Hi! I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video which responds to one of Steven Pinker's criticisms of memetics - the one where he asks: where is the science of memetics?
In my book on memetics - which is out now - I take a look at some of the critics and criticisms of memetics. Steven Pinker is one of the critics. Pinker expressed a number of objections to memetics in a 2009 Harvard lecture. Here we will look at his claim that there is no proper science of memetics - so over to Steven:
For one thing, just empirically, the idea of memetics, of a science of cultural change based on a close analogy with natural selection, it is just a fact: it's never taken off. It's thirty-five years old almost at this point. Every five years a paper appears that heralds the final development that we have all been waiting for of a science of memetics - and nothing ever happens. Compare this to other sciences that have just flourished since 1976: neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology - there are conferences and journals and textbooks - we don't have a science of memetics - despite the constant promise that it is just around the corner - and I think that there is a good reason why we don't that there is something deeply flawed with the idea.
It is, alas, true that, so far, there is no proper science of memetics. At the moment, nobody learns about memes in school, college or university - and practically nobody gets paid to lecture on the topic either. However, what we do have is a science of gene-culture coevolution. This is a branch of population genetics - and on close inspection, it is closely isomorphic to memetics - a fact which has previously pointed out by both by students of memetics (for example, Blackmore in her 2006 review of Not By Genes Alone and at regular intervals by Daniel Dennett) and by people from the population genetics side (for example, Kendal and Laland's 2000 paper Mathematical Models for Memetics). The academic material is essentially memetics without the "m"-word. It comprehensively validates most of the guts of memetics, and it has all of the features that Pinker is objecting to. The field has been researched by Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, Kenichi Aoki, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldman, Joseph Henrich, Kevin Laland, Alex Mesoudi, Edward Wilson, Charles Lumsden - and now many others. It is true that this area is under-developed and not terribly widely known about, but it does at least exist and has produced a long series of academic papers on the topic dating back to the 1970s, which comprehensively document human cultural evolution. Pinker doesn't make any mention of this branch of science - and indeed it isn't clear from his presentation that he is aware of its existence.
Cultural evolution does appear to be slowly blossoming in academia. For instance, this year saw the publication of Alex Mesoudi's "Cultural Evolution" book, Kevin Laland's "Sense and Nonsense" book - which is all about the evolution of culture an has a whole section on gene-culture coevolution and another whole section on memetics. Kate Distin's "Cultural Evolution" book was published this year and there's my own book on the subject. James Gleick's book "The Information" had a big section on memes - as did David Deutsch's book "The Beginning of Infinity". Cultural evolution is also blooming in the world of marketing. Again if we just look at the books from this year, we have Dan Zarella's book "Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness" - which has a whole section on memes - and there's also Alex Bentley, Michael O’Brien and Mark Earls' book entitled: "I’ll Have What She’s Having". I don't pretend marketing manuals have much in the way of academic status - but there can surely be no doubt that these models are of substantial practical utility. Overall, this is not a huge amount of activity for one year - but it is a significant amount.
The biggest problem with cultural evolution being accepted within academia comes from the human sciences dragging their feet when it comes to embracing the basic principles of Darwinian evolution. There is an extremely long history in the human sciences of resistance to Darwinism. Even a few decades ago, within psychology there was ignorance of - and resistance to - Darwinian explanations. The Darwin enthusiasts were treated as alien invaders from another area of science and were given a hostile reception - as Pinker can probably testify. However, the resistance to Darwin from within the social sciences is much stronger. Cultural anthropology and history should be Darwinian sciences, but they are not. Instead they have mostly embraced the idea that their role is to observe and record, and that too much theory results in biases which act only to interfere with this aim. So, essentially, they are not really proper sciences at all. Social scientists have seen eugenics, social Darwinism and sociobiology. They know that anything related to Darwin is not any good, and will just give their field a bad name and make their colleagues hate them for dragging them into disrepute. So: Darwin gets trashed, and the truth be damned.
The problem is not entirely on the social scientist's side. A few evolutionary biologists are knocking on their door - but only a few. Most have no idea that social science has something to teach them about how evolution works. To them, humans are considered to be just another animal - and to think otherwise is "human exceptionalism" - an idea which has a long history of being wrong. So, they are mostly unaware of the revolution represented by cultural evolution.
The result of all this is that memetics has never taken off. That is a rather embarassing fact for intelligent humans - since it means that the scientists whose job it is to study human evolution have rather badly screwed up.
However, the correct response is not to look for holes in memetics. Memetics is just fine - and the criticisms of it are all a bunch of nonsense. Rather we should set to work constructing the science - since the world will be better off if it is built now rather than later.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video which responds to one of Steven Pinker's criticisms of memetics - the one where he points out that most words are do not evolve and rather are intelligently designed.
In my book on memetics - which is out now - I take a look at some of the critics and criticisms of memetics. Steven Pinker is one of these critics. Pinker expressed a number of objections to memetics in a 2009 Harvard lecture. Here we will look at his claim that most words did not evolve via a process of blind mutation and selection. Here's Steven on the topic:
[footage of Steven Pinker]
Pinker gives a series of examples of words that he claims that did not arise as a result of blind mutation and selection. It is of course true that his examples are not the result of such processes alone. However organic evolution is not just the result of blind mutation and selection either. There are other processes involved in organic evolution - and one of these is sexual recombination. In each one of Pinker's examples it is recombination - and not mutation and selection - that explains the main features of the resulting word.
To go through Steven's examples of supposed invention and explain how to interpret them properly:
Palimony - arose from pal and alimony having sex;
Loonie - arose from "loon" and "penny" having sex;
Podcast - arose from "iPod" and "broadcast" having sex;
Spam - arose from the Monty Python Spam sketch and the idea of unsolicited bulk email having sex.
These forms of recombination are typically the result of a breeding process. So: "iPod" and "broadcast" did not just spontaneously combine to form "podcast", rather they were selected and bred. However breeding happens in the organic world as well. It is most familiar in domesticated dogs, cats, pigeons and sheep. However, breeding is not just done by humans - so, for example, ants farm aphids and selectively cultivate fungi.
So, every single one of the examples Pinker gave of word invention is better interpreted as a case of recombination - where two ideas have sex and contribute part of their own inheritance to their cultural offspring. That is not to say that no words are ever invented from scratch by intelligent designers. However, processes in memetics which are deeply analogous to those in genetics are evidently vastly more common and widespread than Pinker seems to realise. Indeed a failure to consider the possibility that recombination might be involved helps to explain why Pinker doesn't think memetics is worth very much - he hasn't grasped one of its most basic and essential features.
It is important to understand that there is more to evolution than blind mutations and selection. Throughout his critique Pinker keeps emphasizing that some cultural product or another is not the result of blind variation and selection. However, organic evolution isn't based only on blind variation and selection either. There are other processes going on - most notably recombination. Any conception of evolution that attempts to boil everything down to blind variation and selection is so deeply impoverished that it is incapable of modeling even organic evolution.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video which responds to one of Steven Pinker's criticisms of memetics - the one where he points out that memetics features directed mutations.
In my book on memetics - which is out now - I take a look at some of the critics and criticisms of memetics. Steven Pinker is one of these critics. Pinker expressed a number of objections to memetics in a 2009 Harvard lecture. Here we will look at his claim that memetics features directed mutations. Here's Steven next:
[footage of Steven Pinker saying things including:]
Design without a designer is essential for biological evolution - but it is peverse for cultural evolution: there really is a designer - the human brain - and there's nothing mystical or mysterious about saying that.
OK - thanks very much for that, Steven. It is true that memetics features directed mutations. However, directed mutations are simply not prohibited in evolutionary theory. It is easy to verify this by looking at the definitions of the term "evolution" in the textbooks on the subject. Not a single one of those definitions makes any mention of mutations being "random" or "undirected". They just talk about variation. Non-random sources of variation are absolutely permitted in evolutionary processes - according to standard definitions of the term "evolution" in the textbooks on the subject.
In the organic evolution of genes, mutations are typically perfomed inside cells. They are far from random. The effects of organic mutations are, in fact, biased towards being adaptive, compared to what the effects of random mutations would be. This is true because the cell controls how its error detection and correction machinery is deployed. Consequently, cells have a variety of mechanisms to prevent the most damaging kinds of mutations - namely mutations to expressed genes. Some of these mechanisms have been clearly documented by scientists working in the area so, we know for example that some base pair sequences are more prone to trigger mutations than other ones. The redundancy in the genetic code allows coding genes to systematically avoid being mutated by steering clear of these mutation-prone sequences.
In meme evolution, mutations are typically perfomed inside brains. Consequently, a much wider array of mutations is available, and mutations can be made using the principles of engineering and intelligent design. So, in memetic evolution, there are indeed intelligent designers. That is just fine, and it does not represent some kind of problem.
Just because directed mutations exist, that does not mean that natural selection is no longer important - just that it is not the sole star of the show.
For example, the design of a video player may involve intelligent design. However, if you look at the VHS vs Beetamax battle, the outcome of that is the result of a selection process, not the consequence of design. So there is still a substantial role for selection to play in determining the form of the things that we see. That is why you need evoution as a base theory. Changes by intelligent agents are modelled as a type of directed mutation - and evolutionary theory is absolutely OK with mutations being directed - that is not forbidden at all.
Introducing directed mutation does not gut the theory of natural selection of its explanatory power. Nor does it entirely take over the role of explaining the form of things that exist. Directed mutations explain some of the features of the resulting products, and selection explains some of their other features. To explain the observed results you plainly need a theory that models both selective and mutational processes - and evolutionary biology is that theory.
In the case of the VHS vs Beetamax battle, the individuals doing the selecting are intelligent agents - namely consumers - but intelligent agents are intimately involved in organic evolution too. Selection by intelligent agents took place throughout human evolution. Human sexual selection was selection of intelligent agents by other intelligent agents. Any idea that organic evolution is somehow "blind" is just bunk. In organic evolution, mutation may not typically involve very much intelligence, but selection very often does. That does not imply that the selection was done by "deities with foresight" or "cosmic engineers". The selective agents were intelligent humans - and it is perfectly permissible to invoke intelligent agents who influence the evolutionary trajectory because the process of natural selection gave them to us. This argument that allows us to invoke the actions of intelligent agents in organic evolution is exactly the same as the argument that allows allow us to invoke intelligent agents in cultural evolution. The time when we are not allowed to invoke intelligent agents in evolution is before intelligence evolved. However, we have had intelligent agents for millions of years, and they have been influencing the path taken by evolution since they arrived on the scene.
Of course, if you bother to unpack the process going on creating something like a VHS video recorder you will find that the process that created it involved a vast amount of trial-and-error testing:
The companies involved in designing them were the result of trial and error in the marketplace, based on their previous products.
Within the company, there was a selective retention process which was responsible for deciding which engineers were employed by the company in the first place.
Another similar process which influenced which of the employees worked on the project.
More trial, error and selective retention was employed by the engineers involved in attempting to find out what works and what doesn't by using testing procedures.
This was then followed by selective rejection of what didn't work and the perpetuation of what did by supervisors and managers.
Also, if you look inside the minds of the human engineers involved, you will find that there's an iterative generate-and-test process going on in there as well. The mind contains a virtual world which allows possiblilites to be tested and rejected rapidly in a virtual environment. The mutations involved at that level are typically generated rapidly - and without very much intelligence - and are then filtered by selective processes.
And at lower levels in the brain, there are still more instances of variation followed by selective retention - in the case of axon tips competing for dendrite attachment points and dendrite bodies dynamically competing with other dendrites from the same neuron for resources.
So, you really have a form of natural selection taking place at each level.
However, that's really more of a topic for another video. Or if you prefer, my Memetics book has a whole chapter about processes of selection in the mind and brain - check it out.
There's a chapter about "Generalised Darwinism" in my Memetics book. Here's a promotional video about one topic within that area:
Transcript:
Hi, I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video about natural production and natural elimination. This pair of concepts represents an alternative to selection and drift when it comes to visualising and modelling the process of evolution. They are extremely basic concepts which arise naturally when attempting to generalise the Darwinian framework.
An understanding that culture evolves along Darwinian lines has led many of those involved to wonder what other systems exhibit Darwinian dynamics.
It has also prompted a revisiting of the foundations of evolutionary theory. I have a whole chapter about Generalising Darwinism in my new memetics book. Here I will describe some of the more significant results.
Natural selection beyond biology
Most people are familiar with the idea of natural selection. However, many people associate the idea with life - and with living systems. In fact natural selection represents the action of a more general principle that also applies systems which are not alive.
The truth of this has long been appreciated. For example, here is Richard Dawkins, writing on page 12 of The Selfish Gene:
Darwin's survival of the fittest is really a specific case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things.
In fact, the familiar process of natural selection is not confined to biology. It affects everything that comes into existence. Whether or not it comes into existence via a copying process is irrelevant. Some abiotic examples of the effects of natural selection include:
Pebbles tend to be made of hard materials;
Islands tend to include hard rocky outcrops;
Planets tend to have circular orbits.
New fundamental concepts
Evolution is often visualised in terms of natural selection, sexual selection and genetic drift. However, when generalising Darwinism, there is another useful perspective, which can be obtained by considering evolution to be the result of a balance between the forces of production and elimination. This idea is best introduced by considering the following new categories:
Natural production - refers to things coming into existence.
Natural elimination - refers to things going out of existence.
These are extremely basic and fundamental principles. They neatly encapsulate the aspects of evolution that do not involve copying. They thus apply to both biotic and abiotic systems. To illustrate these principles with some abiotic examples:
Examples of natural elimination
Some examples of natural elimination:
Stars that are observed are the ones that have not previously burned out or exploded;
Atoms that are observed tend to be the stable ones - the ones with long half-lives;
Mountains tend to be covered in hard rocks - soft rocks there tend to get washed away.
Examples of natural production
Natural elimination is balanced by natural production. Some examples:
Stars are produced by balls of gas condensing;
Atoms are mostly produced from other atoms - by the processes of fission or fusion;
Mountains are produced by tectonic plate motion and erosion.
Observed frequencies
The frequencies of the things we observe in the world arise as a result of a mixture of processes of production and elimination. Things that are produced frequently and are difficult to eliminate are often observed - whereas things that are produced infrequently and are easy to eliminate are rarely observed. In my book I include a table of examples of these phenomena - including "tall coin stacks" - which are produced rarely and destroyed easily - and "pebbles", which are produced easily and destroyed relatively rarely.
If production rates exceed elimination rates, the number of entites grows - while if elimination rates exceed production rates, the number of entites shrinks. These ideas thus fit very naturally into the framework provided by population genetics.
Note that the approach here can be applied to anything with a measurable frequency. The entities do not have to form a natural kind. They do not need to be to be discrete or particulate either.
For example, you could consider the category of: "men over six feet tall". Production takes place during adolescence, and elimination takes place through death, limb loss, sex changes or degenerative osteoporosis. The results may be more interesting if dealing with natural kinds, but any system where you can measure the frequency with which something occurs can be analysed in this way.
Use in biology
Natural elimination and natural production are most familiar in the context of biological systems. There, production typically takes place at birth, and elimination takes place at death. If birth rates exceed death rates the population grows while if death rates exceed birth rates, the population shrinks. In living systems, natural elimination is selection by death. Natural elimination is a bit different from natural selection, thoug. For one thing, it makes no attempt to exclude genetic drift. The nearest familiar concept in biology to natural production is probably sexual selection. However, sexual selection is not a very general principle. It isn't just sexual organisms that are able to produce varying numbers of offspring. Instead the concept of differential reproductive success is sometimes used. Natural production is a more general concept than this though - since it can be applied to both biotic and abiotic systems.
Another way of considering the difference is to
see that natural production is a kind of mirror image of natural elimination - in that production creates and elimination destroys. However, there isn't really any corresponding mirror concept for the idea of natural selection.
Since biological processes involve copying, what is naturally produced is constantly being magnified, while things that are naturally eliminated play an ever-diminishing role. Thus, iterative application of natural production and natural elimination can result in adaptive evolution.
Framing things in terms of natural selection and sexual selection reflects the way in which these ideas were discovered historically - but sexual selection is not a very general concept. Thinking in terms of natural elimination and natural production results in a more general and broadly-applicable framework - one that extends deeply into many kinds of abiotic systems.
Fundamental revisions
When taught at all, natural selection is currently taught in biology classes. Natural elimination and natural production should probably be taught first in physics (or mathematics) classes. These are pretty basic explanatory principles, broadly comparable in scope to the idea of entropy, or to self-organisation.
This material may seem very basic - and it is. However, it is not so basic as to be obvious. Something like it does need teaching to children in science classes - with presentation along the lines given here, and with natural selection in biology being given as an example of the results of these principles being applied to a system which involves copying.
For more about this topic, please see my book on Memetics - which is out now.
Hi, I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video to announce my new Memetics book. The book is
now available on Amazon.com - see the links at the bottom for details.
So, here's the book, the back cover of the book and the book's spine. I am pretty pleased with the build quality and presentation.
The book is all about memes and the science of cultural evolution - as you can probably see from the subtitle of the book - so: memes are small sections of inherited cultural information. Just as genes transmit inherited organic information down the generations, so memes transmit inherited cultural information. Memetics is the name of the field devoted to the study of memes, thus the title of my book.
Memes represent the rise of a new medium of inheritance on the planet. For the first time in three billion years, DNA has a credible rival. As a result, meme products are making substantial inroads into the biosphere. The rise of the memes shows little sign of slowing down and reaching an equilibrium with the nucleic acids that preceeded them. So, an understaning of this area seems to be rather important.
A brief reading from the introduction should help to give a flavour of the book:
This is a book about a curious and counter-intuitive idea. The idea is that humans are apes with infected brains. That we harbour living things inside our skulls which are even less closely related to us than the bacteria that thrive in our guts are.
These entities are not bacteria, or other microorganisms. They are a new form of life, not closely related to the DNA-based life forms that have dominated the planet for billions of years.
It is the presence of these entities that distinguishes modern humans from primitive cave-dwellers. They are what is responsible for out music, literature, science and technology.
It seems likely that these entities have been with us for millions of years - and are a major factor in contributing to making us human in the first place. This means that most accounts of human evolution that fail to take account of these entities are deeply misguided.
Describing humans as "apes with infected brains" is not intended to imply that the infectious agents are necessarily deleterious - just that they don't necessarily always have our best interests at heart. Many visitors are mutualists - useful symbionts. However, others are toxic and harmful - and humans are often in need of strategies for getting their brains disinfected.
I then go on to explain how ideas
behave rather like infectious disease agents using an analogy between the human brain and a zit.
So far, humanity has had a hard time digesting Darwinism, with popular understanding of the topic spreading slowly. According to my book, the revolution started by Darwin is only about half way through. Many scientists are still getting to grips with the idea that our bodies are the product of Darwinian forces, and have yet to get their heads around the idea that all human culture - science, technology, religion and so on - are also the result of Darwinian evolution. Yet without an understanding of cultural evolution, the study of human society and culture is hopelessly stuck in a pre-Darwinian era. Evolutionary theory is key to understanding cultural evolution - just as it is central in understanding organic evolution. Let's hope that - now that we have access to the internet - it won't take another 150 years for the study of human culture to catch up with the rest of evolutionary biology.
Memetics was really founded by Richard Dawkins - in his classic 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins pretty-much nailed the topic - and authors and scientists since then have mostly been playing catch-up. However, Dawkins only managed a single chapter on the topic - so, with my thirty chapters on the topic I'm hoping to do a little bit better than that.
There have been a few books on the topic since then. The first was Aaron Lynch's Thought Contagion, and then there was Richard Brodies's Virus of the Mind. Probably the most important book on memetics so far is Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. However, that's over a decade old now - and there's been quite an explosion of activity in the area and scientific publications on the topic in the last decade, so the topic plainly needs revisiting.
Cultural evolution is one of the most confused and misunderstood areas of science I have encountered to date. The specialists within cultural anthropology and history who are supposed to be studying the area have mostly adopted a bizarre and unscientific approach in which observations are key and theoretical expectations represent an undesirable source of bias. However, this is just not how science works, and as a result whole areas of social sciences are grossly distorted. There's also considerable balkanisation: experts in the social sciences can't talk to each other very easily because the of the lack of a unified framework that would be provided by adopting Darwinian foundations. Social scientists have previously seen the influence of Darwinism. Darwin has brought them eugenics, social Darwinism, and sociobiology - which misguidedly attempts to reduce social phenomena to genes. As a result, to this day, Darwin is mostly kept at arms length in the very fields where the topic most urgently needs to be studied. The resulting anti-Darwinian mindset has had devastating effects on genuine scientific study of these areas.
However, there is an ongoing influx of interest in the area. There has been a substantial explosion of memes on the internet recently - with meme-related searches in 2011 rising to 5-10 times previous levels. Internet memes have started appearing regularly in mainstream news channels - and there are substantial online subcultures devoted to memes. The internet is really a key tool for spreading and studying memes. The ability to decompse online memes into sequences of 1s and 0s is broady comparable to the ability to sequence genomes - and this facilitates attempts to study cultural lineages from a phylomemetic perspective and so document the evolution of culture.
So, I reckon that it's a good time for my book on the topic to be published. There are sections on the history of memetics, the origin of human culture, human meme-spreading adaptations, how to classify memes, the major transitions in memetic evolution, applications to marketing, advertising, politics, science and self-development. The science surrounding memetic change is covered, including sections on meme-gene coevolution, symbiosis-based models of their interactions and epidemiological models of meme spread. There's a chapter relating to criticisms of the topic from naysayers. There's a chapter on generalising Darwinism in an attempt to produce a more universally applicable form. There's a chapter on selection processes within the human mind. Another chapter deals with the rapidly developing topic of memetic algorithms. These are related to genetic algorithms - but they represent an attempt to duplicate human cultural evolution inside machines. The book closes with a look to the future and the possibility of a memetic takeover.
A brief reading from the book on the significance of the whole topic:
Richard Brodie, in 1996, characterised the shift towards cultural evolution as a paradigm shift:
Viruses of the mind, and the whole science of memetics, represent a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind.
It is a major paradigm shift - probably the biggest disruption in evolutionary theory since 1859. However it isn't just a paradigm shift. Not only is our understanding of evolutionary theory changing, but the way in which evolution actually happens is changing too. The introduction of directed mutations, intelligent design, and the whole modern optimisation toolkit are not just major developments in the theory of evolution, they are major changes in how the process of evolution actually works.
The book is necessarily somewhat technical. I have tried hard to make it accessible to general population, but some basic knowledge of evolutionary theory would certainly help in understanding its message.
If you are interested in this whole area, my book makes essential reading. It is now available - please follow the links below to get hold of a copy.
Oh yes, and if you can help to introduce other people to this important, but neglected area of science, please go right ahead with my blessing.
Memetics is the name commonly given to the study of memes - a term originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe small inherited elements of human culture. Memes are the cultural equivalent of DNA genes - and memetics is the cultural equivalent of genetics.
Memes have become ubiquitous in the modern world - but there has been relatively little proper scientific study of how they arise, spread and change - apparently due to turf wars within the social sciences and misguided resistance to Darwinian explanations being applied to human behaviour.
However, with the modern explosion of internet memes, I think this is bound to change. With memes penetrating into every mass media channel, and with major companies riding on their coat tails for marketing purposes, social scientists will surely not be able to keep the subject at arm's length for much longer.
This will be good - because an understanding of memes is important. Memes are important for marketing and advertising. They are important for defending against marketing and advertising. They are important for understanding and managing your own mind. They are important for understanding science, politics, religion, causes, propaganda, law, morality and popular culture.
Memetics is important for understanding the origin and evolution of modern humans. It provides insight into the rise of farming, science, industry, technology and machines. It is important for understanding the history of human evolution. It can also be expected to throw light on the important issues surrounding future technological changes.
This book covers the basic concepts of memetics, giving an overview of its history, applications, development - and the controversies that have been associated with it.
We will start with a brief introduction to the main themes of this book.
Apes with infected brains
This is a book about a curious and counter-intuitive idea. The idea is that humans are apes with infected brains. That we harbour living things inside our skulls which are even less closely related to us than the bacteria that thrive in our guts are.
These entities are not bacteria, or other microorganisms. They are a new form of life, not closely related to the DNA-based life forms that have dominated the planet for billions of years.
It is the presence of these entities that distinguishes modern humans from primitive cave-dwellers. They are what is responsible for our music, literature, science and technology.
It seems likely that these entities have been with us for millions of years - and are a major factor in contributing to making us human in the first place. This means that most accounts of human evolution that fail to take account of these entities are deeply misguided.
Describing humans as "apes with infected brains" is not intended to imply that the infectious agents are necessarily deleterious - just that they don't necessarily always have our best interests at heart. Many visitors are mutualists - useful symbionts. However, others are toxic and harmful - and humans are often in need of strategies for getting their brains disinfected.
Humans have grown dependent on these symbiotic visitors. As with our gut bacteria, most of us are now so dependent on them that we could barely survive without them.
Brain-zit analogy
At this point an analogy and some diagrams should help to illuminate the situation. Acne is a disease caused partly by bacteria - which infect the sweat glands in human skin. These help to create a plug which blocks the pore of the gland. The bacteria reproduce in the resulting trapped pool of juices, and then explode forth into the world - where some of them find their way into other sweat glands - thus completing their reproductive cycle.
The brains of adult humans are typically infected with similar entities. They are contagious ideas. They spend most of their reproductive cycle in human brains, and then spurt forth - often from the human mouth. Then they find their way through the air, and sometimes successfully find their way into another human brain - thus completing their reproductive cycle.
Ideas in brain. Juices in Zit.
In this analogy, certain types of contagious ideas are considered to be similar to the bacteria that cause acne. Like the bacteria, those ideas reproduce themselves using energy derived from their human hosts, and spread from one human to another in a manner closely resembling a contagious disease.
Ideas spurt forth. Juices spurt forth.
Not all ideas spread contagiously from one person to the next. Some ideas form inside human minds but never attempt to spread themselves to other humans. However, other ideas have mastered the trick of spreading "horizontally", form one human to the next - and these more powerful ideas are very common.
Also, transmission doesn't always occur through the human mouth. Sometimes, the ideas are transmitted using gestures. Sometimes, they are typed into computers. Sometimes, the idea is in the form of a picture - or a movie. The important thing is that they have found a way from one human mind to the next.
Parasites and mutualists
On average, these contagious ideas appear to be beneficial. In that respect, they are different from typical diseases, which are normally harmful to their hosts. Many ideas are more like gut bacteria - which are also beneficial, on average. There are other cases in nature of beneficial symbiotic relationships with microorganisms. For example, many common plants make use of nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in their root systems - to help them harvest nutrients from the atmosphere. Some plants actively cultivate ants which help the plants to protect themselves against predators. For example, the Swollen-Thorn Acacias of Central America have developed special bulbous chambers to act as homes for aggressive species of ants - which then protect the their tree house against predators and parasites.
However, not all culturally-transmitted ideas are beneficial to their hosts. Cults, religions, scams, fads and lies are often more like real diseases than they are like a mutually-beneficial symbiosis. Sometimes, the host is even sterilised. Sterilisation can actually benefit the infectious ideas - since liberating the host's reproductive resources can free up time and energy - which can then be used to propagate the ideas to new hosts.
This picture - of humans as apes with infected brains - is one which relatively few people are familiar with, and which even fewer have fully worked through the implications of.
Many find this kind of perspective to be counter-intuitive. If you open up the skull of a human, no parasites spill out. If you look at it under a microscope, no rapidly-dividing foreign-cells are seen. Some question exactly where these hypothetical invaders are - and whether they even exist. The short answer is that the parasites live in a virtual world.
Computer viruses
Fortunately there is another type of system which behaves in a similar way. Our personal computers are also frequently infected with parasites. These regularly get infected with their own species of computer virus - and yet, if you open up a computer, no viruses come spilling out. As with the human mind parasites, this is because they live in a virtual world.
Although the computer viruses live in a virtual world, they can still cause real damage, blackmailing the user, using their network connection by acting as a spam relay - and so on. The infected human brain behaves similarly. Though its infections are often unseen, their effects are not.
The new organisms
The picture that results from this is dramatic - and for many people it is unfamiliar. After several billion years of evolution a range of new types of self-reproducing creature have arrived on the scene. They have genes that are not made of nucleic acids. In next to no time, they have spread to all areas of the globe. Their effects can be seen everywhere. Suddenly, intelligent design, engineering, simulation, extrapolation, interpolation - and many other novel tools are being used to create the next generation of organisms. This is a new kind of evolution, faster than the older kind of evolution by random mutations that preceded it.
This is really the first time in the last three billion years that new, non-nucleic-acid-based self-reproducing entities have succeeded in getting a major foothold in the biosphere. There is currently an explosion of these new creatures. Their rise seems rapid and dramatic, and it shows little sign of levelling off.
The extraordinary and rapid rise to power of these new self-reproducing creatures raises important questions about what will happen in the future. One possibility is that their meteoric rise eventually slow down - and reach some kind of harmonious equilibrium with the older nucleic-acid-based systems that were responsible for their creation. Another is that the new creatures will stage a take over - as they find a way to build bodies and minds for themselves and then proceed unshackle themselves from their more primitive precursors.
We urgently need to develop a basic scientific understanding of what is happening in this area. Understanding the evolution of culture will throw light on human evolution, so we can better understand human nature, it will allow us to better deal with the modern world and the challenges that we now face - and it will also help us to prepare for the future. This book lays down some of the foundations needed to deal with these issues.
Some more videos associated with a story from my book: Cymothoa exigua - an isopod that eats and then replaces the tongue of a fish. Not that many cases where a parasite completely replaces a host organ are known - but this is one of them.
Could humans see any of their organs replaced by their symbiotes? Of course, this already happens if folk are disabled, they can have artificial limbs, and organs. In the long run, all our organs will probably be replaced. The brain could be one of the first to go. We have already heavily outsourced memory. If prediction capabilities become outsourced, the human brain may have a much reduced role to play. Also the human gut may become redundant early on. If food comes predigested, a complicated internal food processing system is no longer needed.
Oh, and I should probably warn you, the first video is not very nice: contains death.
Some of the mutualist relationships of particular interest to memeticists are ones which feature adaptive symbiont homes.
Ant Domatia are one of the most obvious enlarged structures which function to house symbiont visitors.
Domatia are relevant to memetics, because of the big brain hypothesis - according to which our enlarged cranium has swollen up to make a nest for memes.
For more about the significance of domatia in the context of memetics, see my book.
In memetics, culture is in a symbiotic relationship with humans. Cultural creatures have symbiotic relationships with humans - and with each other. So: understanding symbiosis is the key to understanding how human culture works.
Some symbiotic relationships are mutually-beneficial. The term for such relationships is "mutualism". Mutualist relationships are ubiquitous in biology. Some videos illustrate the phenomenon in the organic world:
Sharing is a natural and basic human activity. However,
current law criminilises much sharing, thus hampering
innovation and progress.
The current laws appear to be ridiculous - but
anti-sharing laws are lobbied for by rich and powerful
groups, who benefit from them. Laws against sharing are
widely violated and highly unpopular.
No doubt future society will look back on the current era
of information prohibition with horror and contempt.
The latest salvo in the battle over sharing is this one:
The Trojan Horse technique is an insidious trick that
involves proffering a very attractive meme such as sex,
and having a less attractive meme such as beer sales
ride on its coat tails.
I can imagine how military minds might have
Trojan horses
in mind - but I don't think something is a
Trojanunless the payload is hidden.
The article concludes:
It is vital to the interests of the U.S.
and its people that memetic theory is fully explored,
if for no other reason than to develop defenses
against foreign memetic attack. Memetic operations do
not require a presence in the target country. For a
fraction of the cost of deploying troops on the ground,
the enemies of the U.S. could conduct devastating
memetic based information warfare against America. It
is time for the IC to turn this threat into an
opportunity. Memetics after all is only a tool, and
tools when properly employed can be used to build
peace, hope, prosperity, and a better way of
life.
The article says it is "COPYRIGHT 2010 U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School."
Dan Zarrella's latest book is out now.
On average, these contagious ideas appear to be beneficial. In that respect, they are different from typical diseases, which are normally harmful to their hosts. Many ideas are more like gut bacteria - which are also beneficial, on average. There are other cases in nature of beneficial symbiotic relationships with microorganisms. For example, many common plants make use of nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in their root systems - to help them harvest nutrients from the atmosphere. Some plants actively cultivate ants which help the plants to protect themselves against predators. For example, the Swollen-Thorn Acacias of Central America have developed special bulbous chambers to act as homes for aggressive species of ants - which then protect the their tree house against predators and parasites.
Fortunately there is another type of system which behaves in a similar way. Our personal computers are also frequently infected with parasites. These regularly get infected with their own species of computer virus - and yet, if you open up a computer, no viruses come spilling out. As with the human mind parasites, this is because they live in a virtual world.
Sharing is a natural and basic human activity. However,
current law criminilises much sharing, thus hampering
innovation and progress.
I follow military interest in memetics and recently
came across 
The NYT has a nice article titled: 
The chapter titles and extended section map of a pre-release version of my 
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