Chapter 13 Chapter 11 Memes: New Replicators

So far in writing, I have not made a particularly detailed discussion of human beings, although I do not deliberately avoid this topic.I use the term survival machine partly because animals do not include plants and, in some people's minds, humans.Some of the arguments I have put forward should be said to be applicable to all creatures formed in the course of evolution.If it is necessary to exclude a species, it must be for some good specific reason.Is there a good reason why we say our species is unique?I think there is. All in all, the uniqueness of our species can be boiled down to one word: culture, which I use as a scientist, without the usual snobbish connotations.The spread of culture is like heredity in that it can lead to some form of evolution, although fundamentally it is moderate.Geoffrey Chaucer could not converse with a modern Englishman, although there were some twenty generations of Englishmen between them that bound them together, and each of those generations could converse with the generation before or after it : Like a son talking to his father, he can understand each other.Language appears to evolve through non-genetic pathways, and at a rate orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.

Cultural transmission is not unique to humans.As far as I know, the most recent example given by P. F. Jenkins illustrates this non-human situation best.There is a bird called black-backed gull inhabiting some islands near New Zealand.They are good at singing.On the island where he worked, the birds often sang about nine songs of quite different tunes.Any one male can sing only one or a few of these songs.These male birds can be divided into several groups according to the different birdsong.Say, for example, a colony of eight adjacent males sings a peculiar song which may be called CC.Birds of other twitter groups sing different songs.Sometimes members of a bird-speaking group sing more than one song.Jenkins compared the songs sung by father and son between the two generations and found that the song form was not inherited.Young males are often able to imitate the songs of smaller birds in neighboring territories.This situation is the same as we humans learn languages. During most of the time Jenkins was there, there were a fixed number of songs on the island, which formed a song pool.Each young male can choose one or two songs from this library for his singing.Jenkins sometimes happens to be lucky enough to witness and hear how these little birds invent a new song, formed by their mistakes in imitating the old one.He wrote, "I have found through observation that new songs are produced due to various reasons such as changes in pitch, repetition of pitches, omission of some pitches, and combinations of fragments of other songs. It can be stabilized within a year.Moreover, there are several instances where songs of this new tune can be passed on unmistakably to a new generation of singers, thereby forming new groups of apparently consistent singers of the same songs.Jenkins calls the origin of these new songs cultural mutations.

The song of the stern-backed gull has indeed evolved through non-genetic pathways.Other examples of the cultural evolution of birds and monkeys could be given, but they are merely anecdotal.Only our own species can really show the essence of cultural evolution.Language is just one example among many.Fashion, eating habits, rituals and customs, art and architecture, engineering and technology, all of which have evolved over time in a way that appears to be a high rate of genetic evolution but has nothing to do with it .However, like genetic evolution, the change may be gradual.There is a sense in which modern science is in fact superior to ancient science, and that is true, as our knowledge of the universe changes and deepens as the centuries go by.We should admit that the current situation of continuous breakthroughs in science and technology can only be traced back to the Renaissance, before the Renaissance was a period of ignorance and stagnation.During this period European scientific culture remained static at the level reached by the Greeks.But as we saw in Chapter 5, genetic evolution can also progress by a series of bursts that exist between one stable state and another.

The parallels between cultural evolution and genetic evolution are often mentioned, but sometimes overblown to render them entirely needlessly mysterious.Sir Karl Popper specifically illustrates the parallels between scientific progress and genetic evolution through natural selection.I'm even going to make a case for the likes of the geneticist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, the anthropologist F.T. Cloak, and the humanist J.M. Cullen. ) and others are exploring more in-depth research. Some of my fellow ardent Darwinists have explained human behavior, but I, as an equally ardent Darwinist, am not satisfied with their explanations.They try to find biological superiority in various attributes of human civilization.Tribal religious beliefs, for example, have long been thought of as a means of consolidating group identity, and are particularly useful in species that hunt in packs, where individuals rely on collective strength to catch large, fast animals.These theories, formed with evolution as a preconceived idea, often have the property of group selection, but we can reformulate them in terms of an orthodox view of genetic selection.Humans have likely lived in small, related groups for most of the past few million years.It is likely that kin selection and selection in favor of reciprocal altruistic behavior have acted on human genes to shape many of our basic psychological traits and tendencies.These ideas seem plausible on their own, but I've always felt that they are insufficient to explain such deep, intractable questions as culture, cultural evolution, and the vast differences between human cultures around the world.They cannot account for the extreme selfishness of Colin Tunlbull's Ik of Uganda or the tender altruism of Margaret Mead's Arapesh.I think we have to turn again to fundamentals, to reinterpret.The point I am making is that to understand the evolution of modern humans we must first set aside genes as the sole basis for our theory of evolution.It may seem a little surprising that I should now make such an argument, since I have written the preceding chapters.I am a passionate supporter of Darwinism, but I think Darwinism is too broad to be limited to such a narrow scope as genes.In my argument, genes are just an analogy, nothing more.

So what is it about genes that is so outlandish?We say they are replicators.In the universe within human reach, the laws of physics should apply everywhere.Are there any biological principles that might also be of a similarly generally applicable nature?When astronauts fly to distant planets in search of life, they may find some creepy monsters beyond our imagination.But in all forms of life, no matter where these lives appear, and no matter what the chemical basis of these lives is, is there any substance that is consistent?If there are life forms based on silicon instead of carbon, or ammonia instead of water, if some organisms are found to be scalded to death at minus 100°C, if a life form is found to have no chemistry at all If there are only some electronic reverberation circuits, are there any general principles applicable to all forms of life?Obviously, I don't know.However, if I had to bet on it, I would bet on the fundamental principle that all life evolves by the differential existence of replicating entities.Genes, DNA molecules, happen to be replicating entities that are ubiquitous on our planet.There may be other entities as well.If anything, they almost inevitably form the basis of an evolutionary process, provided certain other conditions are met.

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicators, and other kinds of evolutionary phenomena that follow?I think that right here on our planet, a new type of replicator has recently emerged.It is here before us, but still in its infancy, still adrift awkwardly in its primeval soup.But it is driving the evolutionary process.The speed has been beyond the reach of the original gene. This new soup is the soup of human culture.We need a name for this new replicator.The name should be able to express the concept as a cultural transmission unit or imitation unit. The word Mimeme comes from a proper Greek root, but I wish there was a monosyllabic word that sounds a bit like gene.I hope my classical friends will forgive me if I shorten the word mimeme to meme.We could think of meme as having to do with memory (memory) or with the French meme (same), if that's any consolation to some.The word should rhyme with cream.

A tune, a concept, a catchphrase, a fashion, a way of making a pot or building an arcade are all memes.Just as genes are propagated in the gene pool by passing from one individual to another via sperm or eggs, so memes are passed from brain to brain by a process that may be broadly called mimicry, thereby reproducing in the meme pool. Breeding in the library.When a scientist hears or sees a brilliant idea, he communicates it to his colleagues and students.He also mentioned this point of view when he wrote articles or gave lectures.If the idea spreads, we can say that the idea is multiplying, spreading from some minds to others.As my colleague N. K. Humphrey brilliantly pointed out in his summary of an early draft of this chapter, memes should be thought of as living structures, not just metaphorically but has its academic meaning.When you transplant a living meme into my heart, you actually turn my brain into a host for this meme, making it a tool for spreading this meme, just like a virus parasitizing a host cell same genetic mechanism.It's not just a way of saying, for example, that the meme of belief in an afterlife can actually become matter.It acts as a structure in the nervous systems of peoples around the world, gaining physical power millions and millions of times.

Let us examine the concept of God.We don't know how it arose in the meme pool in the first place.It presumably arose through the process of many independent mutations.Anyway, the concept of God is very old indeed.How does it reproduce itself?It has been reproduced through the oral and written word, assisted by great music and great art.Why does it have such a high survival value?You should remember that the survival value here is not the value of the gene in the gene pool, but the value of the meme in the meme pool.What this question really means is, what is it that gives the concept of God its stability and its penetration in the cultural context?The survival value of the god meme in the meme library comes from its huge psychological appeal.The concept of God offers a plausible answer to some deep and vexing questions about existence.It implies that various injustices in this life can be corrected in the next life.God has stretched out his eternal arms to bear the defects of our human beings, just like a blind placebo prescribed by a doctor for a patient, it will also have a certain effect due to the spiritual effect.This is part of the reason why the idol of God is so readily accepted and reproduced in the minds of people from generation to generation.We can say that in the environment provided by human culture, the image of God exists in the form of memes with high survival value or appeal.

Some of my colleagues have told me that my claims about the survival value of god memes are based on unproven assumptions.At the end of the day, they always want to go back to biological superiority.It was not enough for them to say that the concept of God had a powerful psychological appeal.They wondered why the concept had such a powerful psychological appeal.Psychological appeal refers to the appeal to the brain, and the formation of the brain is the result of natural selection of genes in the gene pool.They are trying to figure out how this brain facilitates the survival of genes. I have a great deal of sympathy for this attitude, and I have no doubt that the brains we are born with have all sorts of genetic advantages.But I think that if my colleagues look carefully at the underlying principles on which their own assumptions are based, they will find that they, like me, are using unproven assumptions as arguments.Fundamentally, it is advisable for us to try to explain biological phenomena in terms of the superiority of genes, since genes can replicate.As soon as the primordial soup had the conditions for molecules to replicate themselves, replicators began to flourish.For more than three billion years, DNA has been the only gene replicator worth mentioning in our world.But it doesn't have to enjoy that monopoly forever.Once the conditions under which new replicators can replicate themselves are established, these new replicators must begin to function and initiate a new type of evolutionary process of their own.Once this new evolution has begun, it has no reason at all to be subordinate to the old one.The original evolutionary process of genetic selection created the brain, thus preparing the soup for the emergence of the first memes.As soon as self-replicating memes appeared, their own type of evolution began, and much more rapidly.The concept of genetic evolution is so ingrained in our biologists' minds that we tend to forget that genetic evolution is just one of many possible evolutionary phenomena.

Broadly speaking, memes reproduce themselves by imitation.But just as genes that replicate themselves are not all good at replicating themselves, so some memes in the meme pool are more successful than others.This process is similar to natural selection.I have specified some of the various characteristics that contribute to the meme's survival value.But in general, these properties must be the same as those of replicators we mentioned in Chapter 2: longevity, fecundity, and the ability to reproduce accurately.Whether any one copy of a meme is long-lived may not matter relatively much, nor does it matter for a copy of a gene.A copy of the tune of the good old days haunts my head, but the day my life ends is the end of the tune in my head.A copy of the same tune printed in one of my Scotch Schoolboy Songbooks will survive a little longer, but not for long.But I can expect that the copies of the same tune haunting people's minds or printed in other publications will not disappear in the next few centuries.As in the case of genes, fecundity is far more important than longevity for specific copies.If the idea of ​​a meme is a scientific one, its spread will depend on how popular it is among a group of scientists.Its survival value can be estimated from the number of times it appears in scientific publications over consecutive years.If it is a popular tune, we can estimate the extent to which the tune has diffused through the meme pool from the number of passers-by who whistle the tune on the street.If it is a women's shoe style, we can estimate it based on the sales figures of the shoe store.Some memes, like some genes, can only diffuse rapidly in a short period of time in the meme pool, but not for a long time.Pop songs and high heels fall into this category.Others, such as the Jewish religious law, can survive for thousands of years, often due to the enormous potential permanence of what is written.

Having said that, I would like to talk about the third universal characteristic of successful replicators: the ability to replicate accurately.On this point I admit that my arguments are not very sound.At first glance, memes do not appear to be replicators capable of replicating at all.Whenever a scientist hears a new concept and passes it on to others, he is likely to change some of it.I candidly admit in this book that Trivers' views have greatly influenced me.However, I have not reproduced his views verbatim in this book.Rearranging and adapting its content to my needs, sometimes changing its emphasis, or mixing his views with my own or others'.The meme passed to you is not what it used to be.This looks very different from the granular, all-or-nothing inheritance that characterizes gene transmission.It appears that meme transmission is influenced by successive mutations and intermixing. However, this non-granular surface phenomenon may also be an artifact, so the analogy with genes still holds.If we look again at many genetic traits such as a person's height or skin color, it does not seem likely that they are the result of indivisible and inmixable genes at work.If a black man marries a white man, the couple will have children whose skin color is neither black nor white, but somewhere in between.That's not to say the genes involved aren't granular.The truth is, there are so many genes involved in skin color, each with such a small effect, that they appear to be mixed together.My description of memes so far may give the impression that the composition of a meme unit seems to be crystal clear.Of course, the truth is far from clear.I said that a tune is a meme, so what is a symphony?How many memes does it consist of?Is every movement a meme, or is every recognizable melody, bar, chord, or something else a meme? Here again I resort to the method I used in Chapter 3.At that time, I divided the gene complex into large and small genetic units, and subdivided units under the units.The definition of a gene is not drawn up strictly in an all-or-nothing fashion, but as a conveniently delineated unit, a segment of a chromosome that is replicated with sufficient precision to be a self-contained entity of natural selection. unit.If a particular phrase in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is so distinctive and memorable that it is worth pulling out of the whole symphony as a call sign for some annoying European radio station, then , in this sense, can be called a meme.Incidentally, this callsign has greatly diminished my appreciation of the original symphony. Likewise, when we say that all biologists today believe in Darwinism, we do not mean that every biologist has a copy of what Darwin himself said imprinted in his mind intact.Everyone has their own way of interpreting Darwin's theory.It is likely that he read Darwin's theory from more recent works, but did not read Darwin's own original works on this aspect.Much of what Darwin said was wrong in its details.If Darwin had had access to my humble book, he might not have been able to discern which of it was his original theory.But I hope he will like the way I present his theory.Still, there is some goodness of Darwinism in the mind of everyone who understands Darwinism.Otherwise, the so-called agreement between two people seems to be meaningless.We might as well think of a conceptual meme as an entity that can travel from one brain to another.Therefore, the meme of Darwin's theory is the main basis of the concept shared in the minds of all people who understand this theory.The different ways in which people formulate the theory are not, by definition, part of the meme.If Darwin's theory can be divided into smaller components, and some people believe in part A but not part B, and others believe in part B but not part A, then the two parts AB should be regarded as two independent meme.If most people who believe in part A also believe in part B that these memes are closely linked together in genetic terms, then it is convenient to treat them as one meme. Let's continue the meme-gene analogy.Throughout this book I have emphasized that genes cannot be viewed as conscious, purposeful actors.Blind natural selection, however, makes their behavior seem purposeful.Therefore, there is a convenience in describing gene activity in purposeful language, as in shorthand.For example, when we say that genes are trying to increase their numbers in the future gene pool, what we really mean is that genes that increase their numbers in the future gene pool due to The genes that are seen acting.Just as it is convenient to think of genes as active, purposeful actors working for their own survival, so we can think of memes as purposeful actors.There is nothing mysterious about genes or memes.We speak of them as purposeful only metaphorically.We've seen that this metaphor works when we're talking about genes.We even use words like selfish and ruthless to genes.We are well aware that these expressions are merely figurative ones.Can we seek out selfish, unsympathetic memes in the same spirit? Here comes a question about the nature of competition.Wherever there is sexual reproduction, each gene competes specifically with its alleles, which are its rivals for the same position on the chromosome.Memes don't seem to have what amounts to chromosomes, nor what amounts to alleles.I think that in some trivial sense many concepts can be said to have opposites.But in general, memes are similar to early replicators, floating freely in the chaos of the primordial soup, rather than pairing neatly in the chromosome ranks like modern genes.So how exactly do memes compete with each other?If they don't have allelic memes, can we say they are selfish or heartless?The answer is that we can say that, because in some sense there may be some type of competition between memes. Anyone who has used a digital computer knows that a computer's time and memory storage space are at a premium.In many large computer centers, this time and space are actually costed in dollars.In other words, each computer user can be allocated a time in seconds and a space in words.Memes exist in the human brain, and the brain is the computer.Time may be a more important limiting factor than storage space, and thus the subject of fierce competition.The human brain and the body controlled by it can only do one or a few jobs at the same time.If a meme is to control the brain's attention, it must do so to the exclusion of other rival memes.Other commodities for which memes compete are radio and television time, advertising space, newspaper space, and shelf space in libraries. As we saw in Chapter 3, gene pools can generate complexes of mutually adaptive genes.A large group of genes involved in butterfly mimicry is so closely linked on the same chromosome that we can treat them as one gene.In Chapter 5, we dealt with the more complicated concept of an evolutionarily stable set of genes.In the gene pool of carnivores, cooperating teeth, feet, guts, and sense organs developed, while in the gene pool of herbivores, a different set of stable traits emerged.Will there be a similar situation in the meme library?For example, has the god meme been associated with other memes in a form that contributes to the survival of the individual memes participating in these associations?Perhaps we can think of an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written traditions, as a set of mutually adaptable, stable, and mutually reinforcing memes. Let me give a concrete example to illustrate the problem.One of the teachings that is very effective in forcing adherence to the canon is the threat of hellfire punishment for sinners.Many children, and even some adults, believed that if they disobeyed the priest's rules, they would suffer terrible torture after death.This is a vile method of defrauding faith, which has brought great psychological pain to people throughout the Middle Ages and even to the present day.But this approach is very effective.This approach may have been the deliberate work of a Machiavellian priest with profound psychological training who knew how to instill religious belief.However, I doubt that these pastors are that smart.More likely, unconscious memes ensure their own survival by possessing the false callousness of successful genes.The concept of hellfire achieves its inherent eternity simply because of its profound psychological effects.It is linked to the god meme because the two complement each other, promoting each other's survival in the meme pool. Another component of the religious meme complex is called belief.This refers to blind belief, that is, belief in the absence of conclusive evidence, or even in the presence of evidence to the contrary.The story of the suspicious Thomas is told not to make us praise Thomas, but to make us praise the other apostles by comparison.Thomas demanded to see the evidence.Few things are more dangerous to certain kinds of memes than a tendency to seek evidence.The other apostles need no evidence, but they can be trusted just as well, and so these apostles are held up as worthy of our emulation.Memes that promote blind belief achieve their own permanence by preventing rational investigation in simple and unconscious ways. People with blind faith can do anything.If someone believes in another God, or even if he believes in the same God but worships it differently, blind faith can drive people to sentence that person to death.He could be crucified, he could be burned at the stake, he could be stabbed to death with a crusader's sword, he could be shot in the streets of Beirut, or bombed in a Belfast pub kill him.The memes that drive blind faith have their own ruthless methods of reproduction.The same applies to patriotic and political blindness as to religious blindness. Memes and genes often support and reinforce each other.But they also sometimes contradict each other.Celibacy, for example, is probably not hereditary.Genes that make individuals celibate certainly have no way out in the gene pool, except in very special cases, as in populations of social insects.However, memes that induce celibacy in individuals can be successful in meme pools.Suppose, for example, that the success of a meme depends strictly on how long it takes people to actively transmit the meme to others.From the meme's point of view, then, it is a waste of time to spend time doing other work than trying to propagate the meme.Priests pass on the meme of celibacy to lads before they have decided on a cause to devote themselves to.The medium of communication is the various influences of people, oral speech, written words, human example and so on.Now, for the sake of clarity, let us suppose that a certain priest is married, and that married life weakens his power to influence his congregation, because it occupies a great part of his time and energy.In fact, it is precisely this circumstance that is used as a formal reason for requiring celibacy from priests.If this is the case, the survival value of a meme that prompts people to be celibate is greater than that of a meme that prompts people to marry.Of course, the opposite is true for genes that promote celibacy.If the priest is the survival machine of the meme, then celibacy is a valid attribute he should have.Celibacy is but a small partner in a vast complex of various religious memes that support each other. I suspect that coadaptive meme complexes evolve in the same way as coadaptive gene complexes.Natural selection favors those memes that are able to exploit their cultural environment for their own benefit.This cultural environment includes other memes, which are also subject to selection.Thus, the meme pool gradually acquires a set of evolutionarily stable properties that make it difficult for new memes to invade. I may have been more negative when describing memes, but they also have a happy side.There are two kinds of things that we can leave to our offspring after we die: genes and memes.We exist as genetic machines, and we are born with the task of passing on our genes from generation to generation.But our exploits in this respect were forgotten three generations later.Your children, or even your grandchildren may resemble you, perhaps in facial features, in musical talent, in hair color, and so on.But with each passing generation, the genes you pass on to your offspring are cut in half.If things go on like this, it won't take long for them to take up a smaller and smaller proportion until they reach a point of insignificance.Our genes may be immortal, but sooner or later the collective genes embodied in each of us die.Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of King William I the Conqueror.Yet it is highly unlikely that a single gene from the old king will be found in her.We should not expect eternity from reproduction. But if you can contribute to world civilization, if you have an insight or compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, all of these can survive intact.Even after your genes are all broken down in the shared gene pool, these things can still exist for a long time and will never be annihilated.There may or may not be a gene or two alive in Socrates in today's world, but as Williams said, who's interested?The meme complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, Marconi, etc. are still prevalent in the world today, and become stronger over time. However speculative my meme theory may be, there is one important point that I want to stress again.When we consider the evolution of cultural traits and their survival value, we need to be clear about whose survival we mean by survival.We have seen that biologists are in the habit of looking for advantages at the level of genes (or at the level of individuals, groups, or species, depending on one's interests).What we have not considered so far is that a cultural identity may be formed in its own way.The reason is simple, because this approach is beneficial to itself. We need not look for the general biological survival value of traits such as religion, music, ritual dances, etc., although such values ​​may exist.Once genes have provided their survival machines with brains capable of rapid imitative activity, memes automatically take over.We need not even assume that there is some genetic advantage to imitation, although it would certainly be convenient to do so.It is essential that the brain should be capable of imitation: then a meme will be formed that takes full advantage of this ability. I will now close the subject of neo-replicators and end this book on a note of cautious optimism.A remarkable human characteristic of conscious foresight may or may not be attributable to meme acquisition.Selfish genes (and, if you agree with my speculations in this chapter, memes) have no foresight.它們都是無意識的、盲目的複製基因。它們進行自身複製，這個事實，再加上其他一些條件，意味著不管願意不願意，它們將趨向於某些特性的進化過程。這些特性，在本書的特殊意義上說，可以稱為是自私的。我們不能指望，一個簡單的複製實體，不管是基因或是覓母，會放棄其短期的自私利益，即使從長遠觀點來看，它這樣做也是合算的。我們在有關進犯性行為的一章裡已看到這種情況。即使一個鴿子集團對每一個個體來說比進化上的穩定策略來得有利，自然選擇還是有利於ESS。 人類可能還有一個非凡的特徵表現真誠無私的利他行為的能力。我但願如此，不過我不準備就這一點進行任何形式的辯論，也不打算對這個特徵是否可以歸因於覓母的進化妄加猜測。我要說明的一點是，即使我們著眼於陰暗面而假定人基本上是自私的，我們的自覺的預見能力我們在想像中模擬未來的能力能夠防止我們縱容盲目的複製基因而幹出那些最壞的、過分的自私行為。我們至少已經具備了精神上的力量去照顧我們的長期自私利益而不僅僅是短期自私利益。我們可以看到參加鴿子集團所能帶來的長遠利益，而且我們可以坐下來討論用什麼方法能夠使這個集團取得成功。我們具備足夠的力量去抗拒我們那些與生俱來的自私基因。在必要時，我們也可以抗拒那些灌輸到我們腦子裡的自私覓母。我們甚至可以討論如何審慎地培植純粹的、無私的利他主義一這種利他主義在自然界裡是沒有立足之地的，在世界整個歷史上也是前所未有的。我們是作為基因機器而被建造的，是作為覓母機器而被培養的，但我們具備足夠的力量去反對我們的締造者。在這個世界上，只有我們，我們人類，能夠反抗自私的複製基因的暴政。 (End of the book)