Looking Out To Sea

At the moment I’m reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore and quite enjoying it. It’s deeper and more thought-provoking than I had originally thought it would be.

The idea that seems most appealing is expansion on the notion of memes as parasitic replicators that Dawkins first uses in his description in The Selfish Gene. It’s certainly true that many ideas are both extremely common and dangerous to our survival. Genetic evolution on its own doesn’t seem to explain the popularity of these ideas.

To what genetic end, for example, do men and women lock themselves in big buildings away from the public and the opposite sex? And yet monks and nuns are a fairly common occurrence throughout history. There are many other examples — honour killings come to mind as being a particularly absurd one. Infanticide is fairly common in the wild if a parent can’t spare resources to keep a new-born alive. But killing your own offspring because they have the audacity to become independent?

And yet there are plenty of examples in biology where one life form can pervert the actions of another to its own end. We sneeze out the cold virus because that helps the virus spread. Ants can be infected by fungus and made to climb to the highest point around before dying. The fungus then bores its way out of the dead ant’s head and spores from this vantage point. Why did the ant climb? Because the fungus did something — I don’t know what — to make it.

It helps the genes of the parasite if the host can be controlled to do its bidding — and these actions may be dangerous to the host. And so the notion of memes as parasites seems all the more compelling — as replicators which don’t care about your survival or that of your line. It only matters that the meme spreads to the population.

And so the meme for shutting yourself away from other people spreads for its own sake and not for yours (or your genes’). Or the meme for killing your daughters spreads (by imitation, by oppression, by proxy) even though it frustrates the efforts of your genes to propagate themselves.

Some memes, like some parasites or infections, can probably be too dangerous. They could kill off the host before spreading. Think about the shortest-lived but most violent infections which inspire books and movies — viruses like Ebola and Marburg. They tend to debilitate their hosts before the infection can spread very far (though not as quickly as in the movies, of course…). And so, I think, might some very powerful memes. Maybe a suicide cult could be considered in this category — a meme-infection with a predefined cut-off point. (Also note that the general concept of suicide cults outlives the active participants, by being recorded in books, films or oral history. Like Ebola has a reservoir of carriers outside the human population, waiting to reinfect at any opportunity, so might the right type of person start another suicide cult.)

The idea seems interesting — I’m keen to see how the idea can be applied to other concepts in the rest of the book. I will definitely see if such a memetic approach can reveal anything new about people.

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