My Favorite Book

I've finally gotten hold of a copy of a book I'd been meaning to read for years, Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. It's a survey of the emerging field of Memetics written in 1999. I read Robert Aunger's The Electric Meme about a year and a half ago, and Aunger includes Blackmore's book in his own survey. Before reading Aunger, I'd thought the term meme arose among authors of popular pseudo-science like conspiracy theorist Robert Anton Wilson, and that it was from here that its use in describing Internet phenomena derived. From Aunger I learned that the idea originates with Richard Dawkins' books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.


These books should be required reading for every freshman Biology class. They should also be required reading for every Philosophy major, because they're fantastic examples of what can come of combining strong analytical skills, creative imagination and epistemological rigor. The Selfish Gene is very readable. The Extended Phenotype makes you work pretty hard at times, and it goes on a couple long, extended tangents for the sake of establishing important points. But it's absolutely worth the effort if you're interested in the way the world works.


Don't expect either book to say much about memes, though. Their topic is Darwinian Evolution, with an emphasis on using Games Theory to explain the differential survival of replicators. Memes are only introduced as an afterthought, an example of a non-genetic replicator.


I think the new paradigm of Memetics will transform our understanding consciousness and the structure of information in the world around us. It has significance for Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Intellectual History, with major implications for our understanding language and culture. And it lays the groundwork for creating testable hypotheses about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and brain. It may eventually do for our understanding of culture what the discovery of genes did for our understanding of biology, including far-ranging technological applications.


Many of Dawkins' opponents have labeled his writings as "genetic determinism" and his conclusions amoral. Yet his theory of memetic replicators, if true, completely refutes genetic determinism, and his writing is profoundly concerned with the problems of ethics and value. If we are to act morally, we must train ourselves to individual and social virtue, within the constrains of natural laws. And this training can only benefit from a scientific understanding of those laws. Dawkins' ideas provide invaluable context for understanding the nature of morality's problem domain, the factors that shape human behavior.


Dawkins is my favorite victim of anti-scientific bias, principally because he's so good at fighting back. Though his earlier works were polite and circumspect in their treatment of religion, he has responded to these unfair criticisms by pointing out the emperor's lack of raiment. In the history of world religions (the topic of my formal, and most of my informal, education), there are many examples of competition, speciation, convergence, drift and even mass extinction events. Dawkins explains these phenomena in terms of memetic competition. Though they can (and do) deny the validity of Darwin's theory until they're blue in the face, religious beliefs and practices are subject to selection pressure. Religion evolves.



One of the interesting things I learned from Dawkins' work on Biological Evolution is a greater appreciation of the role of co-evolutionary arms races, where organisms sharing the same environment influence the direction of each others' evolution (e.g. the way flowers have evolved to compete for the attention of pollen-dispersing insects). Blackmore shows how Dawkins applies this concept of arms races to expose the tricks and deceptions religion uses to perpetuate itself in the minds of believers. The most obvious example is the 'truth trick', the claim that a certain set of memes constitutes the "True and Perfect Revelation of God's Will."


Blackmore really gets into the spirit of Dawkins' critique of the self-serving, irrational and fundamentally immoral character of many religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. The chapters of her book include wonderful rants on the topics of New Age medicine, religious intolerance and irrational dogmatism. Though she doesn't say so explicitly, the picture Blackmore paints of religion is one of a cultural retrovirus. Belief in religious authority is like memetic AIDS, opening the faithful to all sorts of opportunistic diseases of conscience (like rationalizations for suicide bombings, genocide and witch-burnings). In other words, Susan Blackmore is going to hell. As for Dawkins, his final word on the subject of Memetics is titled A Devil's Chaplain.


Here's a quote I especially enjoyed, from the chapter titled, "Religions as Memeplexes," about my favorite book:


"Religious memes are stored, and thus given improved longevity, in the great religious texts. The theologian Hugh Pyper (1998) describes the Bible as one of the most successful texts ever produced. 'If "survival of the fittest" has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts'... Pyper argues that Western culture is the Bible's way of making more Bibles. And why is it so successful? Because it alters its environment in a way that increases the chances of its being copied. It does this, for example, by including within itself many instructions to pass it on, and by describing itself as indispensable to the people who read it. It is extremely adaptable, and since much of its content is self-contradictory it can be used to justify more or less any action or moral stance."


Punk Rock! <G> I especially like the bit about Western culture being the Bible's way of making more Bibles. It reminds me of the entertaining idea that "Humanity is DNA's way of getting off the planet."