The renowned biologist Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of species, pointed to three culprits that make evolution inevitable:

Variation
If you have variation within a species (Different sized beaks, different sized turtle shells, etc.)…

Selection
And if you have a struggle to survive (wonder why elephants aren’t wondering all over the planet?)…

Heredity
And if the traits and/or survival skills are passed down to new members of a species over a time…

Then…
The later generations of a species would be better adapted to the environment then their parents.

If you have these three behaviors, then you MUST get evolution, or as Philosopher Daniel Dennet put it:

“Design out of chaos, without the aide of mind.”

This “algorithm” of evolution has been applied to much more than just biology.  It is studied to varying degrees in sociology, psychology, epistemology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, physics, chemistry, and even quantum mechanics.  But there is one particular field of science that I want to focus on, and that is memetics.

What is Memetics?

Before I answer that question, I need to touch on genetics.  You see, memetics is an applied science, that takes the algorithm of evolution and applies it to the spread of information.  The term originated in Richard Dawkins’ best selling book, The Selfish Gene, that loosely compared the way genes spread to the ways in which ideas, or as Dawkins coined it, “memes”, spread.

Evolution implies self-replication of genes, and so memetics implies self-replication of memes (ideas). Memetics is the study of the virality of memes; how do they replicate?  Which memes spread faster and why?  Are memes independent of species?

Memeticist Susan Blackmore offers that there are at least two known “replicators” that a species must survive in order to advance to the stage of intelligent life (like humans).  The first replicator being genes.

If a species can “overcome” the challenge of efficient propagation of genes, then it must learn how to imitate, and that is the biggest stumbling block for a species.

Imitation is a survival technique, and it is this core mechanic of survival that memes latched onto, in order to spread themselves throughout what limited societal structure early homo sapiens had.  Early memes included tool-making, and hunting tactics, which evolved overtime (by ‘infecting’ more and more minds) into language, irrigation, domestication of animals and local governments.

You can begin to see how memes are self-replicating (much more so than genes).  As human population increases, memes become more advanced and new memes are introduced, with human brains being the “meme machines”.  Memes are in a way, selfish, they will spread at any cost, and they will spread indiscriminately.

Unlike genes however, memes are not limited to a linear path of hereditary evolution.  The transmission of memes is much more like a virus, able to infect without regard to lineage, Though a meme does evolve according to variation, selection, and inheritance.  That is to say that, among competition, ideas vary, the successful ideas survive in the minds of people, and are passed down.  Notice, I did not say that the good memes are the successful memes, there are many bad memes that survive and prove to be a detriment to society.

Specifically, a successful meme is one that makes lots of copies of itself, copies itself accurately, and lasts long enough to make more copies in other people.  Sometimes memes will gang up together to collectively form a set of ideas; making transmission easier and increasing the longevity of the ideas.  This is popularly called a memeplex.

Memeplexes

Some examples of memeplexes:

Singing and playing guitar
Keyboard and mouse
Conspiracy theories
Political parties
Scientific fields
Bathrooms (toilet, toilet paper, sink, soap)
Religion
Language

Religion is a big one, for a lot of reasons.  Religion began perhaps as a natural tendency of humans to explain phenomena they did not understand, stories about immortal beings that caused the seasons, the droughts, the floods, and so on.  These stories were written down, and eventually evolved into ornate tales of a “holy” god(s) who reward their followers with eternal life, and damn those who don’t follow to some sort of eternal suffering.  New passages were added that added a sense of validity and relevance, encouraged people to spread the message, labelled believers as “the chosen people”, and called competing religions blasphemous.  Not to mention the strong connection that the authors of religion made with people and their “faith”.  Religion, according to Darwin’s algorithm, has evolved into one of the strongest memeplexes in existence.  Religion varied over time (understatement), giving the meme machines (us) more to obsess over, there is a clear struggle for survival that has revealed only a few religions that truly infect people (Islam, Christianity, Judaism), and the stories have been passed down through generations of humans.

Language by far the biggest Memeplex, and also the purest.  Think of language not as a product of intelligence, but rather think of it as an entirely seperate organism.  No matter what else is true about the universe, language shows up, like a benevolent watcher, at the precise moment when a creature needs to communicate something.  Language is a parasite that latched onto humans as soon as we conquered the first replicator.  It wasn’t something that humans had to research, study or figure out; it was just there, waiting for us.

Language is a primal memeplex that underlies the evolution of thought.  Language is truly an organism independent of species, alive, immortal, and indiscriminate.

Ideas as an organism

There are many more memes out there than there are brains for them to latch onto, so it truly is a game of evolution.  And with technology like computers, the Internet, cellular phones, and mass production, memes continue to increase  their rate of ‘infection’.  A very noticeable ecosystem is forming for meme evolution thanks to the human desire to connect with one another.  This trend resonates a lot with something Paul Stamets said:

“…Matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network, and this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.”