Fish Without Bicycles
Shel quotes Gladwell, “Ideas … spread like viruses do”. Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” introduced many people to the basic ideas of memetics. Many people readingthat Gladwell line may have recognized a reference to ex-Softie Richard Brodie’s “Virus of the Mind”, which itself is really an attempt to popularize Dawkins.
In a 1983 column in Scientific American, reprinted in “Metamagical Themas”, Douglas Hofstadter explains that the idea considerably predates Dawkins. Of course, the concepts of self-replicating ideas have been used for at least a few thousand years; the discussion here is about who first made the comparisons to Darwin’s theory of natural selection.Hofstadter cites Roger Sperry and Jaques Monod as the first.
What I find very interesting is that Monod was comfortable with the fact that some memes may or may not lend easily to proofs of objective truth, and seemed to caution against being too judgmental about whether a well-established cultural meme was a “lie” or not. He points out that cultural memes evolved to be compatible with the neurobiology of their carriers, and societies institutions are completely interdependent with these memes. So it is impossible to separate out the meme from the biology and sociology of the situation.
On the other hand,Dawkins (and those who followed him)had no trouble passing judgment, painting a picture of such institutions as religion being nothing more than memes run amok; at best random and at worst malicious creations of master manipulators.
The problem is, this completely misses the value of the analogy to natural selection.Natural selectionis a much richer (and IMO more accurate) analogy. As memetics have been popularized under the “viral” banner, memes are seen as something malicious to be stamped out, or something powerful to be unleashed. Memes are no longer seen as reflections of our adaptation to the environment, or as relections of our neurology. Missing these important characteristics is like looking at the pair of legs on a human and saying, “Everyone knows that wheels are much more efficient! The self-replicating DNA process that created those legs left the poor humans with a substandard and dishonest design. Chop them off!!”. Passing judgment on design that arose through natural selection and pushing a design chosen by human reason starts to sound suspiciously like “intelligent design”. It may well be true that legs are inefficient, and perhaps someday an intelligent human designer will succeed in replacing them. But until then, I think all people deserve to have legs.