ABSTRACT
In today's science and technology, a body in pieces is emerging, a composite of replaceable organs. This trend culminates in today's biogenetics: the lesson of the genome project is that the true center of a living body is not its Soul but its genetic algorithm. It was already Weismann, one of the Freud's key references, who, more than one hundred years ago, established the distinction between an organism's mortal and immortal parts: its soma, the external body-envelope that grows and disintegrates, and the germ-cells, the genetic component that reproduces itself, remaining the same from one to another generation. Richard Dawkins provided the ultimate formula of this distinction with his notion of the the selfish gene: it is not that individual organisms use their genes to replicate themselves; it is, on the contrary, individual organisms that are the means for the genes to reproduce themselves.
