Survival of the Fittest Meme

Thank you Joseph—a very interesting contribution. Though I’d appreciate it if you don’t go into too much detail—we have competitors and enemies, and this network may not be completely secure. We’ve had some disturbing warnings from OfPax.

Well, these alternative and radically new ways of doing things in the IT community that Joseph’s been describing exemplify perfectly what we scientists call ‘memetics’ at work. Once a new idea emerges, it gets selected in an evolutionary way, there’s a struggle for dominance, and the most successfully adapted ideas survive. Memetics is to the meme what genetics is to the gene—you’ve all heard of genes, I’m sure. Genes are what evolution works on to select and to produce what you are now, creating your biological identity. Memes are similar but they explain how human culture has evolved on top of our biological heritage (though we must never forget how memes ultimately serve our genes and can be reduced to them).

A meme can be religion, fashion, a song, a scientific theory, a single word, the novel Don Quixote, Spanish, language itself, the alphabet, delusions, the idea of the self, your identity, bad habits, good manners, community, skills, hobbies, technologies, stories, antisocial behaviour, political systems, tools, blogs, financial institutions.

The meme, you see, is like a virus, a parasite that takes over our brain. Because human beings are essentially like chimpanzees—excellent mimics—like superb photocopying machines—we simply pass on these memes. Daniel Dennett states: ‘A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library’. And we here in the Community are just a blog’s way of reproducing itself—our personalities, our individual selves are unimportant and can be said not to exist. Incidentally, reproduction is involved in another way as we have reason to believe that the most successful memes are those that make their carriers more sexually attractive and so help the spread of the virus. So the best ideas—like Joseph’s new technology—wipe out all the others, paralleling our genetically hard-wired competitiveness.