Crumbs: January 19th, 2019. Owning the Memes of Production
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Under what conditions does evolution happen? Simply: there needs to be repeated cycles of imperfect copying of information, alternating with selection of that information. The theory of evolution is an abstract concept that constrains the types of things that actually undergo evolution. DNA is one, memes are another.
We evolution in genes (chunks of DNA code): the knowledge embodied in genes is the knowledge of how to get themselves replicated at the expense of their rivals. Genes often do this by imparting useful functionality to their host organism. This functionality is often created by encoding into genes regularities in the environment and approximations to laws of nature. Think of an eye. In some sense the genes for developing an eye has encoded into the knowledge of physical laws dealing with light. This knowledge is implicit in the genes themselves.
Often, biological evolution is portrayed as a fierce and vicious battle, but the competition isn't between different species -- it's between variants of genes within a species. This can give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce cooperation. Either all the genes are copied into the next generation, or none are.
Now we can contrast genetic evolution with memetic evolution. First, we need to identify the mechanisms of replication, variation, and selection. Like genes, all memes contain knowledge of how to cause their own replication. Genes have DNA, memes have brains. In both cases, the knowledge adapts to causing itself to be replicated, and this adaptation is the outcome of alternating rounds of variation and selection. So, both memes and genes are 'selfish' -- they don't evolve to benefit their holders, or society, or themselves -- except in the sense of replicating better. The successful meme variant is the one that changes the behavior of its holders such that it displaces other memes from the population. This variant can be 'good' or 'bad' as perceived by others, what matters (for the meme) is that it spreads faster than its rivals. Societies have been destroyed because the memes that were best at spreading also were terrible for the society.
Ok, so we've established that the replicator for both memes and genes is abstract: it is the knowledge itself. They are forms of information which, once embodied in a suitable physical system, tend to remain so while most variants of them do not. And memes really exist, regardless of what they're called or how we classify them. We created the theory of genes before we knew how they were stored, similarly we can have an explanatory theory of memes without knowing how they are stored in brains. We know that some ideas can be passed from one human to another and affect their behavior. Memes are those ideas.
Beyond the replication mechanism, the variation and selection mechanisms for genes and memes couldn't be more different. Let's start with selection: every meme must survive two different mechanisms of selection in every generation. One as a memory in the brain that causes the holder to enact the behavior, the second as a behavior that causes the recipient to remember and enact it. Meme generations are simply successive instances of copying to another individual.
Often, long-lived religions are explained via the premise that 'children are gullible' or 'easily frightened' by stories. But that cannot be the explanation. If creating a faithfully replicating meme were that easy, then the whole adult population in our society would be proficient at algebra -- more precisely, they would be proficient algebra teachers. The overwhelming majority of ideas fail to contain the knowledge it takes to persuade anyone else into doing the same to others. To be a long-lived meme, an idea has to contain very sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do at least two things: assimilate the meme faithfully, and enact it. The fact that some memes can replicate themselves for many generations demonstrates just how much knowledge they must contain.
So: selection pressures are intense -- what about variation? Well, that happens even faster. The brain is an arena of intense variation, selection, and competition between ideas. That means meme replication itself involves evolution within individual brains -- up to thousands of cycles of variation and selection in imagination before any variants are ever enacted. Since the inexplicit content of memes cannot be literally copied but has to be guessed from the holders’ behaviour, and since a meme can be subjected to large intentional variations inside every holder, it could be considered something of a miracle that any meme manages to be transmitted faithfully even once. And indeed the survival strategies of all long-lived memes are dominated by this problem.
How do memes ‘know’ how to achieve all such complex, reproducible effects on the ideas and behaviour of human beings? They do not, of course, know: they are not sentient beings. They merely contain that knowledge implicitly. How did they come by that knowledge? It evolved. Same with genes -- the approximations or 'rules-of-thumb' of the laws of nature or the environment were discovered via evolution. Implicit in our genes for eyes is a rule-of-thumb about how light travels. Implicit in romanesco is a rule-of-thumb for how to maximize surface area (the golden ratio).
So let’s apply this idea to cultures: a culture is a set of ideas (memeplexes) that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. Why does one society remain primitive while another dynamic? It's a consequence of the types of memes that can spread through society. In short, if a memeplex dominates a society it can only dominate in one of two ways: either it is great at disabling creativity and critical facilities of thought (anti-rational memes), or it is true and useful (rational memes).
Anti-rational memes exist in static, primitive bubbles/societies because they cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of new knowledge. All new knowledge threatens (and eventually will) unseat the anti-rational meme’s ability to replicate. Thus the best anti-rational memes depend on the lack of critical or creative thought of its members.
Rational memes can only exist in dynamic societies that encourage the criticism of ideas and freedom of thought. In the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have an advantage over false ideas and can be outcompeted by anti-rational memes. By nature, all of our ideas have errors. We are fallible. And only through conjecture, criticism, and seeking good explanations can we weed out anti-rational memes. Without criticism, rational memes cannot be distinguished from their anti-rational cousins, so they lose their fundamental advantage.
We can see this playing out in the 'replication crisis' in psychology and medicine. Many ideas that felt right became replicating memes within society. Things like 'power poses' or 'grit'. However, we now know that these ideas were generated under unhygenic statistical practices that generated many false positives. Once these ideas were subjected to more rigorous standards and criticism, they were exposed as false ideas.
The basic idea is that it should not come as a surprise that we can be badly mistaken in any of our ideas, even about ourselves, and even when we feel strongly that we are right. So we should respond no differently, in principle, from how we respond to the possibility of being in error for any other reason. For every idea we have.
It seems to me that a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains via memes. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes. Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution.
It's truly incredible that the human brain evolved the capacity to be creative 100s of thousands of years ago. It's equally incredible that memes evolved specifically to suppress this capacity for just as long. The process of evolution of memes conspired to keep us in our place for as long as possible -- to benefit the memes, of course.