The Meme Machine (38 page)

In the past, religions that promoted large families were successful because they created more people to adopt the faith from their parents. Lynch (1996) has given many examples of religions, from the ancient Islam to the relatively new and thriving Mormonism, that spread by increasing the number of their offspring, but he does not clearly differentiate the effects of vertical and horizontal transmission. With modern horizontal transmission people are less bound by their parents’ beliefs; as memes spread faster and faster the birth rate becomes less and less significant. We should therefore expect proselytic religions to do better in technologically advanced societies. We may expect new religions of this kind, and also that old faiths which can adapt their memes to changing times may survive while others will become extinct.

I doubt that human beings will ever be entirely free of religion. If the arguments above are right then religions have two very strong forces going for them. First, human minds and brains have been moulded to be especially receptive to religious ideas, and second, religious memes can use all the best meme tricks in the book to ensure their own survival and
reproduction. This may explain the persistence of religion in scientifically literate societies and in societies in which political dogma has tried to erase all religious behaviour – and failed. Perhaps our brains and minds have been moulded to be naturally religious and it really is difficult to use logic and scientific evidence to change the way we think – difficult, but not impossible.

Science and religion

I have implied that science is, in some sense, superior to religion, and I want to defend that view. Science, like religion, is a mass of memeplexes. There are theories and hypotheses, methodologies and experimental paradigms, intellectual traditions and long–standing false dichotomies. Science is full of ideas that are human inventions, and have arbitrary conventions and historical quirks built into them. Science is not ‘The Ultimate Truth’ any more than any other memeplex. However, memetics can provide a context in which to see why science offers a better kind of truth than religion.

We are designed by natural selection to be truth–seeking creatures. Our perceptual systems have evolved to build adequate models of the world and predict accurately what will happen next. Our brains are designed to solve problems effectively and to make sound decisions. Of course, our perception is partial and our decision–making less than brilliant – but it is a lot better than useless. If we had no memes, that would be that; we would have the best understanding of the world that could be acquired in the circumstances. But we do have memes, and with memes come not only new ways of controlling and predicting the world, but meme tricks and free–loading memes, misleading memes and false memes.

Science is fundamentally a process; a set of methods for trying to distinguish true memes from false ones. At its heart lies the idea of building theories about the world and testing them, rather like perceptual systems do. Science is not perfect. Scientists occasionally cheat to gain power and influence, and their false results can survive for decades, misleading scores of future scientists. False theories thrive within science as well as within religion, and for many of the same reasons. Comforting ideas are more likely to last than scary ones; ideas that exalt human beings are more popular than those that do not. Evolutionary theory faced enormous opposition because it provided a view of humans that many humans do not like. The same will probably be true of memetics.
However, at the heart of science lies the method of demanding tests of any idea. Scientists must predict what will happen if a particular theory is valid and then find out if it is so. That is precisely what I have tried to do with the theory of memetics.

This is not what religions do. Religions build theories about the world and then prevent them from being tested. Religions provide nice, appealing and comforting ideas, and cloak them in a mask of ‘truth, beauty, and goodness’. The theories can then thrive in spite of being untrue, ugly, or cruel.

In the end, there is no ultimate truth to be found and locked up forever, but there are more or less truthful theories and better or worse predictions. I do defend the idea that science, at its best, is more truthful than religion.

CHAPTER 16

Into the Internet

In our house we have four telephone lines, two fax machines, three television sets, four hi–fi systems, seven or eight radios, five computers and two modems. And there are only four of us. We also have many thousands of books and a few compact disks, audiotapes and videotapes. How did all this stuff come to exist and why?

If you have never asked yourself the question you might think the answer is obvious. All these things are great inventions, created by other people to make our lives better or more fun. But is this the right answer? Memetics provides an entirely different answer, one that is somewhat counter–intuitive.

I suggest that memetic selection created them. As soon as memes appeared they started evolving towards greater fidelity, fecundity, and longevity; in the process, they brought about the design of better and better meme–copying machinery. So the books, telephones, and fax machines were created by the memes for their own replication.

This may sound odd when we know that memes are just information being copied from one person to another. How can bits of information create radios and computers? But the same question could be asked of genes – how can bits of information stored in DNA create gnats and elephants? The answer is the same in both cases – because the information is a replicator that undergoes selection. This means the evolutionary algorithm runs, and the evolutionary algorithm produces design. The design of computers by memetic selection is, in this sense, no more mysterious than the design of forests by genetic selection. The consciousness of a designer is not the causal factor in either process. Design comes about entirely from the playing out of the evolutionary algorithm.

••••••

We are used to the idea of animals and plants being designed by natural selection, but we must also think about the evolution of the replication machinery that makes natural selection possible – for both have evolved together. This is the analogy I wish to draw here. Memes do not yet have precise copying machinery as DNA has. They are still evolving their copying machines and this is what all the technology is for.

It is helpful to look back at what must have happened in the case of genes – the only other replicators we know much about (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). When the first ever replicator arose on this planet it was presumably not DNA but some simpler precursor, or even some completely different replicating chemical. Whatever it was, we can be sure that the cellular machinery for copying it did not exist. Natural selection in the very early days of life was not selecting between complex organisms like cats and dogs, or even different kinds of simple cell, but between little bits of protein or other chemicals. Any of these proteins that got copied more often or more accurately, or that lasted longer, would have survived at the expense of the rest. Gradually, from these beginnings, natural selection would produce not only more proteins but proteins that took part in the copying of other proteins. Eventually, there evolved the system of groups of replicators, replicating machinery, and vehicles that we see today. The system settled down so that all creatures on the planet use the same (or a very similar) replication system which produces extremely high–fidelity copying of long–lasting replicators.

I suggest that the same process is now going on with memes, except that it is still in its infancy. As Dawkins put it, the new replicator is ‘still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup’ (Dawkins 1976, p. 192). That soup is the soup of human culture, human artefacts, and human–made copying systems. You and I are living during the stage at which the replication machinery for the new replicator is still evolving, and has not yet settled down to anything like a stable form. The replication machinery includes all those meme–copying devices that fill my home, from pens and books to computers and hi–fi.

Looking at it this way we can see all sorts of critical inventions of human culture as phases in the evolution of meme replication. I have already explained how treating language this way provides a new theory of the origins of language. I want now to go on from spoken language itself to the invention of writing, and then to modern information–processing technology. As before, we should expect the evolutionary process to involve increases in the fidelity, fecundity, and longevity of the replicators.

Writing

Writing is obviously a useful step for memes because it increases the longevity of language. We have already seen how language itself increases the fecundity and fidelity of copyable sounds; the problem was longevity. Stories told using language can be remembered in human brains but, that
aside, the sounds of language are necessarily ephemeral. Writing is the first step towards creating long–lived language.

No one knows how many times writing was independently invented from scratch, but the task is formidable. To start from scratch means making a large number of decisions about how to divide up speech and how to organise the marks that are going to stand for that speech. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing about five thousand years ago; the Mexican Indians some time before 600
BC
; and Egyptian and Chinese systems may also have arisen independently. Sumerian cuneiform began, like many writing systems, as an accounting system representing sheep and grain. It started with clay tokens and gradually evolved into a system of marks on clay tablets, with conventions about making the marks in order from left to right and top to bottom. Other systems, naturally enough, use different conventions. From a memetic point of view we can imagine lots of people trying out different ways of using the marks and some ways being copied more than others. This selective copying is memetic evolution at work, and the result is better and better writing systems.

Many writing systems have taken a starting point from other systems, or even just borrowed the idea of writing itself. In 1820, a Cherokee Indian called Sequoyah observed that Europeans made marks on paper and went on to devise a system for writing down the Cherokee language. Although he was illiterate and knew no English, his observations were enough for him to devise a writing system so successful that Cherokees were soon writing, reading, and printing their own books and newspapers (Diamond 1997).

I have suggested that human consciousness is not the driving force behind the creation of language (or anything else for that matter) and Sequoyah looks like the ideal case to prove me wrong. In fact, I chose him as a perfect opportunity to explain what I mean. Sequoyah was presumably as conscious as any human being. In discussions about creativity people often assume that consciousness is somehow responsible for creativity, but this view meets with serious problems as soon as you try to imagine exactly what it means. You are almost forced into adopting a dualist position, with consciousness as something separate from the brain, that magically leaps in and invents things. A more common view in science is to ignore consciousness and treat creativity as a product of the intelligence and ability of the individual concerned – ultimately taking the process back to brain mechanisms. This escapes from the dualist trap but leaves out the importance of all the ideas already available in the creator’s environment. The memetic view includes all this. What I am proposing is this.

Human brains and minds are a combined product of genes and memes. As Dennett (1991, p. 207) puts it ‘a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes’. In Sequoyah’s case he must have had an exceptional brain, with exceptional determination and motivation, and he happened to come across a writing system that was already available at a time when his own people were in a position to take up his ideas and use them. Sequoyah’s thinking was an essential part of the process, but was itself created out of the interplay between memes and genes. All this is a wonderful example of replicators creating design out of nowhere. As ever, there is really no designer other than the evolutionary process.

There are basically three strategies for writing systems. Signs can be used to stand for whole words, for syllables, or for just single sounds. The differences are important for the memes each syllable will be able to transmit. A system based on whole words is clumsy because there are so many words. Every time a new word is invented a new sign has to be created as well. At the other extreme systems using signs for single sounds can use few signs and combine them in many different ways, such as the alphabet of twenty–six letters in which this book is written. The cognitive load placed on the brains of people using the system varies in the same way. It is relatively easy to learn twenty–six letters and their sounds, although even this typically takes schoolchildren many months or even years of work. But learning Japanese
kanji
takes much longer, and unless you know two or three thousand of them you cannot read a Japanese newspaper.

For many reasons, writing systems based on sounds can convey more memes for less effort, and therefore are likely to win out in competition with other systems. Of course, the competition is not straightforward. The historical process by which writing systems are created means that there are all sorts of quirks, oddities, and arbitrary conventions which, once learned by sufficient numbers of people, attain some kind of stability. In biological evolution an important principle is that evolution always builds on what it has available at the time. There is no evolutionary God who can look at the design of the eye and say ‘It would be better if we got rid of this bit and started again’. There is no starting again. The same applies to the design of writing systems. They evolve gradually from wherever they have got to at any point. So, the alphabet of twenty–six letters is far from the ideal that a memetic God would create, but it is better than many other systems, and therefore, when direct competition arises, tends to win. Many languages, like Turkish for example, have changed over from more cumbersome
systems to the Roman one. Many languages use variations on the system, adding umlauts or circumflexes, diphthongs, or even new letters. We have yet to see whether the economic and cultural power of Japan is enough to ensure the survival of its complicated writing system in a world in which the transmission of memes is everything, and English written with the Roman alphabet is dominant. For memetic reasons I suspect it will not be.