Memes and the red queen

The Red Queen Hypothesis is named after the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. In the book, the Red Queen and Alice run for a long time - but they don't seem to be getting anywhere. They then have the following dialog:

Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

The Red Queen Hypothesis refers to the way in which adaptation is constantly needed in order for the individuals of a species to maintain their fitness - in the face of constantly and rapidly evolving parasites. It invokes an evolutionary arms race between hosts and parasites. The short generation time of the parasites results in rapid evolution for them. This pushes the hosts around in gene-space, in order to avoid the attentions of the parasites.

The parasites are undesirable from the perspective of individual hosts - but they can have some overall positive effects. They constantly deform the fitness landscape of their hosts, keeping the hosts constantly off balance. This can result in previously separated peaks in the fitness landscape of the hosts sometimes turning into a ridge system - creating paths that lead away from what would otherwise have been sub-optimal adaptive peaks, and promoting evolutionary change.

Bill Hamilton promoted the idea that this Red Queen race helped hosts to invent sexual recombination - so they would be better able to defend themselves against the attention of parasites by maintaining a large quantity of genetic variation in their populations - thereby making life for parasites more challenging.

Sexual recombination is one of nature's masterpieces, and it seems likely that we have a Red Queen race to blame for it.

These days, a second Red Queen race is taking place. This time around, thee rapidly-reproducing symbionts are not bacteria and viruses, but memes - swarming in our heads and infesting our computer networks. As with the organic Red Queen race some of the symbionts are parasites which the hosts want to avoid. As before short generation time of memes and their rapid evolution pushes their hosts around in gene-space, keeping them constantly off balance, and accelerating genetic change in their gene pool.

The first Red Queen race may have led to the triumphant development of sexual recombination. What new techniques might the hosts use to defend themselves against exploitation in this second Red Queen race?

Will they use genetic engineering? A global hospital? Will meme therapy subdue the bad memes with good memes?

Or perhaps the memes will be triumphant. Meme warfare may mean that the most agressive memes are among those that rise to power. Parasites often evolve into relatively stable relationships with their hosts - but sometimes they wipe them out. That outcome becomes more likely when the parasites have multiple host species, and are not so dependant for their survival on the continuing welfare of any one of them.

At the moment, memes are pretty dependent on humans, but once our computer systems become sufficiently advanced, the memes seem likely to swarm out of the human heads and onto the new digital systems with considerable enthusiasm.

After they have estabished themselves fully in a digital medium, the memes may not need the humans quite so much. They will have multiple host species, and will not be so dependent on any one of them.

We will need to have a good and clear understanding of the dynamics of these types of coevolving systems to have the best chance of surviving our coming encounter with this type of situation.

For more details, about these kinds of possibility, please read my Memetics book - when it comes out in a few months time. It's going to look like this: [holds up book]

Enjoy,

References

Google and the red queen