Meme Wars

Richard Dawkins is my hero. I read his opus The Selfish Gene in high school and it rocked my world. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his beautiful prose style and beguiling ideas, Richard Dawkins is arguably the most prominent evolutionary thinker of our time (sorry Gould, I think he has you beat hands down). His major contribution to evolutionary theory has been the concept of the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection, not the organism or the species. He conceives of organic beings designed by genes as gigantic Rube Goldberg contraptions meant to ensure the transmission of the gene into the next generation. In his vision, the genes have constructed your body merely as a temporary means of gettin’ on down the line. Using this framework, Dawkins constructs the most wonderful Darwinian Just-So Stories imaginable, explaining the emergence of two sexes, the evolution of cooperation, the emergence of communication in bees, all in exhilarating, even page-turning style.

In the later chapters of his work, Dawkins introduces, almost as an afterthought, an idea that has become its own, albeit partially disowned, field. Dawkin’s thesis is simple: wherever there are self-replicating “things” of any sort that exhibit 1) heritibility of traits, 2) variation, and 3) differential reproductive success, that Darwinian evolution is the inevitable logical outcome. In other words, given these three criteria, survival of the fittest takes over and produces “things” that are more and more suited to their environments. To illustrate his point Dawkins describes what he calls “memes,” self-replicating ideas that live in the heads of human beings. Memes compete with one another for the niches that biological evolution has created in our 1200cc of grey matter. As an illustrative example of this process, let us observe a well-adapted genus of memes to see how this memetic evolution works.

Take religion. Religion exploits a simple bootstrapping problem unique to humans: we are unable to understand the nature of our death or non-existence, because our understanding of this state presupposes that we exist to comprehend it. There is no way to wrap our heads around the concept of our demise, and thus most religions, in their many guises, offers us a way out of this logical impasse by offering a solution: we never die. Or, more accurately, those who share the meme will not die. Aye, and here is where the replication comes in. Those harboring the little virus of the mind will attempt to spread it to those they know and care about, as they want their friends and relatives to share in the afterlife bonanza.

Our second criterion, variation, is all too plain to see in this set of religion memes. We have innumerable belief systems tailor-made for the wide-ranging habitats of human minds. We can even point to major “speciation” events such as the Reformation where a major mutation in one strain of meme (Catholicism) leads to a flowering of variation and variety of different memetic strains (Protestantism in all its divergent glory).

It is the third characteristic, differential reproductive success, that is the most fascinating in the realm of the meme. The memes of the Quakers and Shakers are slowly evaporating before our eyes as their children are exposed to the competing memes of the modern world—memes of capitalism, gender equality and consumerism. Quakerhood is an endangered meme, a meme that can no longer compete in the marketplace of ideas that has opened in the 20th century.

But more terrifying are the virulent yet self-destructive memes of radical Islam, or radical Christianity for that matter. The memes that inhabited the brains of the hijackers happened to ensure the destruction of their host, but if they are virulent enough to spread to the brains of others prepared by their local conditions to provide good homes to their ilk, this is no matter threatening their survival. Like viral particles of HIV that infect 20 others for every host they happen to kill, the suicidal terrorist meme is likely spreading in the face of these wanton acts of destruction.

In the distant past, memes were largely confined to their localized niches determined by the geographical location of their hosts, and the local memetic flora and fauna (read: culture). But in the last 200 years, we have fully opened the global communication routes linking the developed world, and many previously balkanized memetic environments have merged into one global marketplace of ideas. A full-on war for the space in the human brain is commencing, with capitalism, democracy and liberalism out in front.

The memetic battleground does not as yet include, however, places like Afghanistan. Here are the game preserves for weak and un-adaptive memes, the great game parks for the memetic equivalent of the dodo. We need to introduce the rabbit to their Australia, the zebra mussel to their Mississippi. Instead of bombs, we should be dropping radios that receive a generous sampling of free-world radio in order to inoculate them with a normal culture of memes before they are infected by the worst of the bunch, the Ebolas of the meme world, suicidal self-righteousness.

B.J. Greenleaf ’01-’02 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.