MEMETICS; THE NASCENT SCIENCE OF IDEAS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION J. Peter Vajk An Essay Presented to the Outlook Club Berkeley, California January 19, 1989 In April 1917, a 47-year old lawyer-turned-journalist and a handful of companions enter Russia by train. By November, they take control of the government of Russia. Within another four years, a devastating civil war kills some 10 million Russians. In 1924, a 34-year old handyman and would-be artist and architect is arrested for starting a brawl in a tavern in southern Germany. In jail over the next nine months, he writes a book expressing his dissatisfactions with life and the world in which he lives, and lays out a blueprint of what he plans to do to change it. Within nine years he has total and sole control of the entire national government. Over the ensuing thirteen years, his exercise of that power leads to the deaths of some thirty million people across two continents and three seas. In the early 1970's, two young men, both of them Vietnam War veterans, go camping in the Sierra Nevada in California, about a mile from a Girl Scout campground. The second afternoon of their stay, one of the men breaks out in chills, sweats, and violent shivering, like he had experienced a few times in Vietnam. About a week later, in the San Francisco Bay area, six Girl Scouts become ill, with high fevers, severe headaches, and violent shivering. In the mid-1970's, a charismatic minister attracts a large following among the poor and disaffected population of a Northern California urban center. After their activities draw increasing attention from the press, the minister and nearly a thousand of his adherent move en masse to an obscure village in the jungles of a small South American country. By November 1978, he and 910 others, including children, lie dead in the jungle, having drunk KoolAid which they knew was laced with cyanide. In the late 1970's, a handsome young French Canadian steward working for Air Canada begins to make regular visits (using his free airline passes) to New York's Greenwich Village, Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, and San Francisco's Castro, Polk, and Mission Street areas. He has no trouble picking up dates with dozens of gay men over a period of two or three years. By 1980, over a hundred men from coast to coast are dead of dying >from a strange form of cancer or from a rare form of pneumonia. In the fall, of 1988, a graduate student loads a short program into a few mainframe computers. Within two days, dozens of mainframe computers all across North America and Great Britain come to a halt: each computer is repetitively doing nonsense copying of files, leaving no time at all for productive computing. It takes as much as a week to get some of the computer centers back to normal activity. These six episodes, from the disparate fields of politics, human disease, religion, and computer technology, have a great deal in common. It is my aim tonight to explore memetics, a science in the early stages of birth. "Meme" (pronounced to rhyme with "cream") is a neologism, coined by analogy to "gene," by the writer-zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book _The Selfish Gene_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). By the end of this essay, the deep similarities (as well as some of the vital differences) among these six episodes will, I hope, become clear. I will also engage in some speculation about the implications of this nascent science for current affairs. The roots of the idea of memetics as a science lie in the study of biological evolution, in genetics, in modern information theory, in artificial intelligence research, in epidemiology, and in studies of patients with split brains. To set the stage for my discussion of memetics, let me briefly recapitulate the modern understanding of biological evolution and the role genes play in evolution. We now know that life originated on Earth about four billion years ago. The earliest things we might consider to be on the threshhold of living beings were in all probability complex organic molecules capable of replication, that is, able to make identical copies of themselves from less complex molecules in their environment. Complex molecules of this sort, given a few hundred million years, could arise by chance at the edges of the young oceans out of the primordial broth of substances like water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, which were all abundant in the original atmosphere of the Earth. This broth was stimulated by ultraviolet light from the Sun (more intense since the Earth had as yet no ozone layer); by lightning and tidal action (both of which were more intense because the Moon was considerably closer and the day was shorter); and volcanism (also more intense since the Earth's crust was newly formed and thinner). Such stimuli, acting for a period of just a few weeks on such a primordial broth, have been demonstrated in laboratory experiments to produce molecules of intermediate complexity such as amino acids from which all proteins are made. These amino acids, in turn, give rise in the same laboratory experiments within a few months to nucleic acids, from which the DNA in all living viruses, plants, and animals on Earth are made. Once even one self-replicating molecule had come together, evolution toward diversity and greater complexity was inevitable. Once in a while, a copying mistake would happen; if the new copy could still make copies of itself, a new "species" would have emerged. Soon (speaking in geological time scales) there would be a number of species of self-replicating molecules competing for the shrinking supply of raw materials in the broth at the edge of the sea. The populations of these different species would depend to a large extent on three characteristics of the molecules: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. If a particular type of molecule were only moderately stable against disruption by ultraviolet light or by the acidity of the broth, for example, it would not have much time available to make copies of itself. On the other hand, even a short-lived molecule could come to outnumber a very stable molecule if it can make new copies of itself very quickly. A molecule which is not very selective about which bits of raw materials it uses for a particular part of a copy may have numerous offspring, but they will be of different species, so that the numbers of molecules which do not have high fidelity replication will not grow; the species may, in fact, become extinct fairly rapidly. As the numbers of self-replicating molecules increased, their food supply declined, since the food was increasingly embodied in the replicators themselves. Any molecule which accidentally had the capability of breaking other species of molecules apart would then have access to more raw materials, and predation appeared on the scene. In turn, molecules resistant to being eaten in this way (perhaps by carrying around a coat of proteins like modern viruses) would then increase in numbers relative to those which molecules which could be eaten easily. At some unknown stage in this process, the class of self-replicating molecules we know as DNA, appeared on the scene. We do not know whether or not DNA was the original replicating molecule, or whether it evolved from some earlier class of molecules. In any case, it has been highly successful, since no other class of self-replicating molecules survives on Earth today. At some later point in time, by processes which are still unknown, simple single-celled organisms which we would clearly recognize as "living" arose. These early creatures were still dependent on physical processes (lightning, ultraviolet light, etc.) for the production of foodstuffs, on predation, or on scavenging. Finally, about two billion years ago, a new molecule was "invented" which changed the whole picture. That molecule was chlorophyll, which enabled its inventors, the blue-green algae, to make complex foodstuffs (sugars and starches) directly and rapidly from two of the simplest and most abundant molecules in the environment, namely, water and carbon dioxide, with a little help from the sunlight. This made it possible for several different types of simple primitive cells to fuse together into the more complicated modern cell in a mutually helpful, symbiotic relationship. The more complex cell could now form multi-cellular entities, and higher plants and animals appeared on the scene, creating the sort or biosphere we know today. But underneath it all, the self-replicating DNA molecule, the gene, is the very essence of life. Trees, dogs, mosquitos, robins, earthworms, and human beings are from a certain perspective nothing more than huge, elaborate robots whose only function is to enhance the ability of the minute genes inside to replicate themselves. In other words, a chicken is merely an egg's way of making more eggs. While individual chickens or salmon or human beings have fairly short lifespans, a particular gene, that is, a particular pattern of amino acids in a DNA chain, may survive through many generations. Ignoring some of the finer points of the way in which chromosomes are scrambled during the formation of sperm cells and egg cells in sexual reproduction, a given gene may actually survive for millions of years, although the survival machine, the body it wears, is replaced frequently. Any particular body reflects the particular collection of genes it carries; natural selection operates, not on species or on particular populations, but on individual genes. As environments change, the survival probabilities for a particular gene may be enhanced by tagging along with a different collection of genes. Thus it is not surprising that the gene for Rh factor in human blood is virtually identical to that in chimpanzees, and just a...
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