The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
– Albert Einstein
We've talked a lot about what memes are, now it's time to ask the question, Why do memes exist? This whole book is founded on the concept of memes, and we can't ignore their origin.
Linguists, sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades over the question, "Why did human language evolve?" Good answers have been proposed, which fall roughly into two camps. The first camp, best represented by the well-known evolution scientists Stephan Jay Gould, holds that human language developed as an accidental side effect of a more powerful brain. Gould's thesis is (very roughly) that increasing intelligence made humans "more fit for survival," and language just came along for the ride.
The second camp argues that human language itself is adaptive, that language made humans more fit for survival. These scientist, well represented by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, claim that the ability to share knowledge about hunting, food sources, dangers and so forth gave humans a huge evolutionary advantage over their non-speaking competitors, and claim that language evolved specifically as a successful adaptive trait.
But in my view, none of these explanations comes even close to the explanatory power of memetics.
Memes evolved as a new mechanism for evolution. Memes replace genes as the primary adaptive mechanism for humans.
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
– Author Unknown
Consider the principles of Darwin's Evolution Science, and what they imply. For a species to survive, the information in its DNA must meet a number of criteria.
First, the DNA's information must be very stable. There are roughly three billion base pairs in the human genome that must be reproduced accurately. That's a lot of information. James Michener's semi-historical novel Hawaii is over 1000 pages, and a typical page contains about 1000 characters, so Michener's Hawaii is roughly one million characters. If the human genome were typed out as characters, it would take 3,000 books the length of Hawaii to hold the human genome! Imagine making just one accurate copy of a set of books that takes over 175 meters of space on the bookshelf. Although a certain small error rate is tolerable during reproduction, it is a very small rate. If the error rate gets too large, there are too many harmful mutations, and the species dies out.
A subtle but important point is that the information must be stable, not the DNA itself. That is, a mutation that doesn't alter the proteins produced by the DNA is irrelevant. (We saw a similar effect with the joke about St. Peter escorting new arrivals into Heaven: The central concept, the funny part, was unchanged even with very different versions of the joke.)
In addition, the DNA's information must be able to change (mutate). This is paradoxical because it conflicts with the need for stability, yet both are true. The mutation rate of DNA must be high enough that the species can adapt at least as quickly as its environment changes, yet low enough that the harmful changes don't doom the species. Species that didn't mutate quickly enough aren't around any more.
Finally, the DNA must contain the means for its own reproduction. If the individuals of the species don't reproduce, it's a quick end for the DNA.
Now consider the disadvantages that go along with evolution of the genes encoded in your DNA.
Evolution is slow. Each mutation inevitably starts in one individual, and then the gene for the newly evolved trait or altered feature must propagate through that individual's descendants to a large fraction of the population over dozens, hundreds, or thousands of generations, as it slowly replaces the less-adapted trait. A rapid event, such as a sudden ice age, a new competing species arriving from overseas, or a deadly disease, takes place much too fast for evolution to handle, and often results in extinction.
And worse, evolution is random. There's no guiding hand, no intent, no motivation. Mutations are far more likely to be bad than good. This amplifies the slowness of the evolutionary process: Not only does it take a long time for a mutation to take hold, but "good" mutations are few and far between, so most mutations just die out.
And finally, the filtering mechanism for mutations is very harsh: Death. That is, an individual with an unsuccessful mutation either dies right away, or loses the "survival of the fittest" competition in the long run. There's no way to say, "Oops, this mutation of my DNA was a bad idea, let's go back to the better version of this gene." Once a bad mutation occurs, that's it.
So "traditional evolution," the mutation of DNA and the harsh filtering by nature, is a slow process, one that works well over long time spans but can't respond to rapid changes, where "sudden" means "faster than a few dozen generations," and it is helpless in the face of catastrophes.
Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.
– Marvin G. Gregory
Where does human language – memetics – come into this picture? Evolution has a remarkable way of solving very hard problems: Consider the human eye, the rattlesnake's venom, the frigate bird's ability to soar for a week over the deep ocean without landing, and the penguin's ability to survive, breed and thrive in Antarctica. These, and countless other amazing results of natural selection, illustrate how the inexorable forces of evolution can "try, try again" until amazing solutions are found to the problem of survival.
One of the hard problems is evolution itself: It is slow and cumbersome. Imagine there are two nearly identical groups of primates, but one of these groups is somehow able to evolve faster, and with fewer harmful mutations. As the weather changes, new diseases arrive, competition increases, and so on, the fast-evolving group will have an advantage over the other group: They can develop warmer fur faster, develop immunity faster, or learn to match new competition faster than the other group. It wouldn't take long at all for the faster-evolving primates to supplant the ordinary primates.
Which is to say, the ability to evolve quickly is itself an evolutionary advantage, as long as it's not accompanied by harmful mutations. If evolution can speed up, while simultaneously avoiding harmful changes, it would be a huge advantage to a species.
That is exactly what happened, and what language and memes are all about. In a weird twist of logic, evolution created a better, faster version of itself, by using memes to pass information from one generation to the next, rather than genes. Evolution reinvented itself, in the form of information that is passed culturally rather than genetically, yet is still subject to the principles of Evolution Science! In other words:
Memes are evolution's way of improving itself.
We have emphasized several times that it's the information in your DNA that is important, not the DNA itself. The act of procreation is, at its core, the act of copying information. Memes are just a more effective way to do what DNA and RNA have been doing for a few billion years: replicate information.
Let's compare the evolution of memes and genes in more detail. Why are memes better?
For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
– Albert Einstein, January 3, 1954, in a letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind
Unlike DNA, the evolution of memes is not necessarily random. It is common for people to deliberately and knowingly craft a meme for a particular purpose. Consider the song, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, a song advertising Coca Cola® (by songwriters Cook and Greenaway). Although most of us hate "ad jingles," this song became a hit in its own right, particularly in the United Kingdom where it is one of the best selling one hundred singles of all time. The Coca Cola company couldn't have asked for a cheaper way to get its message across: People paid money to listen to their ad! This may be one of the best advertising memes in history, and is often credited with helping the Coca Cola company, which had come under severe competitive pressure from Pepsi® , regain its position as the number one soft drink in America. I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing is a set of intertwined memes, one that makes it reproduce (it's a very nice, catchy song), and the other that carries a commercial message.
In the last decade, this type of marketing has even gotten a name, "viral marketing." The advertising industry is always at the forefront of sociology, always ready to exploit the latest insights into human behavior so that they can sell more stuff. The Madison-Avenue marketing experts were quick to grasp the power of memes and memetics, and turn it into a tool of the trade. "Viral Marketing" is the technique of creating an advertising campaign that carries within it something so appealing that people tell it to one another with no further expense or effort from the advertisers. A viral marketing campaign centers on a self-replicating idea, a meme, that carries the advertiser's message and carries the mechanism for its own reproduction. The Coca Cola song wasn't the first viral marketing campaign, but it was one of the best.
Viral marketing illustrates our point that meme mutations aren't always accidental or random. Unlike genes, memes can be deliberately created and improved.
Pryor's Observation: How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are going to be dead.
In 1960, Professor Timothy Leary of Harvard University's Psychology Department, traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico. There, he joined some native people in a religious ceremony that included the use of psilocybin mushrooms, a natural and very powerful hallucinogenic drug. The experience, according to Dr. Leary, taught him more in a few hours about the psychology of the human brain than he'd learned in the previous fifteen years.
At the time, psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD were legal, and the use of these drugs by researchers and psychologists was considered quite legitimate. Leary was so impressed by these drugs and the insights it gave him, that it altered the course of his life, and of American history. He became a counterculture icon, a vocal, articulate and flamboyant advocate of mind-altering drugs, and a hero of the 1960s anti-establishment, anti-war movement. Ultimately, Leary became an international fugitive, was imprisoned several times, and was finally freed by California governor Jerry Brown.
Millions of people in the 1960s "hippie" generation around the world tried, or regularly used, the psychedelic drugs that Leary advocated. Although Leary wasn't single-handedly responsible for the "Psychedelic Drug meme" and the consequent popularity of LSD, he certainly was a strong influence.
LSD seemed like a good idea to many people in the 1960s, but in retrospect it's pretty obvious that long-term use of such drugs is harmful. Luckily for most LSD users, this meme wasn't fatal. Some users experience frightening "bad trips," but the effects are rarely permanent.
Unlike a DNA mutation, which is passed to one's offspring, a human mind can accept, and then later reject, a meme, as long as the human body survives the ordeal.
One of the dark secrets of those who came of age during the 1960s, one that they work hard to conceal from their adolescent children, is that many of them tried these drugs in their youth. In the 1960s, and well into the 1970s, it was a rare college party that didn't include the pungent aroma of marijuana, and the use of stronger drugs was common. But most of these same people later in life rejected the Psychedelic Drug meme for what it is: A bad idea. And they didn't have to die to get rid of this meme.
But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
– Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to S. Kercheval, 1810
The final advantage of meme evolution over genes is the sheer amount of information that can be passed. The human genome contains roughly 25,000 protein-encoding genes, which is a lot of information. But the amount of knowledge that can be passed genetically is tiny, just a fraction of the knowledge that one can learn in a lifetime via memes.
Consider the types of knowledge that are encoded genetically (that is, instinctive knowledge). Birds can migrate for thousands of miles. A salmon can roam the whole ocean, and then return to the exact same river, tributary, stream, and finally, the little creek, where it was hatched. A spider can weave a beautiful web. A penguin knows that when a storm is approaching, it must huddle with other penguins or freeze to death.
The list of amazing instincts goes on an on. But far more remarkable is the human ability to describe, with great accuracy, all of these behaviors, and to pass the knowledge to friends, students, neighbors, and children, with high fidelity, and to maintain this information for many generations, even for millennia.
Consider skills like writing, engineering, poetry, warfare, farming, or music. It is almost inconceivable that these traits could evolve without language. Memes can carry far more information than genes.
Children are naive – they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.
– Frank Zappa
Recall that stability is one of the most important traits of your DNA – the information must be passed reliably. Because of this, our bodies have some remarkable biochemistry that protects our DNA from damage, and certain kinds of damage can even be repaired. Is the same thing true of memes?
The human mind seems to be uniquely programmed for exactly this purpose: meme stability. During childhood, we are able to absorb vast amounts of information about the world, our friends and neighbors, and how to survive and make a living. Robert Fulgham's fun and insightful book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten is remarkably true – all of the really important stuff is taught to us at a very young age, and we never forget it.
Children seem to go through a wide-open phase where they can be taught just about anything (even some wildly implausible stuff), and they'll accept it. One of the joys of parenthood is watching a child explore the world, trying everything. Toddlers will watch, feel, smell, pick up, and even eat, just about everything they find. A five year old is so full of questions it can drive a parent crazy. Children love to emulate their parents; they can spend hours or days in "mimic play," playing house, hunting, fishing, fighting, and even with young romances.
But when the child grows into an adult, beliefs become entrenched. The wide open library of a child's mind, which yearns to absorb new volumes, seems to turn into a dusty, locked archive. Some new information can go in, especially if it agrees with the information that's already there, but most of a person's fundamental beliefs become almost unassailable by age eighteen. It is very difficult to alter an adult's opinions. Fulgham's Kindergarten title quoted above, and St. Ignatius' famous quote, "Give me the boy, and I'll give you the man," are both reflections of this fact: If you want to teach fundamental beliefs, you have to teach the children, because by the time a person is an adult, it's usually too late.
This makes evolutionary sense. If biological evolution has "reinvented itself" in the form of memes, as a better way to pass information from one generation to the next, then we would expect the human mind to be programmed for reliability. And that's exactly what we see: As the child matures and becomes an adult, the mind "solidifies," resistant to new ideas, and protects the fidelity of the ideas it absorbed during youth.
Memes thus pass the test of reliability, in that like DNA, information can be passed down through many generations accurately. This is critical to human survival. Locations of food, good ways to hunt, the procedures for making tools, clothing, and weapons, all must be passed from one generation to the next if the species is to survive. During most of human history, the average lifespan was much shorter than it is today, probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty years. That means that by the time a human reached the age of twenty, his or her parents might be dead. If you didn't remember the lessons you'd learned from them, so that you could pass them to your children, those lessons would be lost forever.
So it's no surprise that our brains are "hard wired" to have a period of open acceptance of ideas (our childhood, when the memes are "loaded" into our brains), followed by an entrenchment of ideas (our adulthood) where we're reluctant to alter our beliefs, and work hard to pass our knowledge to our children accurately.
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
– Lily Tomlin
The human ability to speak is nothing more than evolution's way of improving on itself: It's a better way to pass information. It is faster, far more adaptable and flexible than genetic mutation, and can pass far more intricate information from one generation to the next than is possible with genes. An ice age? No problem, humans learn to use other animals' hides for warmth. A competing species? No problem, a few humans can find a way to defeat the competitor, and in one generation, pass that information to all humans. Disease? Instead of relying on immune systems, humans invent drugs to improve their survival.
Cultural evolution has all of the advantages of Darwin's process of Natural Selection: Complex solutions can arise without any conscious design. At the same time, memes don't suffer from the glacial trial-and-error process that makes genetic evolution so slow and cumbersome.
Memes have proved to be the most important adaptive trait in the history of life on Earth. No other animal comes even close to humans in terms of adaptability and rapid progress. Humans live virtually everywhere on Earth, including a few who live undersea and in orbit above the atmosphere. Humans lifespan is vastly increased. Over half of all children used to die, now the mortality rate is just a small percent. The human population has swelled from a few millions to over six billion (6x109 ) in just a few centuries, and our impact on the environment is so severe that one of the largest mass extinctions in the Earth's entire four billion year history is currently underway.
This extreme adaptability is a direct result of evolution's "trick" of reinventing itself in the form of memes, bits of cultural information that follow Darwin's evolutionary principles, but in a new, better way.
We talk because memes are better than genes for evolution.