8fb8be45_ior__Darwin_s_Powerful_Science__Area
[Mechanism of Replication] Documents were copied by hand with little or no error checking and with scribes free to add or subtract from the documents they were copying. Stories were re-written and sections were added, altered and/or deleted to suit the political agenda of those who commissioned them or to give spurious 'divine' authority to dogma and the right of priest casts to govern. The priesthoods of various sects used different versions to compete for followers, to exercise authority over them and gain political power. The test for fitness was how well the various competing documents met the needs of the winners in the power struggle. Those best fitted were copied; those least fitted were suppressed or removed from the document pool. Forgery and impersonation, analogous to the viruses of genetic replication, were commonly used to give documents false authority. Once a clear winner emerged in the power struggle the 'best' of the resulting documents from the governing priests' point of view were eventually bound together into a book which was then the only version allowed to be replicated. This is today called 'The Holy Bible' to give it an added gloss of authority. Inevitably, this book supported the view the winning priests wanted and which justified their actions in ways they needed. [Notes] So important was it to the governing priests that the book continued to give them authority that it was a capital offence to make unauthorised copies of it. Many cultures still have laws governing which versions of this created book may be copied and sold. Priesthoods still refer to this book to justify the power they still exercise over followers and wish to exercise over others, although they are having to become increasingly inventive in their interpretation as science exposes more an more of the stories as fanciful and the product of ignorance and imagination. None of the original stories has ever been verified and none of the original documents has ever been found. Few of the main characters in the stories have ever been shown to be more than legendary. Most fragments of earlier versions of these stories and related legends to have been found are of documents later declared 'heretical', suggesting that the eventual winners were a small sample of the many competing versions in the original document pool. [Area] 
The Bible. A book held to be sacred by a minority of the world's people, compiled from various documents containing Bronze Age origin myths, pre-urban tribal laws, chronicles, religious chants, actions and sayings of legendary 'prophets', letters and other writings of founders of early Middle-eastern religious sects.
Rosa Rubicondior: Darwin's Powerful Science
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