Stardate 20020429.1301

(Captain's log): Life forms and companies compete, and there is evolutionary pressure on them. But ideas compete, too.

The term for this idea is memetics and it observes that in many ways the process of creation, spread, mutation and death of ideas is analogous to that of life. Ideas live and spread in an ecology made up collectively of all the human minds in existence, and because ideas can affect human behavior they can, to some extent, affect their environment.

And ideas (or memes) also compete and change. However, unlike the evolution of life, which is Darwinian, memes undergo Lamarckian evolution. Lamarck is properly remembered in the history of science as being the father of Evolution. He originally defended the concept and made it part of the scientific orthodoxy of the early 18th century, and he also proposed a very shrewd idea of how it might take place. Lamarck proposed that creatures pass on some characteristics that they acquire during their lifetimes to their offspring. The classic example would be the neck of the giraffe: adult giraffes stretch to reach leaves at the top of the trees, and thus their offspring would have longer necks.

Darwinian evolution proposes a different explanation: some giraffes would naturally have longer necks, and they would pass that on to their offspring. Short-necked giraffes equally would pass that character on. But before they bred, the long necked giraffes would have a better chance of getting food, and the short-necked giraffes a better chance of starving. Thus the overall offspring of each generation would be drawn disproportionately from those with longer necks, and the species would gradually change.

It turns out that Darwin was right and Lamarck was wrong. But that doesn't take anything away from the brilliance of Lamarck's suggestion, and it's important to keep it in mind because cultural evolution is Lamarckian, and Lamarckian evolution is far more efficient and far more rapid than Darwinian evolution.

There's one particular way in which Lamarckian evolution is especially efficient, and that is in crossing lines. The great evolutionary breakthrough in biology was the development of sex (and not just because it's fun). A species which reproduces by strict fission can only have two given genetic characters if both of them happened as mutations in the same line. If you have two contemporaries and one gets one beneficial mutation and another gets a different one, there's no way to combine both mutations together into a single offspring.

Sex solves that problem. On each generation, every offspring has two parents and can inherit some characteristics from each. If one has one beneficial mutation and the other has a different one, there's a chance the offspring might get them both. As a result, species which reproduce sexually (or have some equivalent form of genetic mixing) evolve far more rapidly than those which don't.

But Lamarckian cultural evolution does that far better, because the cultural legacy of each generation can pass on ideas from multiple parent memes to all of the offspring of the next generation. My genes differ from the genes of those who lived in Rome in no important regard, but I am far more powerful than the average Roman because of the knowledge my culture has. In fact, the gap in capabilities between me and someone living fifty years ago is far greater than the gap between the Romans and someone living a thousand years before that in Italy.

However, memetic evolution goes through the same kind of growth and shakeout that biological evolution or markets do. (Markets are, in a sense, a form of meme.) The Greeks established city states elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and they weren't just spreading their bodies: they were also spreading their culture. When the British conquered India, they didn't just take control of the place and loot it, they also gave the Indians the English language.

Languages are memes, and languages, like all memes, can grow. They do this two ways: by having a population increase among their speakers, and by conversion of speakers of other languages. Both happen, and both are still happening. But up to about 500 years ago it was primarily growth; now it's primarily conversion.

All memes ultimately compete this way. As new ideas form, they can spread out (the growth phase) and eventually saturate the environment and come into zero-sum competition with each other. The conversion is not a stairstep and is rarely complete; even in the end-stages there is usually some growth going on, but the primary mode switches to competition.

And this also applies to the deepest and most important memes there are: religion and political philosophy.

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