Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
– Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Up to this point, we have had just a very brief introduction to memes and memetics, with a few examples to illustrate the basics and get the idea across. We then jumped straight into our analysis of religion's history up to the time of Jesus. Before we continue with our history and analysis, we need to take a more detailed look at memetics, really study it, to learn in some detail how the principles of evolution apply to culture and ideas. What is it that makes memes so much like genes, and to what extent do they differ? Is memetics really a deep insight into cultural evolution, or are the parallels between genes and memes just an amusing coincidence?
In the introductory chapters, we learned how cultural information, called memes, seems to be very analogous to genetic information. By "stepping back" from Darwin's principles and looking at genes as information rather than as DNA, we learned how Darwin's principles, under the right circumstances, can apply to other types of information besides genetic information – in particular, to memes.
The term "under the right circumstances" is the key: What are those circumstances? Information comes in a huge variety of forms and content, everything from terabytes of astronomical data streaming from a radiotelescope, to beautiful songs, to the 5,000 year old cuneiform clay tablets of Sumeria. Most information is not memetic, that is, it does not replicate itself, nor is it shaped by evolutionary forces. But some information does. We need to identify the conditions required for cultural evolution to do its work, for a piece of information to become a meme.
I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.
-- Jimmy Swaggert, Christian Television Evangelist, to his wife, after being photographed taking a prostitute to a Louisiana motel.
To survive, evolve, and compete, every living thing from the smallest retrovirus to the monstrous Blue Whale, the largest animal ever to live on the Earth (and still around today), must reproduce.
In April of 1991, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (not their real names), the young parents of a beautiful daughter, found themselves sitting across the table from investigators in the United States Attorney's office, embarrassed at answering questions about something they thought was completely private. The Smiths had gone to see Dr. Jacobson, an infertility doctor, because they weren't able to conceive a child on their own, and had finally opted for artificial insemination by an anonymous sperm donor. The federal investigators were very polite, and apologized for causing the Smiths embarrassment. But they wanted to know if the Smiths could please answer a few questions about Dr. Jacobson's infertility program. Why had the Smiths sought out Dr. Jacobsen? What had he told them about his infertility program? Had they become pregnant from Dr. Jacobsen's treatment?
Although it took a while, due to privacy and ethics concerns, the truth was finally revealed to the Smiths, and to dozens of other patients. Dr. Cecil B. Jacobson had apparently decided that the eight children he'd fathered with his wife weren't enough. Instead of using sperm from anonymous donors, matched to the Mr. Smith's physical characteristics, Dr. Jacobson had used his own sperm to impregnate Mrs. Smith and the other patients who came to him for infertility treatment. In some cases where the husband was able to use his own sperm for in vitro fertilization, Dr. Jacobson had simply discarded the husband's sperm, substituting his own.
Many of Dr. Jacobson's patients who were contacted by the U.S. Attorney's office were reluctant to have their children's DNA tested, so the final count is uncertain, but it's likely that Dr. Jacobson had fathered, via his fraudulent artificial inseminations, sixty to eighty children. Dr. Jacobson was ultimately convicted of fraud and perjury, and for causing his patients "extreme psychological injury." He was sentenced to five years in prison, three years of probation, and fined $117,000.
All men have a strong desire for sex, which (before the advent of birth control) would often result in the impregnation of their sex partner. All human traits vary, including our desire to reproduce. Dr. Jacobson simply took this drive to the extreme, using technology to father many dozens of children.
Even in more normal cases, the birth of a child is almost always the cause for congratulations to the father, even though his role in the process is quite enjoyable, particularly compared to the woman's job. We are genetically programmed to appreciate and be proud of our children. We have a very strong drive to reproduce.
The most fundamental requirement for an evolutionary process is that the information being reproduced (whether a meme, a virus, or an elephant) must carry within it the motivation or mechanism that triggers its own reproduction. This is deceptively simple on the surface: Living things reproduce, and memes reproduce. But the mechanisms are amazingly varied. In the case of viruses and bacteria, the mechanisms are purely biochemical: At some point, certain carefully timed biochemical reactions are triggered, which starts the process of replication (viruses) or splitting (bacteria). On the other end of the scale, humans, elephants and whales have a much more intricate set of genes that code for their reproductive organs, and other genes that control the behavioral patterns of sexual attraction and mating. But whether it's a simple biochemical sequence for a virus, or a complex twenty-year process for a human that starts with courtship and marriage and ends when the offspring are themselves sexually mature, the common feature, from the smallest living thing to the largest, is that the reproductive act is controlled by the genes. That is, the information (genome) that is being reproduced contains the instructions for its own reproduction.
In the case of memes, the "motivation" for reproduction is equally varied. We call a friend to warn of a police radar trap in our neighborhood out of altruism or the hope for a reciprocal warning in the future. We pass on a good joke so that our friends and family will enjoy our company and continue to invite us to parties. We tell our children stories of our own youthful mistakes in the hope that they won't repeat them. We indoctrinate our children with our religion, because we believe the benefits of the correct beliefs are magnificent and the penalties for the wrong beliefs are horrifying.
These motivations are all quite different, but like biological life, they all share a common theme: The meme itself causes you to want to repeat it, to teach it to someone else. Just like a genome, the meme contains the information that causes its own reproduction. That's what makes it a meme, and not just data.
A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.
– Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
James William Tutt, an English entomologist, wrote a really boring book called Natural History of the British Lepidoptera (1890-1911). Well, maybe other entomologists find it fascinating, but I fell asleep after a few pages. Ordinarily, a book like Tutt's would be read by a few and then forgotten on some dusty shelf in the university library's attic. But buried among a thousand other dry facts, Tutt reported one of the first, and still one of the best, examples of "survival of the fittest" in action.
In pre-industrial England, the peppered moths (Biston betularia) were almost all light colored – about ninety-eight percent were white with dark "pepper" specks, and two percent were dark with light specks, and by good luck (and hard work) this statistic had been carefully documented by scientists. The light-colored moths blended exceptionally well with the lichen-covered trees on which they landed, making them hard for birds to spot.
The industrial revolution in England brought textiles, transportation, food production, manufactured goods – just about every aspect of life was changed. But it had a price: Between 1800 and 1900, the energy used by England increased tenfold, and this energy came almost entirely from burning coal, vast quantities of it. The resulting sooty pollution killed the lichens and blackened the trees on which the peppered moths like to land. The light-colored moths who landed on these soot-covered trees were easy for birds to spot, and the dark moths were well hidden. The result? In just forty-seven years, the dark-colored moth population grew from from two percent to ninety-eight percent, a complete reversal of the percentages.
J.W. Tutt's discovery and explanation was a dramatic and simple example of "survival of the fittest" in action, one that has become a textbook case, studied by virtually all students of evolution. It shows, literally in "black and white," just how powerful the filtering process of natural selection can be.
"Survival of the Fittest" is the best-known part of Darwin's principles, and has become somewhat of a popular shorthand for Darwin's entire thesis. The cheetah who runs faster catches more food and raises more fast baby cheetahs. The frog whose tongue is longer and stickier catches more flies, and has more baby frogs with longer, stickier tongues. The smallpox virus that does not kill you quickly will have more opportunities to infect other people, so it spreads faster. These are the "fittest," the ones that go on to reproduce and create the most copies of their genes.
But here's the problem: Both "survival" and "fittest" are misleading terms!
The word "fittest" conjures up ideas of wholesomeness, athletic prowess, morality and other human values. Nothing could be further from the truth: Evolution doesn't care about human concepts like "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "bad." It's unfortunate that the word "fittest," which brings so many human moral and ethical connotations, is a keyword of Evolution Science. It's not "fitness" that matters, it's "reproduction." To put this in human terms, Mormons and Catholics are more "fit" than atheists and others, because they typically have more children.
The word "survival" is misleading, too. The male black widow spider knows this all too well: The female bites his head off during mating, and consumes his body afterwards. Survival isn't the relevant term – reproduction is all that matters. The male black widow spider reproduces very effectively, in spite of not surviving at all. It's his DNA that survives.
We could try to coin a more descriptive term, perhaps something like "the correlation between specific genetic characteristics and reproductive success." This doesn't offer any moral or ethical judgement on whether a trait is wise or foolish, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, good or bad. But, such a phrase will never stick – it's boring and hard to decipher. By contrast, "survival of the fittest" is a very successful phrase, because of the very thing that makes it inaccurate. The phrase has drama ("survival") and it has a sort of good-versus-evil feel ("fittest"). Humans love a good story, and this simple phrase is evocative. As a meme, "survival of the fittest" is much more fit for survival than other phrases that might not have so many moral/ethical connotations! It's a perfect illustration of a core theme in this book, that the entities that reproduce more (whether they are jokes, malaria, or elephants) are the ones that become the most common, irrespective of anything else.
What do the following have in common?
There are alligators living in the New York sewers, and they got there because people bought cute baby alligators, but flushed them down the toilet when they grew too large.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity says you can't go faster than the speed of light.
"Knock knock." "Who's there?" ...
God gave Moses ten commandments, chiseled into two stone tablets.
Princess Diana was assassinated by the British Royal family because she was about to marry a non-Christian foreigner.
There is an inexpensive tablet that can be added to water that makes it as powerful as gasoline, but the oil companies have suppressed this knowledge because it would put them out of business.
Cool stuff, right? But are they true? More importantly, does it matter if these ideas are true? No! Some are true, some are false, and some are outrageous lies. Each of these ideas originated in the mind of (at least) one person, was told, and retold, and possibly changed along the way, and survived. It doesn't matter why it survived and was retold, only that it did.
This is survival of the fittest in the classic sense. Each of these memes, for unique reasons, was an idea that most people found more interesting or funnier, than the other competing urban myths and jokes. Each of these memes is a survivor. For each one of these, there were millions, perhaps billions of ideas that popped into someone's head, but never got further than that. You have an idea: "I think I'll go to the store." You may or may not mention it to anyone else, but even if you do, it's just not interesting enough. It just dies there, and never spreads to the next person. By contrast, when someone tells you "I heard that Princess Diana was killed because...," you think "Wow! That's fascinating!" And because it's a morbidly fascinating meme, one that suggests the high-and-mighty are no better than common criminals (never mind that it's a cruel lie), you pass it on.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
– Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
A couple with whom I am very close, call them Peter and Lacy (not their real names), had the good fortune to find themselves pregnant and were ecstatic about it. But, like many pregnancies, theirs ended early when the Lacy felt ill, experienced severe cramps, and had a miscarriage. Although they were saddened by this all-too-common tragedy, they were determined to let Lacy rest, recover, and try again.
This would have been the end to a sad but otherwise common story, but for one thing. About six weeks later, Lacy went to her gynecologist for what was supposed to be her "all clear" visit, so that Peter and Lacy could try again for another pregnancy. Before the doctor began the examination, he asked Lacy, "How are you feeling? Have you recovered emotionally from your difficult miscarriage?" Lacy got a perplexed look on her face. "Doctor, I know this sounds crazy ... I know for certain I had a miscarriage ... but ... well, I think I'm still pregnant!" And indeed she was. Lacy had been carrying twins, and only one of the two miscarried; instead of getting green light for more fun in the marital bed, Peter and Lacy got the wonderful news that Lacy was three months pregnant.
Six months later, they had a beautiful, healthy boy. Today as I write these words, their son is quite a handsome young man, just about to graduate from high school. His biggest problem is trying to decide which of the top universities he wants to attend, since several have offered him entrance.
Doctors have always known that ten to twenty percent of women who learn they are pregnant have a miscarriage, so it's not surprising that occasionally, one of a pair of twins will miscarry and the other remain healthy.
When high-resolution ultrasound and modern pregnancy tests came on the scene, it was possible to detect pregnancy much earlier and with high accuracy, and doctors found that the real rate of miscarriage is probably around 30% or more of all pregnancies. Many women have a miscarriage without even knowing they are pregnant. Geneticists were able to detect that at least forty percent of miscarriages were caused by readily identifiable chromosomal abnormalities. In all likelihood, a large fraction of the remaining sixty percent are also caused by more subtle genetic problems.
We tend to think that our genetic material is pretty rugged, that we manage to pass it on our genes to our children reliably. After all, our kids look like us, right? But as illustrated by the story of Peter and Lacy's miscarriage, the facts are otherwise: Reproduction is a tricky business, with a high rate of errors. In fact, studies of the human genome suggest that we each carry something like one hundred mutations on our genome! (This is a very rough number and still being researched, but the point is: It's a lot of mutations.) Most of these are harmless or only slightly detrimental, as otherwise the human race would have died out long ago.
Mutations of the genome have a conflicting dual role in evolution: They're both good and bad. On the one hand, they're almost never beneficial, so over a short period of time, it's far better for a species to have a highly stable (non mutating) genome. On the other hand, mutation creates variability, and variations enable a species to adapt to changes in the environment, new predators, diseases, and a host of other threats that could wipe it out. So, while mutations are "bad" for the individual, they are necessary for the long-term survival of a species.
Mutation is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of Darwin's Evolution Science, and is the target of most attacks on evolution by those who claim Darwin was wrong. And with good reason: Until recently, the biochemistry, physics, and statistical mechanisms of mutation were not well understood. It was a huge weakness in Evolution Science. Scientists waved their hands and claimed, "Over billions of years, there have been enough 'good' mutations to cause the primordial soup to evolve into humans. And the proof is that we exist, so it must be true!" It was a circular argument.
But happily, science doesn't sit still. Mutation can be observed by scientists, and the hand-waving has been replaced by a solid body of science proving that the hypothesized mutations really do occur, and they really do drive evolution. Evolution Science's weak point has been dramatically strengthened as scientists learned the complex biochemistry of DNA and reproduction. We now understand how DNA works, how it copies itself, what can go wrong in the process, and especially, how DNA protects itself via repair systems, redundancy, and with immune systems that recognize and destroy damaged cells.
(I must warn readers that I'm playing fast and loose with terms like "DNA", "genes," "genome" and "mutation" and many other scientific terms. There are very important distinctions between genes, a genome, and DNA. A true understanding of how evolution works requires a much deeper treatment than I have room for here.)
Memes, like genes, are subject to mutation. They can survive an amazing variety of retellings and still retain their central concept, their meme-ness. Consider...
Version 1:
In Heaven, Saint Peter is giving a guided tour to a group of new arrivals. "You're going to like it here," he says, "we have a place just for you." He takes them down a hall and opens the first door. Inside, there's a big party, with everyone drinking wine and dancing. "These are the Catholics. Boy do they know how to party!" he says. Moving to the next door, he opens it, revealing a more serious group, with everyone arguing and gesturing. "And here are the Jews, they like to talk." Walking further, they reach the next door, which St. Peter opens to reveal a room full of card tables, with various games of bingo and cards in progress. "The Lutherans!" says St. Peter. But at the next door, St. Peter stops them and says, "Ok, now you must be very quiet." He opens the door just a crack, and whispers, "These are the Baptists. They think they're the only ones here."
Version 2:
A man arrives at the gates of heaven. St. Peter asks, "Religion?" The man says, "Methodist." St. Peter looks down his list, and says, "Go to room 24, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."
Another man arrives at the gates of heaven. "Religion?" "Baptist." "Go to room 18, but be very quiet as you pass room 8."
A third man arrives at the gates. "Religion?" "Jewish." "Go to room 11, but be very quiet as you pass room 8." The man says, "I can understand there being different rooms for different religions, but why must I be quiet when I pass room 8?" St. Peter tells him, "Well the Catholics are in room 8, and they think they're the only ones here."
What is the meme here? The specific telling of the joke varies widely, but the punch line is always the same: Some particular church thinks they have the exclusive key to heaven, and St. Peter is humoring them. The meme is the concept, not the specific words used to convey the concept. A particular meme can be expressed in many, many ways and still retain its identity.
This brings us to an important difference between genes and memes: A concept, the core idea that is being conveyed via the meme, can be expressed in a variety of different ways. For example, a Catholic priest could teach the catechism in Italian, English, German, Japanese, Hawaiian, or any one of hundreds of other languages, and the core concepts of the catechism memes would be nearly identical. In other words, we must be careful to distinguish between changes in the message (the concept), and changes in the medium (the particular words used to convey the concept).
This is actually true of genes, too. In most cases the medium (the DNA sequence) and the message (the protein it encodes) are tightly coupled, but there are examples of different DNA sequences that code for the same protein. However, this doesn't alter the main point here: The medium (words) and message (concept) are much more distinct for a meme than for a gene.
Both the medium and the message can affect the survival of the meme. The concept itself can be so appealing that it can be expressed in many ways and still spread; the message (the specific words) may not be important. We see that in the previous joke about Saint Peter – the particular retelling wasn't as important as the central concept.
On the other hand, a well-crafted medium can make an otherwise uninteresting meme become widespread. Advertising firms know this all too well: They purposely wrap uninteresting memes ("buy our product!") inside of an interesting message, such as a nice song, a humorous advertisement, or a sexually provocative image.
This leads us to the other key difference between memes and genes. Until very recently, genes only changed by random mutation; beneficial mutations were rare, and evolution was a glacially slow process. By contrast, memes sometimes mutate randomly (poor memory in the teller, or a misunderstanding of the concept), but they are often altered deliberately, by someone with a specific goal. Because of this, meme evolution is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
Note that I said "until very recently" when asserting that genes only mutate by random processes. One of the most interesting developments in the history of life on Earth is that scientist are now able to deliberately modify genes, and to do so with precision. An early example was when scientists learned to transfer the genes for the luciferase enzyme responsible for the firefly's glow into other creatures such as mice, causing parts of the mice to glow faintly when certain genes are activated.
And one of the most ironic twists of all was the development of the first transgenic plant. Scientist had assured the public that transgenic experiments could help feed humankind by making crops more productive and nutritious, or grow in harsher climates, or be more pest resistant so that farmers could use organic techniques. But when the first transgenic plant was announced, environmentalists were horrified: The plant was altered so that it could withstand more herbicides. Glycophosphate, a potent herbicide, was being used for weed control in farming, but it has the not-surprising tendency to destroy crops too. So the scientists grafted genes from a petunia, which is resistant to glycophosphate, into other crops, which made it possible for the farmers to increase the use of glycophosphate on their crops.
This illustrates how genes have become more like memes, subject to deliberate change by design. Beneficial traits can be added, and detrimental genes can be removed. The pace of evolution, which for 3.5 billion years has followed a slow, predictable pattern, has been freed from its constraints in a single generation. It is this author's opinion that this will be one of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. Only time will tell.
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.
– Jean Rostand
An excellent example of meme mutation is the revision of Yahweh's visit to Abraham. In Abraham's time, those who worshipped Yahweh believed he was a "same stuff as humans" sort of god, made of flesh and blood, but with god-like powers. It was perfectly reasonable to think such a god could sit down with Abraham, and it wasn't surprising that Abraham took a while to figure out that his guest was Yahweh. But a few thousand years later, the Yahweh meme had evolved – now Yahweh was such a mighty god that his presence would be unbearable to a mere human. So how can we explain Abraham's visitor? By mutations of the memes that explain Yahweh's presence at Abraham's table.
At any particular moment in history, different explanations of Abraham's visitor would be put forth. Some variations of the Abraham story were undoubtedly better, that is, more consistent with the more exalted Yahweh, and thus were more likely to be retold. Others were inconsistent and led to "mental tension" in people who wanted to believe the stories in the Bible. Naturally, the more appealing memes were the ones that reconciled this problem.
This is classical "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection." In the end, the new interpretation is that Yahweh didn't appear in person to Abraham, but instead sent a manifestation of himself, something that was tolerable to Abraham's earthly flesh. The mutation and filtering process did its work, allowing Yahweh to become almighty without discarding the story of Abraham's visitor.
The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.
– Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980)
One of the surprising facts about evolution is that overpopulation is an integral part of the process. Without overpopulation, natural selection (survival of the fittest) would be irrelevant.
Let's say, for illustration, that a bunch of rabbits live in a particular region, and half of those rabbits, by chance, have slightly longer fur. By bad luck, a climate change comes along, bringing many decades of colder weather. Now suppose that the short-haired rabbits are just one percent more likely to die in the cold than the longer-haired rabbits, and because of this, for every hundred long-haired rabbits that survive, only ninety-nine short-hair rabbits survive. That hardly seems important, does it? Even after ten generations, there is only a drop of ten percent in the short-haired rabbit population. But that one percent keeps doing its work, generation after generation. By the fiftieth generation (which can be well under fifty years), the short-haired rabbits' population is down by forty percent, and at one hundred generations, only a third of the short-haired rabbits remain. In a thousand generations, a mere blink of the eye on the geological timescale, the short-haired rabbits are practically extinct.
Now imagine we could go back, and conduct this same experiment but in a place where there are no limits, a magical rabbit Shangri La where there is plenty to eat, no predators, and room for the rabbit population to grow and grow. The "better" rabbits would breed slightly faster, but the "lesser" rabbits would still survive. There would be no filtering, no selection; all varieties of the rabbits would thrive. With enough food, and enough space, even some very "unfit" rabbits, perhaps with birth defects or other weaknesses, could easily reproduce; their genes would not become extinct.
In this rabbit's Shangri La, even a cold century wouldn't necessarily make the short-haired rabbits extinct. Their numbers would grow more slowly than the long-haired rabbits, but it wouldn't matter – the short-haired rabbits' genes would keep on reproducing, making more copies of itself. "Survival of the Fittest" only matters when some individuals don't survive.
A corollary to this is that all species on Earth tend to overpopulate. The above-mentioned rabbits can, under the right conditions, have as many as five litters each year; a single mother can have thirty-five offspring in a single year. Spiders lay a sac of eggs that can hatch thousands of baby spiders. The salmon swims upstream and lays several thousand eggs. Since all species on Earth have fairly static populations over a long period of time, it is clear that most of these offspring don't live to maturity; on average, of the thousands of baby spiders that hatch, or the thousands of salmon hatchlings, only one will reach maturity and have offspring of its own.
This overpopulation is required for evolution to do its work. In each generation, far more babies are born than can survive, and they're not all identical. This is the raw material that feeds the relentless filter of natural selection.
As you might by now expect, this same principle applies to memes: Overpopulation is the key to evolution. Let us return to our favorite, the lowly joke, to illustrate. I have no idea how many jokes are running around the United States right now, but I would be surprised if it is more than 100,000 at any one time, in fact, I'd be surprised if there are more than 10,000 "active" jokes at any given time.
There are two primary limitations on a joke's ability to reproduce. First, there are only a few billion people in the world; once these brains are all "full" of jokes, there isn't room for more. Some jokes will be forgotten as new ones are told.
Second, unless you are a professional comedian, you probably only spend a small fraction of your life telling jokes. I'd be surprised if each of you readers has told more than two jokes today, and most of you haven't told any jokes today. So jokes not only compete for "room" in your brain, they also compete for very limited "reproduction time." Overpopulation has the exact same role in the Darwinistic analysis of jokes (and all memes) as it does in biological evolution.
There are far more ideas generated each day, and variations on existing ideas, than can possibly survive in the long run. The relentless filtering of natural selection works on memes, just as it works on genes, by filtering out the less fit memes, and passing on the more fit memes as they are retold and "grow" in a new mind.
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and
I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963)
How about this joke:
I got my mother a book about atheism for Christmas.
I like this joke, but you may not – perhaps you're not a fan of irony, or perhaps you don't like to make fun of Christmas. Either way, this joke has a limited audience compared to many.
In the biological world, each species has a niche, a place in the ecological system where it can survive. Giant redwood trees get almost half their water from fog, so they thrive in the foggy Pacific Northwest, but can't survive in the heat of Southern California where the palm trees grow. Trout live in fresh water, and are poisoned by salt water. Penguins thrive in the cold, and die of overheating in even a moderate climate. Some very slow-growing bacteria even live deep inside of rocks, thousands of feet below ground.
A species' niche is the specific range of conditions under which it can live. It includes the basic environment (water, land, air, inside rocks), temperature, food sources, salinity, acidity, water supply and any other environmental factor that affects the species' ability to survive and reproduce.
Every species' niche has limits. It may be the entire Pacific Ocean for a whale, or a tiny pond for a fresh-water guppie. Whichever it is, the environment limits the number of individuals that can survive. The ocean fills up with whales, the pond with guppies, at which point not all of the babies born will survive to adulthood.
What about memes? Consider and contrast these two jokes:
A rope gets drunk and disheveled and all tangled up, and walks into a bar. The bartender takes one look at the rope and says, "Hey! We don't serve ropes here. Are you a rope?" The rope replies, "No, I'm a frayed knot!"
René Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "Will you have a drink?" Descartes replies, "I don't think..." and *poof* disappears.
The first one has wide appeal; in fact, I suspect many of my readers have heard it already (or a variant). But don't be surprised if you've never heard the second one, or if you don't get it. It's a philosopher's joke. Descartes was the great philosopher and mathematician whose most-quoted line is, "I think, therefore I am," which he asserted proved his own existence.
Jokes and other memes live in your brain, just as a fish lives in water. The "world" for memes consists of the collective set of all brains in the world. Douglas Hofstadter coined the term ideosphere for this. The ideosphere is the collective intelligence of all humans, and is the environment in which memes live, reproduce, compete, and mutate.
Within the ideosphere, there are niches, just like the niches of the biological world. The first joke above ("frayed knot"), has a large audience: All English-speaking people. But notice that, because it's a play on words, specifically on the fact that "afraid not" and "a frayed knot" sound alike, it can't be translated to other languages so it can't live in the Russian-speaking section of the ideosphere.
The second joke (Descartes) has a much smaller niche: Philosophers, mathematicians, and a few other individuals who know who Descartes was, and exactly what he meant when he said, "I think, therefore I am."
Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Imagine I said to you, "Hey, did you hear? There's this girl named Mary in the Hospital downtown, and she had a baby the other day, and they say she'd never had sex with anyone!" By itself, this would be kind of cool news, and (assuming you believed me), you might tell a friend or two, and perhaps the story would spread for a week or so. But then it would die out. It's a moderately interesting meme, but in today's world where supermarket tabloid headlines shout impossible "facts" daily, it wouldn't be long before this "Virgin Mary" meme faded into oblivion.
But the Christian version of this meme is coupled with thousands of other Christian memes, including memes such as: There is one God; Jesus Christ was God's son; You are inherently sinful, but accepting Christ can absolve you; If you accept Christ, you will be magnificently rewarded; if you don't accept Christ, you will be horribly punished; The Bible is God's inerrant word; You should convert non-Christians to Christianity; There are priests who know more than you about God, Christ and the Bible ... and many, many more.
These Christian memes are an example of a memeplex, a set of mutually dependent, symbiotic memes, each one of which probably would not survive, but when taken as a group, become a survivor, a set of concepts that are passed reliably and frequently from one brain to the next. Religion is an example of an especially rich and powerful memeplex.
Notice the symbiosis in the Christian memeplex: The individual memes each benefit from the complex, and contribute to the survival of other memes in the complex. The relationship is mutually beneficial. These memes together form a very powerful memeplex that has survived for nearly two thousand years.
This book is also a large memeplex. Each chapter, and each section within each chapter, introduces you to new memes. Any one topic, like the Martyrdom meme, is interesting, but hardly likely to change your fundamental views on religion. But taken together, the memeplex presented in this book is far more powerful (or so the author hopes!) than the sum of the individual memes.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
– Charles Darwin
Earlier, we studied the eight great trends in religion memes, things like intolerance, polytheism-to-monotheism, and globalization. Now that we've defined memes more clearly, and had a quick lesson on Evolution Science, let's make sure we understand that religion is a huge, magnificent memeplex.
Most societies spend vast amounts of time and effort passing their religious beliefs to their children. It ranks at the top of things our parents expect us to learn, alongside reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science. In fact, some parents (particularly those in America's more conservative churches) consider their children's religious training to be the only truly important subject; reading is of course necessary so that one can study the scriptures, but arithmetic, critical thinking, and particularly science, are often far down the list of priorities for these parents. Tiny children who have just learned their first words are sent to Sunday School every week to begin learning the memes. Kindergarteners act in Christmas plays about the birth of Jesus. Muslims teach their boys to show their devotion by praying five times every day. For many families, visiting their place of worship on the Sabbath (which falls on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, depending on your faith) is mandatory.
This is the hallmark of cultural evolution, of a memplex: It is information that is passed, very deliberately, very reliably, and with high fidelity, from one person to the next, from parent to child, from generation to generation.
Religion is the all-time best self-replicating meme complex in the history of humans.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
– Paul Vale'ry (1871-1945)
Years ago, in my electrical engineering days, I was working late one night trying to debug a circuit I'd designed and built. Things were going pretty well, until all at once the circuit went completely dead. No matter where I put my oscilloscope's probe or my voltmeter, nothing. Nada. Zilch. I checked the power supply – plenty of voltage. The oscilloscope itself? Still working. The voltmeter? As accurate as ever. The circuit? Still dead.
Then I realized, to my chagrin, that I'd been putting the oscilloscope and voltmeter on my blueprints, not on the circuit itself! I was so used to thinking of the circuitry in the abstract "language" of an electrical engineer's circuit diagram, that the two blended together in my mind. No doubt the lateness of the hour contributed. The great philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (from whose name we get our word, cartography, the science of map making), once said, "Don't confuse the map with the terrain." In other words, the map is just a model of reality, not reality itself. My late-night mistake was exactly that: I confused the map itself (the circuit's blueprint) for the terrain (the circuit).
The same thing can happen when discussing evolution. We use many words in a metaphorical sense, and build a "mental model" of the process of natural selection that includes many verbs and adjectives drawn from everyday life. For example, we say "the Yahweh meme mutated..." which suggests some kind of active, intentional motivation from the meme. Or we say, "Each species wants to survive," or "Competition is fierce between memes." It is important to remember that these are just metaphors. There is no desire, intentionality, motivation or any other emotion in the process of evolution. Natural selection, whether for creatures or for memes, is nothing more than a filtering process.
We use a strainer to remove the tea leaves from our tea, and we might say, "The strainer lets the tea through and stops the leaves," suggesting that the strainer somehow has an active part to play in the process. But we all know that it is a metaphor, that filtering tea is a purely mechanical process. When we say, "The tea strainer lets the tea through," it is an entirely different meaning than when we say, "The policeman lets the pedestrians through."
Darwin himself wrote about this very problem in Origin of the Species. Darwin noted that for brevity and convenience, we use words which have other connotations, and must be careful not to read too much into these terms:
[Some] have objected that the term selection implies conscious choice in the animals which become modified; and it had even been urged that, as plants have no volition, natural selection is not applicable to them! In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; ... It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? Every one knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws [I mean] the sequence of events as ascertained by us. With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten.
As we continue our discussion of memes and evolution, keep in mind that the words we use are metaphorical, and that evolution is an entirely inanimate process.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
– Jesus Christ (Luke 14:26)
The battle over adoptionism during the second century AD is an example of competing memes responding to evolutionary pressure. The adoptionist meme says that Jesus was born human, not divine and later adopted by Yahweh as His son. Adoptionists believed that Joseph was Jesus' father and Mary was his mother (not a virgin), and that through Jesus' sinless devotion, God was very pleased and took Jesus as His own son, making him divine at Jesus' death. The anti-adoptionist meme is the now-familiar (i.e. orthodox) view, that Jesus was born of a virgin and was divine from birth, and that Jesus and God are part of a single Holy Trinity.
The scribes of the second century were educated men, well aware of the debate that was raging about this question. Some of the gospels they were copying contained phrases that supported the Adoptionist's beliefs. When Joseph and Mary took Jesus to the Temple, and the holy man Simon blessed Jesus, "his father and mother were marveling at what was said to him" (Luke 2:33). The scribes changed this to "Joseph and his mother..." In several other places, Jesus' original "parents" were changed to "Joseph and his mother".
With the Council of Nicaea, the anti-adoptionist meme won the day. The subtle alterations of the Gospel helped its case by changing the meme-environment slightly in its favor. The adoptionist meme had several revivals through the centuries, but these were quickly suppressed by the anti-adoptionist meme, which by then was firmly entrenched as Christian orthodoxy.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
– Arthur C. Clarke
This chapter has been somewhat of a whirlwind tour of the principles of evolution, and how they can be "abstracted" and applied to memes. Let's take a quick look back:
Reproduction is the first principle of evolution. While the "reproductive motive" for biological life ranges from simple biochemistry to complex mating rituals, whatever the motive force may be, it is encoded in the genes. Similarly, memes have a wide variety of motivating features that cause you to repeat them, to teach them to someone else, but it is the meme itself that contains this motive force, that has the impetus for its own reproduction.
Overpopulation, the tendency of all species to produce far more offspring than can survive in each generation, provides the raw material for natural selection, the process that weeds out the less fit, and passes on the more fit individuals. Memes, like biological life, have these same two features: There are far more ideas generated than can survive, and only the best ones get passed on to the next generation.
And finally, mutation is the source of all variability, the origin of all change and improvement in species. Although mutation is random and mostly detrimental, occasionally a beneficial mutation occurs, which is rapidly amplified in the population by natural selection. Memes, like genes, are subject to mutation, but they additionally can be modified deliberately, with intent.
We also noted that memes, like genes, can be confined to a ecological niche, a particular subset of the whole ecology that is suitable to the meme's "needs."
In other words, both genes and memes are subject to the fundamental principles of evolution. Both consist of self-replicating information that tends to overpopulate, both are subject to change and mutation, and both are filtered by natural selection. The result is the creation of increasingly complex, intertwined entities: genomes for DNA, and memeplexes for ideas.