[wordup] Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?

[Adam Shand]

Reminds me of Bill Joy's essay, "The future doesn't need us" (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html 
).  It's poignant and a little scary but somehow Bruce Sterling's line  
that only one thing is certain about predictions; that the future is  
never as dramatic as we expect it to be.

Adam.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.500-evolutions-third-replicator-genes-memes-and-now-what.html

Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?
31 July 2009
By Susan Blackmore

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a  
third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and  
possibly dangerous.
What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the  
gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the  
basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in  
a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary  
process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully  
oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we  
realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need  
not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that  
makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and  
given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an  
evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of  
destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs  
thrive because of the many failures that don't.

The information that is copied, varied and selected is called the  
replicator, and the process is well understood when applied to  
biology. Genes are copied, mutated and selected over and over again.  
Assemblages of genes are used to build vehicles that carry them  
around, protect them and propagate them. These vehicles - the  
lumbering robots, as Richard Dawkins calls them - are animals and  
plants, the prolific and exquisitely designed products of the first  
replicator.

About 4 billion years after the appearance of the first replicator,  
something extraordinary happened. Members of one species of lumbering  
robot began to imitate one another. Imitation is a kind of copying,  
and so a new evolutionary process was born. Instead of cellular  
chemistry copying the order of bases on DNA, a sociable species of  
bipedal ape began to use its big brain to copy gestures, sounds and  
other behaviours. This copying might not have been very accurate, but  
it was enough to start a new evolutionary process. Dawkins called the  
new replicators "memes". A living creature, once just a vehicle of the  
first replicator, was now the copying machinery for the next.

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much  
maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much  
to offer in explaining human nature. According to meme theory, humans  
are radically different from all other species because we alone are  
meme machines. Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit  
better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely  
different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of  
information.

The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is  
this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because  
they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes  
retain ultimate control. Memetics challenges that assumption. Although  
the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes  
who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have  
predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary  
process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began  
evolving in their own right.

So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became  
like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and  
their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals  
benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then  
passed on any genes that helped them do so. This "memetic drive"  
forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at  
copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language,  
art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human  
culture.

This process was dangerous. Small brains are much more efficient if  
you don't have to copy anything, but once memes are around you cannot  
survive unless you do. So brains had to get bigger, and big brains are  
costly to produce, dangerous to give birth to and expensive to run.

There is also danger in what is copied. If you start copying anything  
at all then you might copy dangerous memes, like throwing yourself off  
a cliff or using up all your resources in pointless rituals. This  
creates an arms race between two selfish replicators - memes  
benefiting from brains that copy anything and everything; genes  
benefiting from brains that are smaller, more efficient and highly  
selective.

Either of these dangers might have finished our ancestors off, but  
they pulled through. The result was a compromise, with human brains  
being just about as big as our bodies could stand, and yet selective  
enough to avoid copying lethal memes. In the same way that parasites  
tend to co-evolve with their hosts to become less lethal, so memes co- 
evolved with us. Languages, religions, skills and fashions that began  
as parasites turned into symbionts. Not only do we get along with our  
memes now, we could not live without them.

There was also a cost to the rest of life on Earth. Wherever they went  
humans took memes with them, spreading agriculture and changing the  
landscape, obliterating some species, domesticating others and  
changing whole ecosystems. Then, much more recently, they began to  
build radically new kinds of technology, and the changes they effected  
dwarfed anything that had gone before. Was this just more of the same  
or something new?

In all my previous work in memetics I have used the term "meme" to  
apply to any information that is copied between people, including  
stories in books, ideas embodied in new technology, websites and so  
on. The reason was that there seemed no way of distinguishing between  
"natural" human memes, such as spoken words, habits, fashions, art and  
religions, and what we might call "artificial" memes, such as websites  
and high-tech goods. So on the grounds that a false distinction is  
worse than none I stuck to the term "meme". Yet an email encrypted in  
digital code, broken into tiny packets and beamed around the planet  
does seem qualitatively different from someone shaking hands and  
saying "Hi". Could there be a fundamental principle lurking here? If  
we ask what made memes different from genes, would that help us decide  
what would make a new replicator different from memes?

Putting it that way makes the answer easier to see. Memes are a new  
kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new  
kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is  
a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages -  
copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the  
same apply to new technology?

There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary  
information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying  
machinery: computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three  
critical stages carried out by that machinery?

We're close. We may even be right on the cusp. Think of programs that  
write original poetry or cobble together new student essays, or  
programs that store information about your shopping preferences and  
suggest books or clothes you might like next. They may be limited in  
scope, dependent on human input and send their output to human brains,  
but they copy, select and recombine the information they handle.

Machines now copy information to other machines without human  
intervention
Or think of Google. It copies information, selects what it needs and  
puts the selections together in new variations - that's all three. The  
temptation is to think that since we designed search engines and other  
technologies for our own use they must remain subservient to us. But  
if a new replicator is involved we must think again. Search results go  
not only to screens for people to look at, but to other programs,  
commercial applications and even viruses - that's machines copying  
information to other machines without the intervention of a human  
brain. From there, we should expect the system to grow rapidly beyond  
our control and for our role in it to change. We should also expect  
design to appear spontaneously, and it does. Much of the content on  
the web is now designed automatically by machines rather than people.

The temptation is to think that technology we designed must remain  
subservient to us - but think again
Memes work differently from genes, and digital information works  
differently from memes, but some general principles apply to them all.  
The accelerating expansion, the increasing complexity, and the  
improving interconnectivity of all three are signs that the same  
fundamental design process is driving them all. Road networks look  
like vascular systems, and both look like computer networks, because  
interconnected systems outcompete isolated systems. The internet  
connects billions of computers in trillions of ways, just as a human  
brain connects billions of neurons in trillions of ways. Their uncanny  
resemblance is because they are doing a similar job.

So where do we go from here? We humans were vehicles for the first  
replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will we be for  
the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and  
copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the  
selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music  
and entertainment. But the balance is shifting.

Outnumbered
Last year Google announced that the web had passed the trillion mark,  
with more than 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. Many countries now have  
nearly as many computers as people, and if you count phones and other  
connected gadgets they far outnumber people. Even if we all spent all  
day reading this stuff it would expand faster than we could keep up.

Billions of years ago, free-living bacteria are thought to have become  
incorporated into living cells as energy-providing mitochondria. Both  
sides benefited from the deal. Perhaps the same is happening to us  
now. The growing web of machines we let loose needs us to run the  
power stations, build the factories that make the computers, and  
repair things when they go wrong - and will do for some time yet. In  
return we get entertainment, tedious tasks done for us, facts at the  
click of a mouse and as much communication as we can ask for. It's a  
deal we are not likely to turn down.

Yet this shift to a new replicator may be a dangerous tipping point.  
Our ancestors could have killed themselves off with their large brains  
and dangerous memes, but they pulled through. This time the danger is  
to the whole planet. Gadgets like phones and PCs are already using 15  
per cent of household power and rising(New Scientist, 23 May, p 17);  
the web is using over 5 per cent of the world's entire power and  
rising. We blame ourselves for climate change and resource depletion,  
but perhaps we should blame this new evolutionary process that is  
greedy, selfish and utterly blind to the consequences of its own  
expansion. We at least have the advantage that we can understand what  
is happening. That must be the first step towards working out what, if  
anything, to do about it.

Your ideas: Help find a name for the third replicator

Replicators on other planets?
We are able to ask the question "Are we alone in the universe?"  
because our ancestors created memes, turning Earth into a "two  
replicator", or R2, planet, rich in language and culture. We are able  
to contemplate communicating with other worlds because Earth is fast  
becoming an R3 planet, rich in digital technology that passes  
information around at the speed of light, and with the potential to  
send it out into the galaxy. How many other planets have taken a  
similar course? And why haven't we heard from them yet?

The standard approach to answering that question focuses on the search  
for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1961 Frank Drake proposed his  
famous equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilisations  
capable of communicating with us in our own galaxy. It includes the  
rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets, the  
fraction of planets that can sustain life and the fraction that get  
intelligent life and then technology.

Perhaps intelligence and civilisation are not what we should be  
concentrating on. My analysis based on Universal Darwinism suggests  
that instead we should be looking for R3 planets. The number of those  
in our galaxy will depend on the probability of a planet getting a  
stable first replicator, then a second, and then a third. Maybe each  
step is hard, or maybe each is easy but dangerous. This new and  
simpler equation won't tell us the answers, but by posing new  
questions it may help us understand why - so far - we have not heard  
from anyone else out there.

Susan Blackmore is a writer and psychologist based in Devon, UK