What is so special about genes? Richard Dawkins posed this question 33 years ago in his massively influential book The Selfish Gene. His answer was simple: they are replicators. At their core, genes and their proteinaceous partners are beautifully adept at copying and transferring information. By 1976, when his book was first published, this was a well known fact, but Dawkins had the curiosity and insight to ask the question, what other replicators, if any, might there be?
Not satisfied with his colleague's solely genetic explanation of human behavior, Dawkins saw the need to include a cultural counter part to the gene. Thus, the term meme was introduced to the world to account for culturally transferable replicators. Like genes, memes range in size and often have associates that replicate together. A meme can be a word, song, slogan, idea or any other culturally significant propagator and, like the idea of god, can often have a lot of baggage accompany it. While genes lie in the twists and turns of sugars, phosphates, and nucleic acids that make up DNA, memes take up residency in the neurochemical and anatomical changes that occur in the brain during memory formation. Unlike genes, they replicate not with intricate biochemical machinery, but simply by imitation as one person passes a story, song, or idea on to another. Hopelessly at the mercy of Darwinian evolution, memes selfishly compete for residency in our brains every chance they get.
In a recent article written by Stephen Hawking comparing the rate of change of internal information (genes) to the external information reservoir (some of which become memes), he notes that the information in our DNA has probably only changed a few million bits since the appearance of homo sapiens, while the meme pool produced by books alone increases by a hundred billion bits every year. In short, the meme pool is much, much larger than the gene pool. In addition to this tremendous disparity in the quantity of information, memetic evolution occurs at a much faster rate than genetic evolution. While our brains are evolving on a Darwinian time scale, the information they are processing is growing and evolving at a much increased rate. This startling disparity between internal and external information flow, Hawking argues, has resulted in a new stage of evolution he calls "an external transmission phase."
Although it is uncertain what the ramifications of this widening disparity could be, Hawking notes that we will soon be able to give genes a chance to catch up. We are quickly entering an era of self designed evolution in which parents will be able to manipulate the genetic characteristics of their unborn children. "At first," he notes "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression." Hopefully this will turn out to be the right move, eventually upgrading our outdated hardware to better able handle the exponential bombardment of external information.
I think it's worth mentioning that the word meme has certainly lived up to its name these last 33 years with 348,000,000 search results on google. Jesus only has 216,000,000. :)
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