The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

  Another line of criticism is that memes, unlike genes, are not stored in identical physical forms in every holder. But, as I shall explain, that does not necessarily make it impossible for memes to be transmitted ‘faithfully’ in the sense that matters for evolution. It is indeed meaningful to think of memes as retaining their identity as they pass from one holder to the next.

  Just as genes often work together in groups to achieve what we might think of as a single adaptation, so there are memeplexes consisting of several ideas which can, alternatively, be thought of as a single more complex idea, such as quantum theory or neo-Darwinism. So it does not matter if we refer to a memeplex as a meme, just as it does not matter if we refer to quantum theory as a single theory or a group of theories. However, ideas, including memes, cannot be indefinitely analysed into sub-memes, because there comes a point where replacing a meme by part of itself would result in its not being copied. So, for instance, ‘2 + 3 = 5’ is not a meme, because it does not have what it takes to cause itself reliably to be copied, except under circumstances which would also copy some theory of arithmetic with universal reach, which itself could not be transmitted without also transmitting the knowledge that 2 + 3 = 5.

  Laughing at a joke and retelling it are both behaviours caused by the joke, but we often do not know why we are enacting them. That reason is objectively there in the meme, but we do not know it. We may try to guess, but our guess will not necessarily be true. For instance, we may guess that the humour in a particular joke lay in the unexpectedness of its punchline. But further experience with the same joke may reveal that it remains funny when we hear it again. In such a case, we are in the counter-intuitive (but common) position of having been mistaken about the reason for our own behaviour.

  The same sort of thing happens with rules of grammar. We say, ‘I am learning to play the piano’ (in British English), but never ‘I am learning to play the baseball.’ We know how to form such sentences correctly, but, until we think about it, very few of us know that the inexplicit grammatical rule we are following even exists, let alone what it is. In American English the rule is slightly different, so the phrase ‘learning to play piano’ is acceptable. We may wonder why, and guess that the British are more fond of the definite article. But, again, that is not the explanation: in British English a patient is ‘in hospital’, and in American English ‘in the hospital’.

  The same is true of memes in general: they implicitly contain information that is not known to the holders, but which nevertheless causes the holders to behave alike. Hence, just as native English speakers may be mistaken about why they have said ‘the’ in a given sentence, people enacting all sorts of other memes often give false explanations, even to themselves, of why they are behaving in that way.

  Like genes, all memes contain knowledge (often inexplicit) of how to cause their own replication. This knowledge is encoded in strands of DNA or remembered by brains respectively. In both cases, the knowledge is adapted to causing itself to be replicated: it causes that more reliably than nearly all its variants do. In both cases, this adaptation is the outcome of alternating rounds of variation and selection.

  However, the logic of the copying mechanism is very different for genes and memes. In organisms that reproduce by dividing, either all the genes are copied into the next generation or (if the individual fails to reproduce) none are. In sexual reproduction, a full complement of genes randomly chosen from both parents is copied, or none are. In all cases, the DNA duplication process is automatic: genes are copied indiscriminately. One consequence is that some genes can be replicated for many generations without ever being ‘expressed’ (causing any behaviour) at all. Whether your parents ever broke a bone or not, genes for repairing broken bones will (barring unlikely mutations) be passed on to you and your descendants.

  The situation faced by memes is utterly different. Each meme has to be expressed as behaviour every time it is replicated. For it is that behaviour, and only that behaviour (given the environment created by all the other memes), that effects the replication. That is because a recipient cannot see the representation of the meme in the holder’s mind. A meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program. If it is not enacted, it will not be copied.

  The upshot of this is that memes necessarily become embodied in two different physical forms alternately: as memories in a brain, and as behaviour:

  A meme exists in a brain form and a behaviour form, and each is copied to the other.

  Each of the two forms has to be copied (specifically, translated into the other form) in each meme generation. (Meme ‘generations’ are simply successive instances of copying to another individual.) Technology can add further stages to a meme’s life cycle. For instance, the behaviour may be to write something down – thus embodying the meme in a third physical form, which may later cause a person who reads it to enact other behaviour, which then causes the meme to appear in someone’s brain. But all memes must have at least two physical forms.

  In contrast, for genes the replicator exists in only one physical form – the DNA strand (of a germ cell). Even though it may be copied to other locations in the organism, translated into RNA, and expressed as behaviour, none of those forms is a replicator. The idea that the behaviour might be a replicator is a form of Lamarckism, since it implies that behaviours that had been modified by circumstances would be inherited.

  A gene exists in only one physical form, which is copied.

  Because of the alternating physical forms of a meme, it has to survive two different, and potentially unrelated, mechanisms of selection in every generation. The brain-memory form has to cause the holder to enact the behaviour; and the behaviour form has to cause the new recipient to remember it – and to enact it.

  So, for example, although religions prescribe behaviours such as educating one’s children to adopt the religion, the mere intention to transmit a meme to one’s children or anyone else is quite insufficient to make that happen. That is why the overwhelming majority of attempts to start a new religion fail, even if the founder members try hard to propagate it. In such cases, what has happened is that an idea that people have adopted has succeeded in causing them to enact various behaviours including ones intended to cause their children and others to do the same – but the behaviour has failed to cause the same idea to be stored in the minds of those recipients.

  The existence of long-lived religions is sometimes explained from the premise that ‘children are gullible’, or that they are ‘easily frightened’ by tales of the supernatural. But that is not the explanation. The overwhelming majority of ideas simply do not have what it takes to persuade (or frighten or cajole or otherwise cause) children or anyone else into doing the same to other people. If establishing a faithfully replicating meme were that easy, the whole adult population in our society would be proficient at algebra, thanks to the efforts made to teach it to them when they were children. To be exact, they would all be proficient algebra teachers.

  To be a meme, an idea has to contain quite sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do at least two independent things: assimilate the meme faithfully, and enact it. That some memes can replicate themselves with great fidelity for many generations is a token of how much knowledge they contain.

  The selfish meme

  If a gene is in a genome at all, then, when suitable circumstances arise, it will definitely be expressed as an enzyme, as I described in Chapter 6, and will then cause its characteristic effects. Nor can it be left behind if the rest of its genome is successfully replicated. But merely being present in a mind does not automatically get a meme expressed as behaviour: the meme has to compete for that privilege with other ideas – memes and non-memes, about all sorts of subjects – in the same mind. And merely being expressed as behaviour does not automatically get the meme copied into a recipient along with other memes: it has to compete for the recipients’ attention and acceptance with all sorts of behaviours by other people, and with the recipient’s own
ideas. All that is in addition to the analogue of the type of selection that genes face, each meme competing with rival versions of itself across the population, perhaps by containing the knowledge for some useful function.

  Memes are subject to all sorts of random and intentional variation in addition to all that selection, and so they evolve. So to this extent the same logic holds as for genes: memes are ‘selfish’. They do not necessarily evolve to benefit their holders, or their society – or, again, even themselves, except in the sense of replicating better than other memes. (Though now most other memes are their rivals, not just variants of themselves.) The successful meme variant is the one that changes the behaviour of its holders in such a way as to make itself best at displacing other memes from the population. This variant may well benefit its holders, or their culture, or the species as a whole. But if it harms them, or destroys them, it will spread anyway. Memes that harm society are a familiar phenomenon. You need only consider the harm done by adherents of political views, or religions, that you especially abhor. Societies have been destroyed because some of the memes that were best at spreading through the population were bad for a society. I shall discuss one example in Chapter 17. And countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting memes that were bad for them – such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads. Fortunately, in the case of memes, that is not the whole story. To understand the rest of the story, we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully replicated.

  Static societies

  As I have explained, a human brain – quite unlike a genome – is itself an arena of intense variation, selection and competition. Most ideas within a brain are created by it for the very purpose of trying them out in imagination, criticizing them, and varying them until they meet the person’s preferences. In other words, meme replication itself involves evolution, within individual brains. In some cases there can be thousands of cycles of variation and selection before any of the variants is ever enacted. Then, even after a meme has been copied into a new holder, it has not yet completed its life cycle. It still has to survive a further selection process, namely the holder’s choice of whether to enact it or not.

  Some of the criteria that a mind uses to make such choices are themselves memes. Some are ideas that it has created for itself (by altering memes, or otherwise), and which will never exist in any other mind. Such ideas are potentially highly variable between different people, yet they can decisively affect whether any given meme does or does not survive via a given person.

  Since a person can enact and transmit a meme soon after receiving it, a meme generation can be much shorter than a human generation. And many cycles of variation and selection can take place inside the minds concerned even during one meme generation. Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holders’ biological descendants. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge. Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.

  But, for the same reason, on the face of it meme replication is inherently less reliable than gene replication. Since the inexplicit content of memes cannot be literally copied but has to be guessed from the holders’ behaviour, and since a meme can be subjected to large intentional variations inside every holder, it could be considered something of a miracle that any meme manages to be transmitted faithfully even once. And indeed the survival strategies of all long-lived memes are dominated by this problem.

  Another way of stating the problem is that people think and try to improve upon their ideas – which entails changing them. A long-lived meme is an idea that runs that gauntlet again and again, and survives. How is that possible?

  The post-Enlightenment West is the only society in history that for more than a couple of lifetimes has ever undergone change rapid enough for people to notice. Short-lived rapid changes have always happened: famines, plagues and wars have begun and ended; maverick kings have attempted radical change. Occasionally empires were rapidly created or whole civilizations were rapidly destroyed. But, while a society lasted, all important areas of life seemed changeless to the participants: they could expect to die under much the same moral values, personal lifestyles, conceptual framework, technology and pattern of economic production as they were born under. And, of the changes that did occur, few were for the better. I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants. Before we can understand our unusual, dynamic sort of society, we must understand the usual, static sort.

  For a society to be static, all its memes must be unchanging or changing too slowly to be noticed. From the perspective of our rapidly changing society, such a state of affairs is hard even to imagine. For instance, consider an isolated, primitive society that has, for whatever reason, remained almost unchanged for many generations. Why? Quite possibly no one in the society even wants it to change, because they can conceive of no other way of life. Nevertheless, its members are not immune from pain, hunger, grief, fear or other forms of physical and mental suffering. They try to think of ideas to alleviate some of that suffering. Some of those ideas are original, and occasionally one of them would actually help. It need be only a small, tentative improvement: a way of hunting or growing food with slightly less effort, or of making slightly better tools; a better way of recording debts or laws; a subtle change in the relationship between husband and wife, or between parent and child; a slightly different attitude towards the society’s rulers or gods. What will happen next?

  The person with that idea may well want to tell other people. Those who believe the idea will see that it could make life a little less nasty, brutish and short. They will tell their families and friends, and they theirs. This idea will be competing in people’s minds with other ideas about how to make life better, most of them presumably false. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that this particular true idea happens to be believed, and spreads through the society.

  Then the society will have been changed. It may not have changed very much, but this was merely the change caused by a single person, thinking of a single idea. So multiply all that by the number of thinking minds in the society, and by a lifetime’s worth of thought in each of them, and let this continue for only a few generations, and the result is an exponentially increasing, revolutionary force transforming every aspect of the society.

  But in a static society that beginning of infinity never happens. Despite the fact that I have assumed nothing other than that people try to improve their lives, and that they cannot transmit their ideas perfectly, and that information subject to variation and selection evolves, I have entirely failed to imagine a static society in this story.

  For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo. However, that alone could not suppress change. First, no enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation. It is infeasible to specify every aspect of acceptable behaviour with perfect precision. Second, it is impossible to tell in advance which small deviations from traditional behaviour would initiate further changes. Third, once a variant idea has begun to spread to even one more person – which means that people are preferring it – preventing it from being transmitted further is extremely difficult. Therefore no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once they have been create
d.

  That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

  How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society’s constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes.