emotional responses, or which relate to the core needs for sex and food – and evolutionary psychology can help us here. They may be ones that provide especially good tools for creating more memes, or which fit neatly into already installed memeplexes like political ideologies or belief in astrology. But exploring these reasons is a more specific task and I shall return to it later. For the moment I want only to show how general principles of memetics can help us understand the nature of our minds.
I think of this as the ‘weed theory’ of memes. An empty mind is a bit like my vegetable garden when I have dug and cleared and hoed it. The earth is brown, rough, rich and ready for anything that wants to grow. A week or two later there are little bits of green poking up in places; another week or two later there are serious plants dotted about; and soon the whole plot is covered in green, tangled with creepers, thrusting with tall leaves, and not a spot of brown earth can be seen. The reason is obvious. If something can grow it will. There are far more seeds in the soil and in the air than can possibly grow into mature plants, and as soon as any one of them finds itself with space, water and light, off it goes. That is just what seeds do. Memes do just the same with brains. Whenever there is any spare thinking capacity memes will come along and use it up. Evenwhen we are already thinking about something absolutely gripping any other idea that is even more gripping may displace the first from its position, improve its chance of getting passed on, and so increase the likelihood of someone else being infected with it. On this view the practice of meditation is a kind of mental weeding.
There are other analogies in the world of biology (although we must remember they are only analogies). Take a forest, for example. In a forest every tree has to compete for light, so genes for growing tall trunks will do well and tend to spread in the gene pool, as all the trees carrying genes for shorter trunks die out in the gloom below. In the end the forest will consist of trees that all have the tallest trunks they can manage to create.
Who benefits? Not the trees. They have all invested enormous amounts of energy into growing the trunks and are still competing with each other. There is no way that they could come to a gentleman’s agreement not to bother with trunks, for if some of them did, a cheat could always succeed by breaking the pact. So forests are a common creation all over the planet. The beneficiary is the successful gene, not the trees.
Returning to our poor overactive brains, we can ask again – who benefits? The constant thinking does not apparently benefit our genes, and nor does it make us happy. The point is that once memes have appeared the pressure to keep thinking all the time is inevitable. With all this competition going on the main casualty is a peaceful mind.
Of course, neither the genes nor the memes care about that – they are just mindlessly replicating. They have no foresight and they could not plan according to the consequences of their actions – even if they did care. We should not expect them to have created a happy and relaxing life for us and indeed they have not.
I have used this simple example to show the way in which I want to use memetics to understand the human mind. Later I will use the same approach to ask a closely related question – why do people talk so much? You may already think the answer is obvious, but before we explore the many ramifications of this one I want to add an important word of caution.
Not everything is a meme!
Not everything is a meme
Once you grasp the basic idea of memes it is all too easy to get carried away with enthusiasm and to think of everything as a meme – to equate memes with ideas, or thoughts, or beliefs, or the contents of consciousness,or anything you can think of. This tendency is deeply confusing and gets in the way of understanding what memes can
I think of this as the ‘weed theory’ of memes. An empty mind is a bit like my vegetable garden when I have dug and cleared and hoed it. The earth is brown, rough, rich and ready for anything that wants to grow. A week or two later there are little bits of green poking up in places; another week or two later there are serious plants dotted about; and soon the whole plot is covered in green, tangled with creepers, thrusting with tall leaves, and not a spot of brown earth can be seen. The reason is obvious. If something can grow it will. There are far more seeds in the soil and in the air than can possibly grow into mature plants, and as soon as any one of them finds itself with space, water and light, off it goes. That is just what seeds do. Memes do just the same with brains. Whenever there is any spare thinking capacity memes will come along and use it up. Evenwhen we are already thinking about something absolutely gripping any other idea that is even more gripping may displace the first from its position, improve its chance of getting passed on, and so increase the likelihood of someone else being infected with it. On this view the practice of meditation is a kind of mental weeding.
There are other analogies in the world of biology (although we must remember they are only analogies). Take a forest, for example. In a forest every tree has to compete for light, so genes for growing tall trunks will do well and tend to spread in the gene pool, as all the trees carrying genes for shorter trunks die out in the gloom below. In the end the forest will consist of trees that all have the tallest trunks they can manage to create.
Who benefits? Not the trees. They have all invested enormous amounts of energy into growing the trunks and are still competing with each other. There is no way that they could come to a gentleman’s agreement not to bother with trunks, for if some of them did, a cheat could always succeed by breaking the pact. So forests are a common creation all over the planet. The beneficiary is the successful gene, not the trees.
Returning to our poor overactive brains, we can ask again – who benefits? The constant thinking does not apparently benefit our genes, and nor does it make us happy. The point is that once memes have appeared the pressure to keep thinking all the time is inevitable. With all this competition going on the main casualty is a peaceful mind.
Of course, neither the genes nor the memes care about that – they are just mindlessly replicating. They have no foresight and they could not plan according to the consequences of their actions – even if they did care. We should not expect them to have created a happy and relaxing life for us and indeed they have not.
I have used this simple example to show the way in which I want to use memetics to understand the human mind. Later I will use the same approach to ask a closely related question – why do people talk so much? You may already think the answer is obvious, but before we explore the many ramifications of this one I want to add an important word of caution.
Not everything is a meme!
Not everything is a meme
Once you grasp the basic idea of memes it is all too easy to get carried away with enthusiasm and to think of everything as a meme – to equate memes with ideas, or thoughts, or beliefs, or the contents of consciousness,or anything you can think of. This tendency is deeply confusing and gets in the way of understanding what memes can
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