Memes Are Everywhere

At the end of 2011, I wrote about the cultural and memetic evolution of the economy. Most of you probably understood what I meant. But I would like to include here a summary of the idea of memetic evolution, which I have extracted from Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published last year.

Humans exist in a sea of memes. For example, music is memes. Somebody invents a new piece of music, and performs it. A successful set of music memes gets performed by others. Because of memetic selection, there are more copies of Dvořák’s New World Symphony on the market than anything written by Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf. The reason that most folk songs are good is that they have endured centuries of memetic selection. Memetic selection appears to have condemned the deliberately atonal academic music of the twentieth century, such as the works of Anton Webern and Witold Lutosławski, to long-term obscurity. (You’ve never heard of them? That is my point.)

To a certain extent, memetic evolution is arbitrary. But memes, like genes, must correspond to underlying reality. In the case of music, harmonic consonance creates more of a feeling of peace and enjoyment than harmonic dissonance. Consonance results when the vibrations of different notes match one another’s overtone series. Humans desire more than just peace and enjoyment from their music, however, and a certain amount of dissonance is necessary to create a flow of musical events; resolution of a dissonance is part of the story of a piece of music. You cannot change the physical basis of consonance and dissonance any more than you can change the law of gravity. Rhythm is also based on the natural world and may be even more primal than harmony. The powerful drum beats of Japanese taiko and Lakota wacipi music bring back fetal memories of your mother’s heartbeat.

Computer programs are memes. Computer programmers commonly use evolutionary algorithms that consciously imitate natural selection. The program begins with a simple set of instructions, then generates slight variations, tries them out, then retains the ones that work the best. The weasel program is a simple example of an evolutionary algorithm. The computer iterates this process over and over, producing complex results that were designed not by the programmer but by memetic evolution within the computer. Old movies with battle scenes required (and boasted of) “a cast of thousands,” but modern movies often have such large-scale scenes generated by computer programs that use evolutionary algorithms.

Literature is memes. The marketplace is an arena of memetic evolution, as people choose some products over others. Science is memes, as scientists try out hypotheses, retaining and propagating the ones that successfully explain the natural world. Everywhere you look, there are memes, memes, and more memes, all of them evolving.

Check out the new YouTube video available soon on my YouTube Channel (StanEvolve). The video may not be available right away. Also remember to submit any comments, especially about topics you would like to discuss for this blog.

For more information about Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, which has now been published in Chinese as well as English, see my website.

Almost Everything Evolves

The following appears in my book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books. I also just finished lecturing about this subject in my evolution class this morning.

The process of natural selection involves these elements: variation; reproduction; limitation. We usually think of genes in this context: natural selection favors the best genes, which must cooperate with other genes to create the best organisms, within populations. But there is nothing about the process of natural selection that requires that the evolvers be organisms. As it turns out, almost everything evolves.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out that it is not just genes, but any kind of information, that evolve. Dawkins called non-genetic pieces of information memes, a counterpart to genes. The result is cultural evolution, the counterpart to biological evolution. Cultural evolution turns out to strongly affect biological evolution, because for most complex animals, the most important part of the environment is the culture of its species.

All that is necessary for something to evolve, according to Dawkins, is a faithful but imperfect copying mechanism for instructions, and a system that is ready to obey those instructions. DNA and the cell fulfill these requirements. So do computer programs and computers. And so do memes and the human mind.

A meme can be as simple as an idea. Somebody thinks of an idea, which is a mutant form of some earlier idea that somebody else had. This is the variation step. In the population of human minds, this new idea contributes to the memetic variation of ideas that is available in the culture. The person then tells the idea to another person, or publishes it or sends it. This is the reproduction step. The human mind has a limited capacity for recalling and using ideas. This is the limitation step. The result is that the most successful ideas get propagated in the culture. The less successful ideas remain rare, the arcane knowledge of a few people, or become extinct. The most successful ideas are not necessarily the best ideas, but just the ones that people like the most. For every good and true idea, there are probably a dozen bad and stupid ideas that rattle around in people’s brains. Many of us try to eradicate the bad ideas from our minds, but with only partial success.

Usually, memes are parts of complex sets. As a result, memetic selection not only favors the memes that are most useful to the animals that think or learn them, but work best as part of a memetic set. Human languages are sets of memes. All humans have an innate capacity for language, but they always learn their particular languages from other humans. The result is that languages evolve.

Evolution is like a branching tree. The branches become separate species when the animals no longer recognize one another as potential mates. Languages have the same pattern. The main Indo-European branch of evolution split into smaller branches, one of which was Latin, which then evolved into smaller branches such as Iberian and French, which evolved into twigs such as when Iberian evolved into Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Mutations accumulate in languages, and memetic selection preserves the variations that are most useful or most appealing to the speakers. After awhile, so much divergence has occurred that the speakers may be mutually unintelligible, as when a speaker of Spanish tries to understand French, or when a Parisian pretends he cannot understand a Frenchman from Dijon. An awareness of the branching evolutionary pattern of languages grew during the nineteenth century at the same time as the awareness of biological evolution. A successful word-meme is one that functions best as part of a language, not necessarily by itself.

This week's evolution celebrities!

The two big evolution celebs this week are Ardipithcecus ramidus and Richard Dawkins (Ardi and R.D.). Ardi is the skeleton of a woman who lived about four and a half million years ago. She was about a meter tall, and walked upright. However, her foot had a thumb-like big toe that allowed her to grasp branches. Therefore this species was perfectly intermediate between four-legged life in the trees and two-legged life on the ground. A missing link that lived exactly where and when we would expect her to, and look like what we would expect, during human evolution in Africa.

Meanwhile Richard Dawkins completed a book tour (to promote "The Greatest Show On Earth") in the United States and once again had huge crowds.

Please comment on your reaction to either of these celebrities.