by Zeev Nitsan
Memes can change the expression of the genes in an epigenetic manner. They do not change the composition of the genes directly, but they do change the regulation proteins that regulate activation or inactivation of genes, which means they affect the start/stop switch of the genes. Sometimes they encourage activation, and, by that, lead to reproduction of the genes to the proteins that are the genes’ executive arm; at other times they promote inactivation, which results in lack of reproduction. In fact, they create a balance of terror against the genes and constitute counterweight to genetic influence.
That being the case, thoughts that are expressed as memes are capable of changing the reproduction pattern and, as a result, to narrow or expand the expression of genes.
The pressing of the memes on the genes’ keys leads to the creation of sounds that are similar, in terms of their material manifestation, to proteins that create new music, which is not composed by the laws of the old composition of evolution.
The opposite is also true. It seems that a certain genetic array is more prone to absorbing certain memes, as in the common supposition according to which the human brain, out of its genetic conditioning, which determines its structure and wiring, is prone to “connect” to the meme of believing in force majeure; and it seems that there is a difference among people in terms of the willingness of their brain to fixate the concept.
We might say that success from the point of view of the gene, which is reflected in increasing its expression in the genes’ reservoir of the next generations, shares similarities with the success of memes. Thus, for example, with a meme of religious belief, the brains that contain it mostly aspire to “infect” other brains with it.
More Similarities
The nature of genes and memes is embedded in them, and they lack a pattern of free choice. In other words, the ideas do not aspire to “distribute” themselves, and the genes are not equipped with free will. Nevertheless, there are memes that acquire a foothold in our brain, which they use to distribute themselves. They have a hold on us more than we have a hold on them. They use us more than we use them (exactly like the genes..).
Another similarity is the existence of a multigene phenomenon and the multimeme phenomenon. Various physical conditions reflect the involvement of several genes (a multigene consequence), similar to complex ideas whose creation involves different memes (a multimeme consequence).
The Memes as Lamarckian Evolution
As aforementioned, epigenetics deals with heredity processes that are not performed according to the classic Mendelian pattern of change in the order of the nucleotides in the DNA—which means heredity not through intergenerational transfer of genes’ duplicates. Some refer to epigenetic heredity as “soft heredity,” which is not stiff like the etching of information in the DNA strands.
In assimilation of “memes” that affect youngsters’ behavior, a type of epigenetic heredity can be noticed.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the eighteenth-century French biologist, assumed that traits that are acquired throughout a person’s life might be transferred to his offspring. At first, this assumption had numerous supporters (including Darwin!), but it was later excluded from the heredity discipline. Recently, however, several mechanisms were found through which information trickles from one generation to the next not by means of “blind” mutations in the DNA nucleotides. These mechanisms have an important part in directing the arrow of species’ development.
Thus, for example, environmental conditions and nutrition might significantly affect the pattern of development. The bee’s maggot, which is hidden in a beehive’s cell, will either turn into a queen bee or an ordinary working bee in accordance with the nutrition it gets. The queen bee is fed royal jelly throughout its development, from the maggot stage until it is crowned, which takes sixteen days, on average. On the other hand, the beehive’s proletariat is fed royal jelly only through the first three days of development and is later fed poorly on honey mixed with pollen. The different nutrition turns on and turns off different genes; thus, although the maggot has the same array of genes (identical genotype), the activation–inactivation pattern of the genes will determine the course of its development and its different final shape (different phenotype).
It is known that when humans move from a certain food culture to another food culture, such as when immigrating to another country, their morbidity epidemiology also changes.
Along the genetic dictate, our development is environmental oriented, and, among humans, it is also culture oriented. The environment supplements genes-oriented heredity and, in certain aspects, is even more important than it.
Human culture exists in a Lamarckian heredity pattern. The memes are assimilated by adults in the brain of youngsters from generation to generation. It seems that it is not less important than “classic” genetic heredity and is often even more important than it.
One might claim that, due to constant improvement in our ability to conceptualize the world (discoveries expose to our conceptual eyes nuances that were not known to past generations, and new lingual concepts that conceptualize these new distinctions are constantly born in increasing rate)—improved capabilities that are also reflected in language—the transferring of the terms of “improved language” to the next generation is, in a way, a “perceptional Lamarckism”—an intergenerational leap in conceptualization capabilities and understanding of the world.
The memes allow for Lamarckian evolution, which, within one generation, or even within the same generation, brings about changes that, for the first time since life appeared on Earth, enable us to bypass the arduous course of Darwin’s evolution.
Memetic Bang
A memetic bang might be defined as a burst idea that casts a shadow over numerous conceptual systems; under its shadow, they can be understood, anew, in a more “correct” manner. The meme at the basis of the explosion serves as an intellectual godfather for many secondary memes that derive from it. Its appearance resembles an explosive bang that stirs things up, in terms of the most basic concepts of our culture, and reorganizes them afterward. This is a type of super-meme of the highest level. An example of such a meme is the meme of the evolution concept.
The big explosion of memes that took place in 1859 when Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was first published and the dawn of the meme of evolution in the sky of ideas make us sometimes refer to the people who lived before 1859, whose brains did not encounter or assimilate the evolution super-insight—gullible by force of circumstances whose understanding of humanity was missing a highly important piece of the puzzle.
Although we are, in distance, a tiny grain of time in the hourglass of evolution away from the people who lived on Earth in 1859, before Darwin’s book was published, in terms of evolutionary perception, it seems that our understanding of the world is far away from theirs. It seems that they come from a totally different conceptual era, which is ancient and deprived. The conceptual bang of the super-meme, with respect to the natural selection, has brought to us, for the first time, a natural explanation regarding world phenomena, which we were almost unable to evaluate beforehand, except through mystic, religious terms. The year 1859 is a borderline between two eras of memes’ evolution, since the concept of evolution has turned into a huge cascade from which springs of sub-memes derive with respect to all areas of life.
We are not more intelligent than the people who lived in 1859, but it seems our conceptual toolbox contains key tools that allow for understanding world manifestations in a manner that is closer to truth.
Does “memes’ impairment” turn the people who lived before the evolution concept was discovered into an archaic version of a lower value? Can we say the same thing about the brains of people who lived prior to 1905, when Einstein talked about the meme bang based on the equivalence principle of mass and energy? On a similar note, an idea that is concealed from our collective consciousness at the moment, and that might cause a “conceptual bang” in the future, will turn our brain
into a “memetic- deprived” brain in the eyes of generations to come.
The Memes as a New Type of Evolution Outliners
The Homo memeticus is the upgraded Homo sapiens.
From an evolutionary point of view, our brain, with all its various functions, was not “intended” to enable us to understand the world but, rather, to survive in it—to “hang in there” for a sufficient period of time that will allow us to pass our genes forward. The additional tasks and requirements we load on our brain have nothing to do with evolution; thus, we need to come up with unique strategies in order to improve them. The excess capabilities of our brain are a type of extra advantage that was not preplanned by evolution (but, on the other hand, evolution did not “oppose” them). Another possible conclusion is that we are sailing along a cruise route that deviates, for the first time on our planet, from ordinary evolution routes. Moreover, we are creating such a “different evolution” that some of its rules are not written in the book of laws of ordinary evolution. We invent and enact these rules by ourselves and for ourselves.
The outcome of the encounter between the human brain and the memes is a combination that bypasses Darwinian evolution.
The human brain is becoming a tool that bypasses evolution through the memes in the sense that the result of their joint activity is a process of evolutionary Lamarckism. Within a single generation (and sometimes within an intragenerational period of time), the memes are improved so that the insight of the next generation sometimes performs a “quantic insight leap.” The biological evolution plods on, while intellectual evolution moves forward in an exponential pattern.
Human beings and lab mice: The Internet and other technological progress devices, creatures of the human brain, change the pattern of our relationships and, at a most basic level, the pattern of our brain. We all take part in a huge experiment in which we cross the boundaries of ordinary biological evolution. This is an evolutionary leap that reinforces, as if in a magic cycle, the gadgets’ repertoire of our brain. These are the “luxuries”—excessive qualifications that were acquired by our brain, beyond the scope of capabilities that were granted to it by evolution.
Memes’ Heredity and Genetic Heredity
In humans, as in any other organism that reproduces through sexual reproduction, there is a 50-percent chance, on average, to pass a certain gene (out of the two gene manifestations—the alleles) to each of the offspring. The parallel gene of the partner has an identical chance of being passed to the offspring. The gene array of the offspring is weaved as if according to binomial probability, which is composed of experiments that do not depend on each other’s results and, in each of the experiments, there are two possibilities of even chances: success and failure. On the other hand, the memes, once memorized by the next generation, have a 100-percent chance of meeting the neurons in the offspring’s brain but will not necessarily acquire foothold in it.
“Memes’ penetrability” is a term that is taken from genetics, in which the term “genes’ penetrability” reflects the percentage of carriers of a certain array of genes (genotype) who physically reflect the phenomena deriving from the specific array (phenotype). These terms are usually used in relation to impaired genes’ array on the genotype side and to the level of their reflection in terms of morbidity on the phenotype side.
According to an interpretative view that uses genetics’ terms, one might claim that memes of ideas that acquired foothold in a specific brain can be referred to as “memetic genotype.” Their influence on the thoughts and actions of the brain owner equals the “memetic phenotype,” and the extent to which these ideas cause a typical behavioral, conceptual/practical outcome might be considered “memetic penetrability.” On the other hand, there might be other terminological interpretations, such as the definition of “memetic penetrability” as the level of the ideas’ (memes’) tendency to set foot in other brains (how infectious they are), and the definition of the “memetic phenotype” as the level according to which the ideas are put into practice (i.e., their implementation in the practical world by the brain owners who host them).
A danger of “random eradication” hovers over unique memes, as it hovers over unique genes, if the person whose brain invented the unique meme (or the carrier of the unique gene) passes away in random circumstances before the meme or the gene is transferred to other brains, or is perpetuated in some other manner. There is no doubt that numerous potential founders of conceptual revolutions were lost to humanity as victims who died in vain during battles, and we all pay the price for it, mostly without even being aware of it.
Our behavior is the common phenotype of our genes and the memes that reside in our brains, both of which, in various proportions, contribute to our different behavioral patterns.
We are like dancers who follow the choreography created by both the genes and the memes.
Co-Evolution of Genes and Culture
The genetic outline of our brain leaves sufficient room for the influence of culture and environment.
The capabilities we acquire from birth and on are added to the innate skills, expand their owner’s options, and reinforce their competence and survivability. It can be seen as the blessing of the acquired course. Sometimes the intensity of acquired memes surpasses the intensity of innate memes with respect to dictating behavior. An example of that can be found in people’s willingness to risk their life in the name of the concept of brotherhood, for the sake of saving others, although the genetic dictate perceives the survivability of the body (and, more accurately, the survivability of the genes that the body carries and “distributes”) as the supreme value.
The acquired course is at the foundation of the development of human culture, and some might say it constitutes a new phase of evolution also, in the sense that it enables a transition from passive adaptation of man to the surrounding to adaptation of the environments to man’s needs. The acquired course and the culture that derives from it reinforce, in an exponential manner, the capabilities of human kind. It enables expansion of the narrow slit through which our senses have sampled the world to a wide opening that ranges from the microscopic dimensions of the subatomic world to the dimensions of the galaxies that exist at a distance of billions of light years in the depths of the universe. The adaptation of the environment to man’s needs, as has been and is promoted by mankind, brings thriving and welfare to humanity but, at the same time, serves as a two-edged sword, since accelerated, unplanned change involves a breach of the ecological balance, which puts the future of Earth at risk.
In accordance with the degrees of freedom in behavior that are at the disposal of man, man is not a passive victim of his own capabilities; he has the power to reverse the reversible damage done to the environment and re-achieve ecological balance.
Faith is not just an idea you grasp, but an idea that grasps you. There are super-memes that encircle our brain in an invisible manner, which is hard to get rid of.
Monogamous adherence to a meme might be part of an extreme worldview that does not allow the facts to confuse it. Although there are memes that we should to be married to in monogamous matrimony, there are some that require bigamy, polygamy, or even swingerism. It is all in the name of pragmatism and being loyal to the truth, whose deeper understanding dynamically changes our memetic perception of the world. There is also the serial-monogamy approach, according to which, at every given moment, loyalty is devoted to a single idea, but the idea changes.
Rigid social topography, such as social classes, and rigid geographical topography, such as mountain ridges, prevented, in the past, the social and geographical mobility of people.
Many of the geographical and social barriers have been removed, and the physical and memetic mobility has improved dramatically. People who were born in different societies meet one another, and, at the same time, memes created in different cultures meet, clash, or assimilate with each other and bring closer the fulfilling of the vision of a memetic, universal codex with respect to
core issues related to the future of mankind (such as the treaty that prohibits child labor).
The Creation of Memes’ Clusters (Meme-Complex)
Just as genes appear in clusters, which improves the complexity of the organism and increases the chances of duplication and transfer of themselves to the next generation, memes also appear in clusters (i.e., memes that are bounded, support, and have been supported by each other). The inter-memetic-collaboration strategy often intensifies memes’ survivability and their chance of being distributed to other brains.
“Sociable memes,” which have a friendly interface for connecting to other memes, are more prone to integrating into clusters of memes and survive better—like genes that tend to “collaborate” with other genes. A collaboration in this sense is not a “zero-sum game” (a competition in which the success of one party means the failure of the other)—it might benefit all the participants (again, without attributing “will” or intention, in the teleological sense, to the memes or the genes).
A cluster of memes can also create a common memetic core that serves as an anchor point for the various memes that are included in the conceptual cluster. Such a pattern might exist in an inclusive pattern that groups a group of submemes and encodes the common between them.
The paths of history are embedded with warning signs—summoned by circumstances under which, in different societies and different times, brains of an entire generation (and sometimes entire generations) were captured by the dark spell of a memetic complex—that many of the memes that compose it are morally impaired. A typical case is that the outline of the memetic complex is based on a super idea, which turns the ones that carry it into marionettes that move along the sounds of the conceptual collectivism; their lives run in its shadow, and they are a “recruited” generation in the service of its distribution. Such examples can also be found nowadays.
