Cultural Memes as an External Evolution

For many years now I have been struggling with the question “Why does humans evolved culturally and technologically so fast? “ What is so special about us? Why does everything happened so fast and one could even observe this evolution within a lifetime even within decades? I just can’t feed my curiosity enough to stop asking questions. Which probably is one of the reasons we advance with such a pace? We never stop asking questions, questions about fictional things that do not exist in the real world. We can comprehend our own history and meaning; we can think of the future and believe in non-existing reality, we can create that reality out of fiction. These are just some of the prerequisites needed for cultural and technological advancements. Of course back in the time when we didn’t have sufficient information about our reality people invented probably the first fiction that turned into reality, or namely Religion! Our brain needs to have answers in order to keep on functioning normally and not deal with these questions anymore. So what we did is just invent a story that explain everything so that we don’t have to worry about such stuff, and focus our attention on growing or hunting food, mating, surviving and so on. This was the first complex Idea that settled in our brains, the first step into our incredible journey of cooperation with purely informational structures that have no real world representation. Of course there were earlier informational structures, but religion open our minds , gave us tools to foster other more complex more sophisticated fiction ideas, and use them as tools to develop our world in a way which have never been observed before in nature.

Now as an introduction I would like to say first, that I do not claim to be an expert in this field, I merely just try to assemble some structure of understanding from what I’ve learned through my own experience and brainstorming throughout the years and what I’ve gathered as a knowledge throughout my little research. I do not try to really answer any questions, exactly the opposite, I want to provoke myself and the readers to find more questions, not to be afraid to ask them and criticize this theory, because the truth could only be obtained in collision between different opinions. I am going to discuss the topic “ Cultural memes as an external evolution” by discussing where the idea originally came from, the people who developed it and criticized , in other words a little historic background and later examining it from a Normative approach, Critical approach and Positivist approach.

The History of Cultural Memes Idea.

Now natural selection evolution of course has been controversial since Darwin first published `The Origin of Species' in 1859, not least amongst those who hold religious beliefs. By demonstrating that through the accumulation of small inherited changes and differential survival, `nature' could select animals upon the basis of their suitability to their environment, Darwin achieve an explanation of how complexity and apparent design could have arisen in nature without the need for a designer. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Darwin's theory was that it challenged the view that `Man' was somehow separate from the rest of nature. Human beings were merely another branch of life, stemming from the same evolutionary process and primitive beginnings as all other animals. Nowadays we all know that this is true and it is proven, although with some changes to the main theory. Essentially, however, it could be said that Darwin's theory is the center piece of biology, the basis for explaining the origins and history of life on Earth, and perhaps everywhere else in the universe (c.f. Dawkins [1]; Dennett [2]).
His 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins hypothesized that living beings, including humans, are mere «vehicles» for the transmission of the genetic information they bear. Genes, said Dawkins, are «replicators», information units which produce copies of themselves in order to be transmitted from generation to generation; and evolution can be understood as directed by those replicators in order to preserve their continuity.
But in the last chapter of his book, «Memes: the New Replicators», Dawkins took a step further. Dissatisfied with the usual Darwinian explanations of human behavior in genetic terms, he postulated the existence of a unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, which he termed meme. Like genes, memes would be replicators, and the mechanism by which they produced copies of themselves would be imitation:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation [3].
Ever since, the study of memes -- memetics -- has strived to attain a scientific status
Now that might seem a bit awkward and complicated but I am going to try and explain it in a more simple way. The idea of memetics claims that thanks to our brain tools that we obtained with evolution we can host to a Mind Virus or Memes that work on the same way as a virus or a living being that is able to replicate itself and evolve, with the only difference that it doesn’t have a physical representation in the classic mean. It only has a physical carrier. To put it in a simpler way, it is like energy that needs a material carrier.
To clarify all the definitions I would suggest the followings:
Meme:
(Biological definition from Dawkins)The meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission or imitation. Examples of memes are: tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or building arches.
(Psychological definition from Plotkin)A meme is a unit of cultural heredity analogous to the gene. It is the internal representation of knowledge.
(Cognitive Definition from Dennett)A meme is an idea, the kind of complex idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit. It is spread by vehicles that are physical manifestations of the meme.
(Simplified working definition by Brodie)A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.
Now some people would argue that memes does not have the goal to replicate themselves and that this is merely a different point of view for our own thoughts, twisted by a philosophical overthinking. Partly that is true! The memes themselves does not have any intentions whatsoever. It is a purely mechanical process that is being influenced by the environment and the natural selection. One could say of course that we already have sciences that study those occurrences, but I would say that this is a more structured way of thinking about our own thoughts and culture, and thus to comprehend them easier , and to use the knowledge we have gained for a better understanding of our cultural habits and development, and for finding tools to influence them and work with them and even create a new better ones (memetics engineering) One who intentionally devises memes, through meme-splicing and memetics synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others. Writers of manifestos and of commercials are typical memetics engineers.[4] ) Of course that sounds a bit like an urge to manipulate other people, but I would argue that it is more like to be able to separate the good from the bad memes, which of course is a normative stand , but nevertheless using a positivist approach.
As I already mentioned in the beginning, religion was probably one of the first cultural memes that have nested in our minds, and this is probably why it is still so powerful and replicated among human population and evolved along with other memes in a symbiosis in to a Memeplex, or a complex structure of symbiosis between many different memes that were able to coexist instead of annihilating each other. Same thing happened with the first two prokaryotic cells that instead of one of them eating the other, they fused in to a eukaryotic cell way more advanced and equipped for surviving in compare to other normal prokaryotic cells. They were just better suited for surviving in the environment. Instead of destroying what have already been accomplished, the cell started using two different DNA strings that work for a common goal sort of. This can still be observed in our own cells and of most of the living beings of the planet Earth. We have our own DNA string that is in the nucleus of the cell, and a mitochondrial DNA string that serve different purpose, but still help the first. As cultural units that nested our minds Religions do basically the same thing between each other (religion and different memes) but there is a crucial difference yet. In the cell the both strings of DNA help it survive and perform tasks for the common good. But within the human body, the Brain is merely a carrier for these cultural units, and not always these memes work for the benefit of the Brain. In other words they are viruses.
Virus:
A virus is anything that takes external copying equipment and puts it to work making copies of itself.
Mind virus:
A mind virus is something out in the world that infects people with memes. Those memes, in turn, influence the infected people's behavior so that they help perpetuate and spread the virus.
You have probably noticed that people many times are eager to spread their ideas to other people without any thought of why they should do that. They think that this is the right way; this is the right culture or religion, or anything that does not have a physical representation, but only a carrier. Radical Islam for instance could be observed as a Mind Virus that have infected people’s brain and they are doing anything they can to replicate it and to infect other people with it , even with the cost of their own life, with the cost of a sacrifice of your relatives , family , riches , goods and all possessions that belongs to them. Their children and personality doesn’t matter anymore. One could even say that they are obsessed. They are zombies. But thinking a little deeper about it, we are all zombies controlled by many different cultural units that have spread and developed. The memes are like the software of the computer, and our brain is the hardware. I would even say that our consciousness is a mixture of different mind viruses working together, and in any given time we are simply representing one or more of these memes or viruses. It is a struggle in our brain for which one should be on top, but we still have the power to choose which one we use to suit our own purposes. As Bo Dahlom said: “You can't do much carpentry with your bear hands and you can't do much thinking with your bear brain”
Miller (1998, 1999) has proposed that artistic ability and creativity have been sexually selected as courtship displays to attract women, and has provided many examples, citing evidence that musicians and artists are predominantly male and at their most productive during young adulthood. The same argument explains why our brains seem especially adapted soaking up some kinds of memes rather than others. For example, most people find mathematics and reading difficult, but adopting religious rituals, retelling stories and singing songs easy. This argument parallels an important argument in evolutionary psychology. It has become increasingly clear that the human brain is not a general purpose learning device but is adapted to learn some things more readily than others, based on genetic advantage in past environments (Pinker 1997, Tooby & Cosmides 1992).
The equivalent for memes is that the brain is not a general purpose imitation machine, but one honed by memetics and genetic evolutio