From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:03:00 Subject: Evolution memes 1 of 6 UpdReq Evolve.1 of 6 Memes, Evolution, and Creationism Copyright 1989, the authors. Copyright 1990 Institute for Memetic Research. A close version of this article appeared in Vol 1, No. 1 of the Journal of Ideas, September 1990. Contact the editor, Elan Moritz (moritz@well.sf.ca.us) for current subscription information. Posted by permission, but use other than personal requires permission from the Institute. By H. Keith Henson and Arel Lucas (hkhenson@cup.portal.com) ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the question of creationism and evolution theory in the context of memes. Several key questions are raised including the questions of why humans have beliefs at all, and why does belief in evolutions excite substantial opposition. The authors address the competition of memes in the meme pool and propose the existence of meme 'receptor sites' responsible for strong maintenance of religious beliefs. KEYWORDS; memes, creationist, evolution, learning, games, receptors-sites. The widespread and long-lived opposition to evolution by fundamentalist Christian sects is not the first time the religious sector has opposed the findings of science. Copernican astronomy excited centuries of opposition before finally being accepted. Why did the Catholic Church defend the theories of a long dead Greek? Why do "creation science" followers defend an Anglican bishop's calculations of a world only a few thousand years old? We would like something better than an intuitive, hand-waving answer to these rather serious questions. We would like to be able to make specific predictions and recommendations. Our attempt to answer the "creation science" question above will be in two parts: Why do humans have beliefs at all? And why does the belief in evolution excite so much opposition? In attempting to find answers, we will invoke Darwin in two places. First in asking where human evolution has gone the last few million years. Second to consider the evolution of ideas (which we will also call memes, replicating information patterns, or beliefs) and the forces that shape them. Human and meme evolution is inextricably tangled. This discussion will switch back and forth from one to other in seeking an understanding (in evolutionary terms) of why evolutionists run into so much opposition from certain segments of the wider community. Knowledge of the modern concepts of evolution is assumed. -------- Footnote: Richard Dawkins' *The Blind Watchmaker*, is a well-written and entertaining book which describes the recent advances in understanding how evolution works. -------- Current interpretation of hominid fossils is that the split between the line which led to humans and the one which led to the chimpanzees came about 5 million years ago. A whole suite of changes, male provisioning, bird-like pair bonding, more frequent births, sequestered estrus, and bipedality evolved together, perhaps in response to the shrinking of the relatively safe forest and the expansion of the dangerous but protein-rich grasslands. These changes long proceeded any significant increase in brain size. Hominid evolution in the last 2.5 million years, that is since our ancestors started chipping rock, has mostly been in the direction of elaborating brains and learning ability. Even prior to "modern" technology humans lived over a wider range of the Earth's surface than any other animal of comparable size. It seems fairly obvious that large brains supporting powerful learning abilities are part of the answer as to why humans (and their ancestors) have been so successful in occupying such a wide variety of habitats. The rest of the answer is in the skills which today, as it was in the past, we must learn to survive. We learn skills and, once in a while, discover new knowledge as individuals. But most of our learning is from others. A simple example: learning by trial and error that streets are dangerous because of cars is *not* a practical approach for children. A good deal of our learning is across generations, the rest from our contemporaries, or from information stored in some material form (books, etc.). Most of what we learn is from the "meme pool" (analogous to gene pool) of our culture, and a *selected part* of it gets passed on to the next generation, thus setting up the conditions for the evolution of culture. A meme pool may be imagined as the set of circulating information patterns (ideas, blueprints for making artifacts, customs, and so on) which indirectly structures the artifacts and behavior of a culturally distinct group. The earliest cultural-information-propagated-across-generations (meme for short) probably dates back to our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. Young chimpanzees learn from their elders how to make tools for extracting termites from termite hills. Surviving hominid artifacts which indicate cultural passage of information ... The cost of feathers has risen... Now even DOWN is up! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:03:00 Subject: Evolution memes UpdReq Evolve.2 of 6 date back 2.5 million years. Though it got off to a slow start (chipped rocks look about the same for 2 million years), memes and the human line formed a hyper-cycle (in analogy to the DNA/protean hyper-cycle) where improving knowledge made human line survival ever more likely, and the resulting larger populations discovered and passed on an ever increasing amount of (mostly) useful knowledge. Today humans and a huge, abstract mass of information, have become fully dependent on each other. In addition to humans evolving the capacity to learn and spread memes, we see Darwinian forces acting on the replicating information patterns themselves. One evolutionary force affecting the frequency of a particular piece of shared information has been the reality of the physical environment. Because they shape behavior, memes that are too far removed from the way the world functions lose influence either by being refuted or by poor survival of their hosts. Memes that cause serious harm to their carriers usually become inactive, though it may take a long time. The Shaker belief persisted in its active form for about 100 years despite incorporating a ban on host reproduction. Another primary force in the evolution of memes is the rest of the meme pool. Simple competition between similar replicating information patterns for a limited number of "slots" in human minds results in the survivors of this process being very good at getting themselves into new hosts, and, once they have, excluding competitors. A few meta-memes apply powerful selective forces to the rest. The scientific method is perhaps the best known "artificial" meme selection force. Phrenology (as a replicating information pattern) is no sillier than palmistry. In spite of a fairly good start, it failed to survive in the scientific meme pool where a testable relation to reality is an asset. A goodly number of memes have no significant relation to reality at all. Yet they are quite successful (in the Darwinian sense of existing in many copies). Into this class we would place astrology, Marxist economics, and religions. Our concern in this article is about those "schemes of memes"* which excite those infected with them to actively oppose the evolution meme. How can we account for the opposition? ------------ Footnote: Cooperating groups of memes. Credit this clever turn of phrase to Douglas Hofstadter. ------------------ We will start by showing that our minds developed organizational quirks as a byproduct of interacting modules in enlarging human brains, and than show how these quirks provide a mental substratum for the spread of a whole class of "reality unrelated" replicating information patterns. Among them we will find the one(s) which excite opposition to Darwin's meme. Why did our brains enlarge? The advantage must have been larger than the high cost in terms of increased infant care and maternal mortality from getting those oversized heads born. William Calvin in *The Throwing Madonna* proposed one continuous selection mechanism that would come into play for a primate that started throwing rocks and obtained a survival advantage by killing the target instead of just scaring it away. Timing the release of stones or spears to hit small targets must be done much more accurately than the nervous systems of our remote ancestors could achieve. Rebuilding the basic chemistry of nerves, or converting to electronics is out of range for the small steps of evolution, but adding more of the same is an old story. Parallel redundant neural networks reduce timing error by well understood mechanisms. Better accuracy, more protein on the table, and more surviving children for rock-throwing ancestors. However they came to enlarge, the brains we now possess support even self-awareness.* ------- Footnote: Marvin Minsky proposed in *Society of Mind* that what we call "consciousness" arose as the result of the evolutionary reassignment of redundant capacity to new tasks. Thus, the larger brain may have preceded the "smarter" brain. "Newer" thinking skills (which have had less evolutionary honing) may still have more variation than older thinking skills. ------------ Recent work has found the mind to be organized into a vast number of interacting, simpler modules. A substantial amount of data has emerged from the work of neurologist Michael Gazzaniga, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky, and others. (In historical prospective, this work was presaged by Freud & Co.) Simple mental modules or "agents" (Minsky's word) combine into larger agencies to accomplish tasks of great complexity. Starting from a base of hardwired connections from the senses to the brain, Minsky shows how motor activity and feedback from the physical world builds agents that allow a small child to stack blocks. Stacking blocks is not a task to be sneered at. Many a graduate student-year has gone into building machines that fall short of the abilities of a three ... The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the damn parts. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:04:00 Subject: Evolution memes UpdReq Evolve.3 of 6 year old! Memes may be seen to program or direct the formation of more complex agencies such as those for chipping rock or making clay pots or shoes. Minsky speculates that a substantial number of our agents are censors. It's easy to see how, with an enlarging number of modules in potential conflict for "attention" we need censors to stop us from getting into logical tangles or "inappropriate" behavior. They may work by detecting unfruitful "loops" or painful thought activity in other parts of the brain, and inhibiting the part that is thinking "improper thoughts." One "improper thought" is to think about our mortality. In getting smarter and being able to plan far enough ahead to store food or plant a crop, we have gained powerful agents with "think ahead" ability, and they have been so successful in helping us survive, that we can't "wire out" the ability to think about the future and consequently about our own end. This is, however, an unproductive and (at least potentially) a survival-threatening class of thinking. Such thoughts are likely to activate censor modules that powerfully inhibit further thought about the topic. So far we have Minsky's censors and "think ahead" agents. Gazzaniga clearly demonstrated the presence of another agent, an "inference engine." This mental module detects or invents plausible "causal" relations, sometimes when there aren't any. New replicating information patterns seem to be invented (or recombined) here. The same hardware seems to be involved in judging meme input from others for plausibility. It makes evolutionary sense that unsatisfied inference engine problems would be anxiety provoking. If there is no "explanation," there is no way to predict (or control) when similar events, especially frightening ones, will happen. Almost any answer, no matter how far fetched, reduces anxiety. There is a great deal of data on the functioning (and misfunctioning) of this module in Gazzaniga's *The Social Brain*, and in the landmark *Human Inference* by Nisbett and Ross. Ritual passed on through memes (praying, rites, etc.) gives the illusion of human control over events, a psychological condition thought to be essential for mental health. (At least the counter condition of hopelessness is known to be detrimental.) Though the plausibility standard of the inference engine is pure *National Inquirer*, the importance of this module should not be underestimated. It was a milestone in our evolution, and lies behind every advance we make. But it was shaped by evolution to jump to the conclusion that the noise in the bushes is a bear. People who screen out its less plausible outputs do so at the conscious level, making use of difficult-to-learn logical and mathematical skills. To sum up, our think ahead (and look back) capacities raise painful questions, for which our inference engines either invent "causes" or judge acceptable some meme obtained from others. The effect of these modules has been to open our minds to replicating "explanations" of our origin and fate. Religions and such "new age" philosophies as "cosmic consciousness" memes or beliefs satisfy the inference engines in most of us, providing explanations-- superficial or profound--to account for times before birth or after death. Just as chemical replicators were the consequences of the primal soup, this entire class of memes is the consequence of the way our mental processors were long ago wired up by evolution, and the recent growth (in evolutionary terms) of these processors. Beliefs in this class can be traced back at least as far as the beginnings of oral history, and probably go back much farther, given the finding of flower offering in 70,000 year old graves. It may be that primitive versions of such beliefs were essential stabilizers, which had to be on hand prior to the last great expansion of the human brain. By now, the difficulties evolution has as a replicating information pattern should be apparent. In explaining one side of the where-did-we-come-from/where-are-we-going question, the evolution meme is in serious competition for limited mind "space" with long-evolved religious memes. Unlike the memes of physics, it is out there in a Darwinian fray for mind space with a large group of well adapted, fearsome competitors, some of which have induced those infected to incredible physical exertions, from building cathedrals to flaying infidels. There is an even more important strike against evolution in this competition. Most of the religious memes provide for both origin and fate. Unlike them, evolution deals only with origin and says little (certainly nothing comforting!) about our fate, either as individuals or as a species. With so little going for it, why has the meme of Darwinian evolution had any success at all? First, physical evidence--especially from geology and biology-- and the meta-meme of the scientific method are strongly supportive of evolution as a ... Ride the NewWave, CyberNauts! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:05:00 Subject: Evolution memes UpdReq Evolve.4 of 6 meme. Second, the (relatively) tolerant, secular world, with its diverse religions, and rapidly increasing scientific knowledge was complex enough when the concepts of evolution were first introduced that space in minds was available that was not wholly committed to competitive memes. Had there been no diversity in the religions at the time of Darwin, the religious meme carriers might have succeeded in suppressing ideas about evolution, or at least censoring those holding such beliefs as they did temporarily with Copernican astronomy. As it turned out, the memes of evolution have spread well in the subpopulation of receptive humans. They fit in seamlessly with the scientific meme pool. Since Darwin, most religious schemes have evolved to at least ignore natural history, waxing metaphysical and getting vague about the meaning of passages written by (or about) nomads thousands of years ago. But a few of the religious belief patterns have successfully evolved into an expanding niche (especially in the southern part of the US) where organized opposition to evolution memes is a distinguishing, even driving feature. Anti-evolution beliefs involved fit comfortably into a meme pool that is almost an inversion of the scientific one. The developing situation is reminiscent of the struggles driven by memetic competition that sometimes turn into physical conflict between groups of people infected with different religions. On this rather alarming note, let us resume thinking about mental models and see if a better understanding of the processes within the minds of "creation scientists" and their ilk can come out of it. We are going to assume some "mental space," and speculate a little about the shape and function of it. We are not proposing a literal, physical space into which ideas tumble and take root, like fertilized eggs in a uterus, yet the metaphor is useful. Consider "mind" to be composed of various "modules," or functioning computation sites like parallel processors within a computer. The form and identity of many of these modules are shaped by memes. Thus we could say (from examination) that person has the baseball meme (or memes). That is, enough knowledge so that they could teach a recognizable game to a group of children who had never seen or heard about it. "Game" memes seem to have relatively little competition with each other. Knowing about baseball probably has little influence on susceptibility to learning marbles, hockey, or hopscotch, though there is competition among these memes for a person's "game time." This is not true of all memes. Memes of the religious class are quite effective in excluding each other. Games do not include a "play only this game" sub-meme, religions ordinarily do. Religious memes may be taking advantage of the mortality censors, i.e., having acquired an "explanation" that accounts for "after death," the censors close off thinking that may change the structures of this area. For those who already have one religion, there is little to be gained by acquiring a different one. In former times, and to some extent today, changing religion often cost you your social group. During our tribal past, questioning the tribes beliefs or ritual was potentially disruptive, a threat to the group, and, even up to late historical times, put your survival in question. Anything statistically affecting survival can cause genetic bias to emerge if there is variation in the available genetic material. Edward Wilson and Charles Lumsden in *Genes, Mind and Culture* provide suggestions as to how units of cultural transmission may influence hereditary "biases" toward certain kinds of behavior via a cycle of both physical and cultural reinforcement over several hundred generations. It seems fairly obvious that if your tribe makes its living with chipped rocks, inability to learn how to chip rock will be bred out after a while. Likewise, we may have coevolved with religious memes to accept, and not question, the one of our tribe. Memes of the religious class infect a majority of the people in most countries of the western world. The combination of widespread vulnerability to these memes and (normally) exclusive rule of one set of memes per mind has led one of us (Henson) to propose a "religious meme receptor site" in human mental space, with the usual properties (selective stickiness and exclusion) of chemical receptor sites. Selective stickiness means that only "religious" beliefs can occupy the site. The "energy currency" to measure stickiness might be the lower level of anxiety from "solving" inference engine problems of the where-did-I-come-from/where-am-I-going kinds. Exclusion provides a test of what *is* a religious belief, and forces us to include (for example) communism in the class of competitors for the site. Unless our analogy is misleading, the "site" may be shaped/prepared by other memes (concepts) and experiences that are commonly learned in ... Sit down, you're stocking the moat! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:06:00 Subject: Evolution memes UpdReq Evolve.6 of 6 that we know it has an understandable origin in our evolutionary past. +-- UuEncoded Public Key For Ammond Shadowcraft Follows ----+ begin 644 ammond.pub MF5T`_*DS*A-3:&%D;W=C]X/07B+,HO#A&97$.F]P;ERRMJ:AM,!L5QX(:GYD'6YQ &$=`O!0`1 `end +---- Public Key Ends - Use UuDecode To UnEncode -----------+ ... Don't let your schooling interfere with your education. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:07:00 Subject: Meta memes 1 of 7 UpdReq Meta.1 of 7 [I was going to put this through one more editing pass before posting it, but the recent discussion about memes without people having much of a background on the subject has led me to post it sooner rather than pass it through another edit cycle. KH] Memes Meta-Memes and Politics By H. Keith Henson "For philosophically committed people, politics is primarily a contest over public policy. The measure is not what people, but what ideas win." --Morton C. Blackwell "If you would understand politics, study evolution first." --H. T. Watcher Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our times, starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with "It's raining DNA outside." He goes on to describe a willow tree that is shedding fluffy seeds far and wide across the landscape. The paragraph ends: "The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Not just any DNA, but DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks are, literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. They are there because their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy disks." The paradigm of life as the propagation of genetic information and of Darwinian evolution as resulting from the selective survival generation after generation of some part of that information is an outgrowth of the computer age. This paradigm has led to a number of remarkable advances in evolutionary biology. For example, seemingly "altruistic" behavior of worker bees is now understood as a consequence of the improved survival of the "selfish" DNA they share with the queen. About a decade ago in the mind of the same Dr. Dawkins this line of thinking led to a new way to view the spread and persistence of the ideas that make up human culture. The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with cream). "Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and purposefully similar to "gene." Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his earlier book, The Selfish Gene, to defining memes and discussing the survival of these replicating information patterns within the meme-pool (roughly culture). "Meme" is close to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. An idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first thinks of it is not a meme. "Beliefs," especially organized and promoted beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about them, cooperating groups of memes. I will use memes, ideas, replicating information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article. The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life of their own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution, and epidemiology to study the spread and persistence of ideas in cultures. If you come to understand memetics, I expect your view of politics, religions, and related social movements to be changed in much the same way the germ theory of disease changed the attitude of the medical profession about epidemics. Memetics provides rational explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human behavior. A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them. Collections of organisms make up ecosystems. Human culture is a vast collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem. The diagram below is in terms of increasing complexity. Memes (groups form culture, stabilized by meta-memes) Organisms (groups form ecosystems) Cells DNA (informational though embedded in material) ------------------------------------- molecules material atoms sub atomic Once the informational boundary is crossed, biological models of replication and survival become applicable. Most of the memes that make up human culture are of the shoemaking kind. A rationale for the spread and persistence of these ideas/skills seems obvious: they aid the survival of people who in turn teach the same ideas and skills to the next generation. But a good fraction of the memes that make up human culture fall into the categories of political, philosophical, or religious. A rationale for the spread and persistence for these memes is a much ... Programmers get overlaid! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:08:00 Subject: Meta memes UpdReq Meta.2 of 7 deeper problem. The spread of some memes of these classes at the expense of others is of intense concern to many readers of Reason. If we are to be effective at judging ideas and promoting the spread of ones we think are more rational, it would be useful to understand how memes come about, how they use people to spread, and why the self-interest of the people who spread a meme and the meme's "interest" are not always the same. Study of these concepts may provide insight into why some ideas are more attractive than others and into what "rational" and "objective" mean. Much of the recent progress in understanding evolution came from a viewpoint shift: biologists started looking at the world from the viewpoint of genes. Because genes influence their own survival (via causal loops) the ones we observe seem as if they were "striving" to be represented by more copies in the next generation. Memes too seem to "strive." Of course, this is metaphor, since neither genes nor memes are conscious. In the process of making more copies of themselves in human minds memes sometimes work at cross purposes with human genes. At least three different and conflicting viewpoints for determining "rational" and "objective" exist: from the viewpoint of the genes a person carries, from the viewpoint of the memes they carry (or are infected with) and from their conscious mind, shaped by both genes and memes. Memes and humans have co-evolved. Pre-human minds were, like current human minds, the substrate for memes. Pre-human minds were the memetic equivalent of the "primal soup" in which genetic life started. Replicating information patterns such as the ones which built mental structures for chipping rock or (much later) controlling fire improved the survival of certain human genes. These genes in turn built bodies and minds able to learn and pass on the memes. The result was a double positive feedback cycle where memes for survival- enhancing behavior and genes for mental hardware able to learn and pass along memes were both favored. The combination is so successful that human beings and their complex cultures inhabit the largest ecological range on the planet (at least for animals of our size). Any ecological success becomes a fertile ground for parasites. The environment of the cell nucleus with its raw materials and enzyme systems for replicating DNA/RNA is hijacked by viruses. Likewise, the human/memetic system is beset by biological and memetic parasites. Successful parasites (that is the ones which don't kill off their host) evolve into mutualistic symbionts. The host also evolves to be resistant to parasites. I think both genetic and memetic responses to parasitic memes can be recognized. Parasitic memes have been strongly selected to fit the strange quirks that developed in human mental systems as they evolved. For example, the ability to plan into the future confers a strong survival advantage, especially since the introduction of farming. But being able to think about the future (and past) generates troubling problems when this ability is applied to questions such as where-was-I-before-birth or where-will-I-go-after-death. The attractiveness of religious belief systems largely stems from providing "plausible" answers to questions that would not be asked except for the hyperdevelopment of this mental skill. To illustrate the lifelike quality of memes, here is my story about how a meme was introduced to a sub-culture, how it thrived, evolved, and finally became extinct. When I went to college in 1960, the University of Arizona registration material included a punch card for religion. I figured (correctly) that they would sort this card out and send it to the 'church of your choice' so the churches could send around press gangs on Sunday morning. At the time, I was drifting away from the church in which I had been raised. (My intellectual and social development had simply become incompatible with churches of any kind.) I wasn't expecting this question, hadn't given any thought to what I would put down, and was in a hurry to get through the lines of registration checkers. I remembered an old SF story that hinged on a mystery word, Myob, later explained as an acronym for Mind Your Own Business. Why not? I put down MYOB in the religion space, and got away with it when they asked me what it meant. By the next semester I had thought up a better answer. The high school crowd I ran around with had used runes to write silly messages on the blackboards, and we actually knew quite a bit about old religions. So I put down Druid, and got away with it. In fact, the harried registration checkers who asked what was a Druid didn't let me get more than a sentence or two into my prerecorded rap about how the Druids had been around a lot longer than the upstart Christians. ... The cost of feathers has risen... Now even DOWN is up! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:09:00 Subject: Meta memes UpdReq Meta.4 of 7 history records a number of similar incidents, with similar memetic origins. The Children's Crusades of the Middle Ages and the mass starvation in the 1850's of the Xhoas in South Africa are typical examples. Mass suicide episodes do not seem rational from either a memetic or genetic viewpoint. But they make sense as a consequence of human susceptibility to beliefs that happen to have fatal outcomes. They are close analogs of diseases that overkill their victims--like Dutch elm disease. Consider the "Killing Fields" of Kampuchea. The people who killed close to a third of the population of Kampuchea do not seem to have profited from their efforts much more than Jones. In the memetic view of history, ideas of influence are seen as more important than the particular people who hold them. Some memes (for example Nazism) are observed to thrive during periods of economic chaos just as diseases flourish in an undernourished population. Thus it is not much of a surprise that Nazi-related beliefs emerged in the Western farm states during the recent hard times. Beside being utilitarian and dangerous, memes can be fun. Fads, such as hula hoops or pet rocks can be considered as the behavioral outcome of memes. Memetics links the pet rocks fad, the Nazis, drug "epidemics," and the problems in Belfast, Beirut, Iran, and Central America. *ALL* result from replicating information patterns which lie behind the whole range of social movements. This is not to downgrade the effects of population pressure, ecological limits, or the marketplace. But while these provide substrate and predisposition, the specific form of social response which emerges in a crisis depends on memes, either already present or imported, and how well they replicate in the pre-existing memetic ecosystem. Why do these "replicating information patterns" jump from mind to mind, sometimes setting off massive, and occasionally dangerous, social movements? Memes that are good at inducing those they infect to spread them, and ones that are easy to catch, simply become more common. Since this is circular reasoning, I need to restate the question. What, in the evolutionary prehistory of our race, has predisposed us to be a substrate to memes that can harm us? The ability to learn from each other is strongly rooted in our evolutionary past. Mammals are generally good at this, primates depend on it, and we are the absolute masters of passing information from person to person and generation to generation. In fact, the amount of data passed on through human culture is much, much greater than the vast amount of information we pass on through our genes. We are obligatory "informavores," and simply could not live in most of the world without vast amounts of information on how to survive there. I am not talking just about the need to read The Wall Street Journal if you are in the financial business, but the need for a little child to learn (without using trial and error!) that cars make streets dangerous places. Though the evolutionary origins of our susceptibility to memes is fairly obvious, it is instructive to examine the actual mechanisms of the mind that are engaged when we are infected with a meme. Recent research in neurology and artificial intelligence has produced a remarkable model of the mind. Minds are beginning to be viewed as vast parallel collections of simpler elements, called "agents" or modules.* Memes are information patterns which, like a recipe, guide the construction of some agents, or groups of agents. A "walking under ladders leads to bad luck" meme has successfully infected someone when it has built agents that modify a person's behavior when walking near ladders. Some mental agents are "wired in". The most obvious ones pull our hands back from hot things. Others are not so obvious, but one which has considerable study is often called "the inference engine." Split brain research has established it to be physically located in the left brain of most people, close to or overlapping the speech area. This module seems to be the source of inferences that organize the world into a consistent whole. The same hardware seems to judge externally presented memes for plausibility. This piece of mental hardware is, at the same time, the wellspring of advances, and the source of vast error. ----- *The new models even offer an explanation for that difficult problem, the origin of consciousness. Each agent is too simple to be conscious, but consciousness incidentally emerges as a property of the interconnections of these agents. In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky uses the analogy that consciousness emerges from non-conscious elements just as the property of confinement emerges from six properly arranged boards, none of which (by itself) has any property of confinement. (And you thought Ids and Egos were ... Ride the NewWave, CyberNauts! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:10:00 Subject: Meta memes UpdReq Meta.6 of 7 event, since memes inducing tolerance to other memes would be expected to lose in the competition for mind space to memes which induce intolerance to other beliefs. Within small, isolated social groups, this is still the case. But in larger cultural ecosystems, when traders come with obnoxious ideas and customs, but desirable goods, at least limited tolerance is a requirement if any trading is to be done. There were many other factors in the development of modern western tolerance such as the Renaissance and the indecisive religious wars that swept back and forth across Europe. Still, the advantage of trading goods may have been the primary force at work in the memetic ecosystem which caused many belief systems to adopt a tolerant-toward-other-beliefs component. Cooperative behavior is known to spontaneously emerge from groups (even groups at war) when certain conditions are present. Free trade may be similarly linked to the emergence of the meta-meme of tolerance, and in turn to the respectability of free thought. Testing these speculations would require rating the trade/tolerance of many groups and seeing if there is (or was) correlation. With respect to the USSR, trade and tolerance are both at a low level. Historically trade was a much smaller part of the economy during the time the rest of Europe was undergoing the Renaissance. The recent attempts to introduce tolerance to other modes of economic systems in the USSR have more than a superficial similarity to the Catholic church finally deciding to live with the Protestants. A modern-day Renaissance in the USSR may be based on the free exchange of information through computers and free(r) trade. China presents a classic case of innovative memes spreading from the ports. Until England intervened and opened a weak China the rulers tried to quarantine dangerous foreigners and their infectious ideas near the ports. To this day the most productive parts of China are where capitalist/free market memes spread from the seaports. It may be that homogeneous, closed groups without the influence of outsiders reinforce their belief systems into the ground, burning heretics and stagnating economically, until they are forced to open their ports. A full analysis may eventually determine that tolerance, innovation, combating cultural and economic stagnation are *all* dependent on free trade. Memes and trade are coupled the other way as well. The feedback loop for many memes is closed through goods made for the marketplace. Better ideas for how to make shoes, or computers, or (you name it) spread best when they are tested in the marketplace. Closing the ports (currently a popular idea in Silicon Valley) to either ideas or goods is a memetic disaster. Bad products and bad ideas are weeded by market place competition. Study of ecosystems usually leads to a great deal of appreciation of the complexity that has been worked into them through evolution. Our actively evolving memetic ecosystem (culture) has been shaped over many centuries by the rise and fall of the replicating information patterns which have come down to us. These memes that make up our culture are essentially living entities. They struggle against each other for space in minds and lives, they are continually evolving. New memes arise in human mental modules, old memes mutate, and many become confined to books. The ferment is most noticeable on the edge of new scientific knowledge, pop culture, and the ever shifting of ascendant political ideas. Western culture is as complicated as a rain forest, and deserves no less respect, admiration, understanding, and care. The vast majority of the memes we pass from person to person or generation to generation are either helpful or at least harmless. It is hard to see that these elements of our culture have a separate identity from us. But a few of these replicating information patterns are clearly dangerous. By being obviously harmful, they are easy to see as a separate class of evolving, parasitic, lifelike forms. A very dangerous group leads to behavior such as the People's Temple suicides, or similar cases that dot our history. The most dangerous class leads to vast killings like that of the Nazis in WW II, the Communists in post-revolutionary Russia, and the Kampuchea self-genocide. The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models) for thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal, that replicating information patterns have on all of us. Here is a source of danger if memetics comes of age and only a few learn to create meme sets of great influence. Here too is liberation for those who can recognize and analyze the memes to which they are exposed. If "the meme about memes" infects enough people, rational social movements might become more common. ... Don't allow your beliefs to ruin your life. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Ammond Shadowcraft Area: Base of Set To: All 9 Jun 92 14:10:00 Subject: Meta memes Last UpdReq Meta.7 of 7 ----- The author gratefully acknowledges ideas and editorial assistance from Arel Lucas. +-- UuEncoded Public Key For Ammond Shadowcraft Follows ----+ begin 644 ammond.pub MF5T`_*DS*A-3:&%D;W=C]X/07B+,HO#A&97$.F]P;ERRMJ:AM,!L5QX(:GYD'6YQ &$=`O!0`1 `end +---- Public Key Ends - Use UuDecode To UnEncode -----------+ ... Ride the NewWave, CyberNauts! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718