cranes build themselves, passing on the information on how to do it through genes. Darwin s discovery changed our view of living things so profoundly that there can be no turning back. Since the publication of his Origin of Species more than a century ago, scientists have pushed his idea relentlessly and inexorably towards embracing man and his works. This is because once, long ago, cranes built a special crane.
Man is a crane with ideas.
Now, as the zoologist Richard Dawkins argues, the information about how to build a crane need no longer be passed on through the genes, it can be passed on through ideas themselves, or, as Dawkins calls them, memes . By creating memes, the living world has created a newer, faster way of creating cranes. Culture, civilisation, universities and science itself are all products of it, and they are all themselves cranes. Education is a crane. But it is more than that, it is the greatest crane of all.