Memetics – How Ideas, Behaviors, and Narratives Spread

By FractKali on deviantart

What is a fruit? It’s something sweet and healthy that grows on a plant. It’s food. It is a symbol of prosperity. At least, that’s what a fruit is to us. But what is a fruit to a plant? It is a vessel for seeds, which are eaten by animals and carried far and wide, so that the plant may have many healthy offspring. All the animals think about is the tasty snack, unaware of what is happening behind the scenes.

The plant, however, doesn’t think anything at all. It’s just doing what it is programmed to do by its genes, which have been designed by evolution to spread and propagate into the future. In doing so, they have hit upon a strategy: you make use of other living things, tailoring yourself to use their behavior to your advantage. Animals like eating sweet, juicy, colorful things, so surround your seeds with sweet, juicy, colorful fruit.

Here’s another question that seems completely unrelated, but as we will see, it is very similar: are we in control of our actions? We consider ourselves, at least in Western societies, as rational creatures, making decisions based on information and logic. But, as we talk about frequently on this blog, that’s not generally true. Rationality is a skill that requires regular practice and exercise. On the other hand, our natural means of determining what to believe and how to act is through our narrative senses.

As we go about our days, we perform routines, talk, hang out with friends, and do all kinds of things. In the background of these actions and interactions, ideas and behaviors are being shared and absorbed, often without us taking notice of them. Some ideas and behaviors are able to use our psychology, notably our narrative senses, to spread themselves. Like genes being selected to use the natural environment to propagate themselves, ideas and behaviors are selected to use the human psychological environment to propagate themselves. It’s evolution by natural selection, and instead of genes, the carriers of information, behaviors and ideas, are called memes.

When you see the word “meme,” you might think of pictures with silly captions found on social media. But those are just one type of meme out of a vast ecosystem encompassing trends and fashions, the arts, sayings, beliefs, opinions, quirks, habits, and more. As genes come together to make biological organisms, memes come together to make memetic organisms. We have talked about one type of memetic organism before: narratives. Philosophical outlooks, religions, ideologies, mythologies. All of these are adapted by natural selection to propagate themselves, and their slightly altered offspring, into the future.

As in biological evolution, the memetic ecosystem has tremendous diversity. There are parasitic narratives that harm those they spread to, like Nihilism and strict moralities. There are symbiotic narratives that have a mutually beneficial relationship with those they spread to, like rationality and some versions of most religions. Some narratives vie for dominance, such as political ideologies and tribal religions. Others spread by showing kindness and bending with the wind. Some appeal to truth, others to trickery.

The memetic ecosystem is similar in a lot of ways to the idea of a spiritual realm. We are being influenced by immaterial forces, which, though blind and unconscious, act as if they have goals. Like the animals who eat fruit unaware of the role they are playing in the domain of the plant, we go about our days acting according to our routines and values, often unaware of the role we are playing in the affairs of memetic organisms.

This may seem troubling, but it’s not bad. The influence of memetics is not something that needs to be fought, but a critical part of the process of culture and the everyday experience of being human. And unlike the animal who is totally ignorant of the game of genes being played by the plants, we can learn about the game of memetics, and by knowing ourselves, our values and how we are influenced, we can become players in that game rather than mere pieces. That is why I eagerly and fervently spread the memes of rationality, narrative senses, and humility. In recognizing that our agency is not as absolute as we may like, we gain more of it.

How did Life Begin?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible to us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws.” Soon after Kant died, Charles Darwin was born. And after Darwin came molecular biology.

Despite Kant’s pessimism, we have come a long way toward understanding life in terms of physics and chemistry. Darwin’s theory of evolution by variation and natural selection has been substantiated and improved upon by the discovery of DNA and genetics. We now have a robust theoretical picture of how, over billions of years, life can evolve from single-celled organisms to the variety and complexity we see today.

Yet still, one piece of the puzzle eludes us. How did the first spark come to be, when life formed from non-life? We have not seen this happen anywhere, not in nature, nor the controlled conditions of the laboratory. So far, Kant's prediction has held.

But Kant's claim is a lot stronger than perhaps even he would have meant. It is far easier to show something is possible than to prove it impossible. For instance, it was once said that there are no black swans. Nobody in Western culture had ever seen one, and it was taken for granted as common knowledge. But when explorers set out to map the coast of Australia, there they were, black swans, swimming around like nothing was out of the ordinary. The claim that we will never find a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is the same as saying there are no black swans. To disprove it, all we have to do is find one.

How do we go about looking for a theory of the origin of life? We need to look for what all life absolutely requires, its reductionist building blocks. First is water. We know of nothing living or semi-living that does not incorporate liquid water as an essential part of its makeup. The next is organic molecules. All of the complex molecules making up life forms are constructed from small organic molecules. Finally, life needs an energy gradient. This is a technical term for “food source,” although it sometimes literally means energy is being transferred through the environment, like in photosynthesis. In the realms of physics and chemistry, energy gradients are the drivers of reactions and increasing complexity, making it look on a small scale like the second law of thermodynamics is being violated.

All three of these are common in the universe, water especially. But there is another element we haven’t talked about yet: the information the organism is made of. This consists of DNA and RNA, long chains of molecules that act like source code. DNA and RNA are only known to exist on Earth, within living or quasi-living organisms, and in laboratories. When we look for it in nature, in places we guess life might have emerged from, we don’t find it. Is this evidence Kant was right? No, because of one important factor: life already exists in all those places. Anywhere the ingredients for life could be found are swarming with bacteria gobbling it up. Once life exists in a place, we can safely bet it won’t get started there a second time.

So what do we do now? The next obvious course to investigate is the simplest life we can find. So far, the simplest natural living organism we know of is a bacterium called mycoplasma genitalium. This little bugger has less than 600,000 base pairs in its DNA. Contrast that with humans, who have billions. Still, 600,000 base pairs is far from simple, and it has a cell wall to boot. M. genitalium does not look like a good analog for the bridge between non-life and life.

If existing life is not the answer, we can perform experiments to try to make something simpler. Nine years ago, Craig Venter took the DNA from M. genitalium, deleted as much as he could, and put the results into an inert cell, creating the worlds simplest and first synthetic life form, mycoplasma laboratorium. The number of nucleotides it had was . . . still over 500,000. It was an improvement, and a major breakthrough for science, but did not get us much closer to the origin of life. At least, not yet.

However, we have not yet talked about quasi-living organisms. These are organisms that are kind of alive, but don’t replicate themselves, instead relying on the reproductive machinery of other living things. There are two kinds of quasi-living organisms: viruses and viroids. Viruses have their own DNA and cell walls, but viroids are just small closed loops of RNA. How small? Between 200 and 500 nucleotides. Not genes, nucleotides. And they don’t have a cell wall, or organelles, or supporting macromolecules.

Model of the potato spindle tuber viroid.

Now we might be getting somewhere! Of course, viroids could not be the original life forms, because they require other life in order to reproduce. Still, it is now within the realm of possibility that the first quasi-living organisms were similar to viroids. We know that small amounts of DNA and RNA can perform various types of mechanical tasks, as shown by the field of DNA nanotechnology, so we seem to be on the threshold of a solid theory of the origin of life.

You may sometimes hear people talk about the probability that life will arise on its own. But no number you hear is valid. Whenever I’ve dug into these calculations, I’ve found the math formulae that are used treat the molecules as if they are drawn out of a hat. That is not how chemistry works. To do the calculation properly, we would have to know the physics of the environment, the chemistry of every step along the way, how common such environments are in the universe, and how big the universe is. We don’t know any of that stuff, so we can’t say anything at all about the probability.

Some people don’t want to believe it’s possible that life arose naturally in the universe. Some of them just aren’t interested in the science, and don’t have the time to learn the mental skills and do the research to get up to speed. That’s understandable. Others are averse because they are loyal to a religious narrative, like I once was. Still others may be uncomfortable at the thought that human life had such a humble beginning, believing it takes away from our innate worth. This is a fallacy. Human beings are priceless and have innate dignity because of what we are. How we came to be this way has no effect on what we deserve or how we should treat one another.

Based on what we've talked about, we can construct a crude hypothesis, a guiding tool, a proof of concept. This may or may not be close to how life began, but it will stand as evidence that there is an answer, and we can find it. Here it is:

Suppose, deep in the ocean, where vents spewed heat from the Earth’s mantle, there was a soup of organic molecules. These molecules bumped into each other, reacting millions or billions of times every second, to make more complex molecules. Some of these complex molecules would fold and unfold, or spin parts of themselves around, or be attracted to certain parts of other molecules. Some of these molecules could break other molecules apart and reconstruct them. This process was random, and mostly resulted in junk. But a few made copies of themselves, which in turn made more copies. There, Darwinian evolution took root, with variations in each generation, and natural selection favoring those that reproduced better. With further generations, the molecules bonded with other, non-reproducing complex molecules, forming a symbiosis which allowed them to do more tasks. Eventually, one of these constructed a shell of molecules around itself, and the first cellular organism was born.

This process, and others like it, can be tested in the lab. One of the most interesting mysteries of all time, it's a popular subject of research. So far, there has not been a Newton for the blade of grass. But it is no longer absurd to think one will arise one day soon.

Resolutions of Truth

In his Ted Talk, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman talks about how he and his associates did many simulation experiments where they created a variety of virtual worlds and creatures to inhabit them, and ran them forward using Evolutionary algorithms. They found that, with natural selection, the trait of seeing the world as it was went extinct, and fitness won out every time. Hoffman suggests that we see our world like a computer desktop, an interface full of icons that help us interact with the world, but are completely different from the objective parts of reality they represent.

Life evolves to see the world in ways that are useful, not in ways that are true.

We already know that the Universe is different from how we see it. The Earth looks flat, but it is really more like a sphere. Solid objects seem like continuous matter, but really they are made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Planets seem to follow Newton’s idea of gravity as a force, but as Einstein discovered, objects in space really take as close to a straight path as possible in curved space-time. Hoffman’s idea, however, is more like what I discussed in Representational Realism, where reality-in-itself is fundamentally different from anything we can imagine, because the act of constructing a picture in our minds is automatically at least one step removed from reality itself.

In their public conversation, Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson discussed Hoffman’s interpretation of an icon-based perception of the world. They disagreed slightly with his interpretation, because our perceptions and mental pictures inform us to some degree of what will happen when we interact with them. Thus, it is not correct to say that the icons we see are nothing like reality, but they are versions of the truth at a low-resolution.

This fits with my own experience, and I presume the experiences of most people as they progress through life. In our quest for nobler purpose and deeper truth, we keep finding that the truth as we see it is not entirely correct, and that some nuance at the edges of it speak of something more complex. We continually find ourselves looking closer at things we thought we understood, only to find new insights about them that cause them to make even more sense and explain things more thoroughly.

As reality pertains to the human experience, the lowest resolution is one of stories. We see how the patterns in the world and our lives line up with the archetypes buried in our unconscious minds—or how they deviate in tragic or amusing ways. At a slightly higher resolution, the world is made of agents of choice,* people with free will who craft the future through effort and action. At a higher resolution, we find deterministic biology and physics, with organs, neurons, and fluid systems performing their tasks like clockwork. And at the highest resolution known to humankind, we find probabilistic quantum physics, where two systems that start out exactly the same can end up differently, but with well-defined probabilities for each. That might be the highest resolution, or there might be more layers hidden beneath it. No one knows.

You might wonder, as we come to understand higher and higher resolutions of truth, if there is any reason to look at the world in the lower resolution pictures. Shouldn’t we just go with the clearest, most in-depth understanding of reality, and throw out the naive views we had before? I’ll answer that question with another question: is it better to look at a map of the world, to walk along a beach, or to examine a handful of sand? All of the layers are important, because every time we peer closer, we lose a little of the big picture. What I’m saying is that reality comes in layers. At one level, physics is probabilistic, but at a large enough scale, it behaves deterministically. At one level, human beings have free will and the power to make the future, and at another level we act out our archetypal instincts like actors on a stage. All of these pictures are true, and we find the richest, fullest understanding and engagement with the human experience by taking all of them seriously.

*I am actually not sure what order free will and archetypes come in. It may be that free will is sandwiched between telling stories at a lower resolution, and acting out archetypal instincts at a higher resolution. I left the main text as it is, though, because its lower-resolution explanation gets my point across nicely, while this higher-resolution explanation in the footnote would bog it down.