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    a re the genes of today.  And the latest versions of those first primitive

    protective suits are you and me.

    There's another aspect to Dawkins replicators that helps explains

    some of nature's more reprehensible habits.  Imagine a day in the

    future when some clever engineer invents an entirely new industrial

    process--a manufacturing technique that makes factories and workers

    obsolete.  Under the new system, management committees that sit

    around anxiously pondering the next profitable move are as useless as

    last week's donuts.  The enormous stamping machines, pressing

    devices and even welding robots are  unnecessary artifacts to be tossed

    into museums and gawked at from time to time. What has replaced

    them?

    An ultra-miniaturized factory complete with a built-in blueprint

    for its finished product.  The device is so small that you can fit millions

    of them on a flyspeck and so inexpensive that a penny will buy you

    more than you can count.

    These little wonders have another advantage.  You can scatter

    them at random.  They take care of the rest.  There's no more need to

    spend billions digging metals out of the earth or cracking chemicals

    from oil and turning them into plastics.  The automated mini-factories

    find what they need without help, sensing the presence of unprocessed

    industrial materials in a pile of garbage, a whiff of air, or a lump of dirt.

    If they run across the necessary substances, they immediately go to

    work assembling the finished goods.  If they don't discover what they

    need, these little babies simply fail to activate.  A deactivated

    mini-factory is no great loss.  After all, millions of the

    micro-construction units can be turned out for the price of a stick of

    gum.

    When the new system becomes popular, however, it turns out to

    have a glitch.  The scheme is too  successful.  Each product is cranked

    out in a world overrun with other gizmos stamped out by the same

    system.  What's more, each product of the mini-factories is

    programmed to go out and gather the raw materials to make more

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