Regulation In Biological Systems

Survival

10/5.   What is it survives, over the ages?  Not the individual organism, but certain peculiarly well compounded gene-patterns, particularly those that lead to the production of an individual that carries the gene-pattern well protected within itself, and that, within the span of one generation, can look after itself.

What this means is that those gene-patterns are specially likely to survive (and therefore to exist today) that cause to grow, between themselves and the dangerous world, some more or less elaborate mechanism for defence.  So the genes in Testudo cause the growth of a shell;  and the genes in Homo cause the growth of a brain.  (The genes that did not cause such growths have long since been eliminated.)