Domesticated Homo Sapiens

We developed a symbiotic relationship with memeplexes from the start.  Language domesticated us.  Memeplexes played a  parenting role, stabilizing our food supplies, developing architecture.  As we domesticated other species, we domesticated ourselves, through cooking and tool making and telling stories. 


We are poorly adapted to survival in the wilderness.  We need tools and often companions to gather and hunt dinner.  We need shelter and clothing to protect us from the elements.  We quickly learned to create synthetic environments (the city being a prime example) and these environments changed rapidly (compared to geologic and ecologic change) and our natural bodies and brains have struggled to adapt with them.


We domesticated ourselves, selecting mates for their mechanical and linguistic aptitude, social skills, reputation and creativity.  Creativity is an interesting one because it involves a flexibility of the mind, playfulness, a juvenile trait.  And something curious happened: our features became rounder, eyes became wider, brows less prominent and our jaws shrank.  These smaller, juvenile features demonstrate the paedomorphosis of humanoids to modern humans. 


We shunned and executed those among us who were too aggressive and assertive...something we also did to other species in the process of domestication. 

Memeplexes extended childhood, even empowered people to experience lifelong "immaturity"  (meaning a dependency on the society & memeplexes to feed, clothe and shelter).  This has increased physical security and leisure time, meaning an increased potential for learning and an increased opportunity for creativity.  This has also increased life expectancy, material goods and food security.


Memeplexes are so intricately intertwined with us that we find it difficult to imagine our existence without them.  They often encourage deference to the group consensus, belief in supernatural entities and other practices which complicate our lives as much as they may help.

The Minds We Create--Domestication

[This post is human-centric.  No big surprise there, since a dog clearly did not write this.  Bias is ok as long as we work in awareness of it.  For a more accurate insight into the process of domestication check out this article on dog domestication and borrow The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan from your local library.]


Whether we domesticated them for food, labor, defense or companionship (or a combination of all) we have shaped not just the physical attributes but the cognitive functions of domesticated species. 


We have made dogs and cats docile, perpetually juvenile, compared to their wild counterparts.  This has even extended vocal communication in cats.  Feral adult cats and wild cats rarely vocalize while their domestic relations mew dependently for every meal.  Dogs remain playful long after physical maturity, extending their learning as well as their adolescence.


Darwin aptly articulated the physical variations human selection of plants and animals creates among domesticated species.  The same can be said of the cognitive capacity and protomemes of domestic animals compared to variations within their species and in comparison to their wild relatives.  A Pit Bull's response to physical threat is quite different from a Sheltie's. The adult Wolf's means of acquiring dinner are quite different from the Papillon.


Cats have retained more independence as their main function was pest control and they needed little encouragement to fill that niche.  Dogs on the other hand depended on reading social signals and moods of humans.  Because of this dogs developed an ability to read human facial expressions, and respond to verbal and non-verbal cues (which most cats, as any roommate of one will know, feel too intelligent to do on any reliable basis).  Dogs even developed the ability to point (for hunting purposes) and to decode human pointing (something most creatures, even those closely related to us, cannot do). 


This shaping of cognitive and emotional function extends to farm animals as well and explains why animals in confined, industrial environments respond in ways similar to human psychological disorders.  We shaped them to function in a pastoral environment, complete with social stimuli, human husbandry and natural cycles, then rapidly changed that environment.  Since we control the breeding, even after the species has lost its ability to mate independently, such as with Angus cows (where natural mate selection is not permitted) and Domesticated turkeys (where the birds were bred to have so much meat they are physically incapable of breeding), these animals have lost all ability to adapt or go extinct, caught in a vicious cycle of human manufacture, driven by markets rather than gene-environment interplay. 


But there is another brain/body which we have domesticated with even more complex outcomes: Our own. 

Cuttlefish and Octopus

For the last several posts we've talked about brains and intelligence in a very vertebrate-centered way (though we did briefly address the protomemetic intelligence of bacteria, fungi, ants and bees).  Let's take a side-exploration on the banyan-tree-of-life and explore cephalopods.  These creatures lost their protective shells early on which placed selective pressure on them to become agile hunters and crafty escape artists. 


There was no pressure exerted on the octopus to develop social networks and they rarely interact (except to mate and eat each other).  Their intelligence is cumulative over a lifetime, but not shared.  They easily adapt to artificial environments and show incredible mechanical aptitude.  They do however have incredibly advanced neural and optic systems which allow them to mimic venomous species and inedible environments, triggering reactions in predators which aid in their survival.  This is a protomemetic exchange, but it is a very advanced one, changing rapidly as different environments and threats are encountered on an individual, not collective, basis. 


Look at it this way: You, as a human, need other humans to survive (or needed their help to survive until you could create an illusion of being totally self-reliant).  The octopus is so flexible in assessing new situations and has been so well-adapted through the whole of evolutionary history that it never was required to become social. It has avoided the convoluted complexities of social interaction due to a quirk of selective pressures. 


Cuttlefish have developed slightly differently. They compete for mates with elaborate displays.  Smaller males who can't compete with larger ones will "cross dress" to avoid conflict with large males and get closer to females.  So they have a slightly stronger social interaction.  They therefore must have had a high enough population density at some point in evolutionary history to trigger and reward competitive and seductive mating behaviors.  Cuttlefish will also turn their skin into an elaborate pulsating display to stun prey.  These displays are protomemetic communication, triggering instinctive responses in others that aid their survival and reproduction.   

Dolphins

Selective pressures usually oppose ever-larger brains.
Survival depends on the conservation of energy and big brains are calorie hogs.  Therefore big brains are rare.  They do things that (as far as we can tell) smaller brains don't have the computing power for. 

Dolphins have the capacity for abstract thought and complex memetic communication, complete with regional dialects.  How did such a brain develop?



Through the fossil record and genetics, we are able to piece together the development of Dolphins, like forensic scientists recreating a crime scene.  Thirty-nine million years ago, odontocetes (an order inclusive of toothed whales, beaked whales, sperm whales dolphins and porpoises) diverged from the ancestral Archaeoceti group.  For the ancestors of modern dolphins, body size decreased and brain size increased.  Echolocation emerged which helped locate food and networked individuals more effectively.  The interplay of selective pressures and the survival advantage created by these new survival strategies spurred the growth of the Dolphin brain.  This interplay led to another growth spurt around Fifteen million years ago.  The more a dolphin depended on communication to survive, the more environmental pressures selected for big brains.

Researchers are still trying to "crack the code" of Dolphin language, which due to its complex relationship with the ocean environment and Dolphin experience, has not been as easy to decipher as researchers in the 1960s had hoped.  But researchers are increasingly aware that when a problem seems unsolvable, it often means we need to approach it in a new way, asking different questions and questioning assumptions.




Dolphins are creatures like us, who clearly have memetic communication built on top of protomemetic communication.  Understanding the protomemetic framework which creates structure for memetic communication is our first step in decoding Dolphin language. 

Do You Remember Dinosaurs? (A Fun Sidenote on Memetics)

Dinosaurs was on air when I was in preschool, and Dad just loved it.  That's what I'd started to call him, "Dad" instead of "Daddy".  My oldest brother was home from college and wouldn't play along with calling him "Daddy" anymore.  (Can you blame him?)


When I asked my brother why he called Daddy that, he said "Daddy" was ok for a little kid but he's grown up, so he calls Daddy "Dad".  I thought, "I'm not little!"  So I started calling Daddy "Dad" and Mommy "Mom".


Dad liked Dinosaurs because it was about an average working guy with a well-educated, liberal wife, two teenagers and a baby and of course, the grandma.  We were a multigenerational family too. 


I just loved the show!  It looked almost like Sesame Street, only with a lot of Oscar the Grouches and all the big people watched it.  I wanted to be big too!  So every time Dad watched Dinosaurs I'd go into the living room. 


Pretty soon the predictable happened.   After all, I was the baby of the family and the star attraction of the show was: Baby.  I started picking up on Baby's bad habits like doing something mildly destructive then saying "I'm the baby, gotta love me!"


There was a girl sitting next to my second brother on the couch.  She had blond hair and a nice smile.  I stood in front of them, leaned into my brother and said, "So, are you gonna kiss her?"  He turned beet red and made a quick exit.  Maybe she was a baby sitter?  Who knows. 


Long story short my bed time was moved to half an hour earlier & I started sneaking downstairs to watch Dinosaurs from the stairwell.  Mom or Grandma would catch me and send me back to bed.  And so the narrative was created and stuck, that Dinosaurs was something for big people that I was not allowed to have yet. 


So, when I started school and the teacher asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I didn't say a princess or a firefighter, I said "Dinosaurs.  I want to watch Dinosaurs!"  And that was my introduction to paleontology and all those cool dino names and dreaming of excavations in our backyard to resurrect the bones and bring the characters to life.  By the time  I was in first grade, the idea of the TV show had melted away but the love-affair with everything prehistoric was hopelessly implanted forever in my brain.  It helped me fall in love with time travel stories and creative writing, Einstein, Geoscience and the theory of natural selection. 


Morals of the story: 


Memes start implanting in our brains at the start of language acquisition, long before rational thought processes develop. 


Ideas grow, scaffolding onto existing ones, melding in complex ways even in extremely young brains.


Never assume someone is too young or too uninformed to take an interest in your subject, assume you're teaching it wrong. 


For memeticists and other scholars: Don't look down your nose at the artists and comedians.  They are your allies: they can reach audiences you will not. 

Protomemes vs. Memes

I want to avoid endless coinage of terms because as mentioned previously, endlessly coining terms without a methodology for testing memetics just convolutes the conversation and wastes energy. 


However, when our minds get hung up on the improper use of a term or the lack of clear definitions, it becomes necessary to alter the dialogue with a little linguistic innovation.


Saying other living organisms have memes goes too far for some...it's  a deviation from the definition of meme (a bit that transmits culture).


Bacterial colonies and ant colonies do not have culture.


The chemical memes talked about earlier are transmitters.  They carry information from one individual to another, creating a network of communication and giving the network a stronger survival advantage than the individual.   But calling them real memes may be going too far.


Or perhaps we can call those chemical signals, body postures etc. "memes" but call the bits that form human culture "true memes" so we can tell them apart? 


(But then you get tangled up with the emotional weight applied to the word "true" and the devaluation of the regular "meme" which is widespread in nature and deserves equal attention).


So KISS me baby: Keep It Simple & Stupid.


Don't overcomplicate things if you don't have to.


This is what we'll do:


The chemical memes, postures, etc. which are network signals and form the scaffolding for cultural memes will be called "proto-memes" from now on.  This shows their pre-emergence and critical role of scaffold for human cultural memes.  The cultural memes we'll keep calling memes.  There we go, simple and devoid of emotional weight.  Let's keep going.

Dinosaurs

We left off talking turkey.
Turkeys suffer from the general sterotype of having bird-brains, yet they have an innate, instinctual intelligence which has been honed by natural selection.  So, let's look at the lineage of a thanksgiving meal.


It is now generally accepted that birds are the modern descendants of a branch of dinosaurs.  Going back to the fossil record, we have evidence that some dinosaurs like hadrosaurs had well developed organs for communication.  Other dinosaurs cared extensively for their young for months after hatching.  They were social creatures.  They utilized memes.  Their memes were also closely tied to genetic concerns. 


For most organisms, memes remain in strict service to the genes.  Deviations from this servile position can endanger the individual and group (if the memes fail to promote survival behaviors) as well as expend too many calories (by stimulating activities unrelated to survival and reproduction). 


Human memes are a special case.  They are unique, they are more complex, but they may not be as advantageous as the commoner types of memes we see in the rest of the animal kingdom.  Environmental pressures select for small brains and caloric efficiency.  If most creatures had the capability to reflect on the human brain and its caloric consumption, they would no doubt conclude it is an aberration. 


Yet, the human brain is a product of natural selection.  Stripped of physical defenses, we were dependent on individual and group cunning to maintain our status among the living.  We fit into a niche: bipedal, defenseless omnivore.  The environment selected increased communication organs and large brains.


Dale Russell suggested that given other environmental pressures the dinosaur lineage might have produced humanoid creatures.  This theorizing is productive in that it allows us to understand the algorithmic nature of natural selection.  It is possible our niche could have been filled by creatures rather different from ourselves.  We are a special case, but we are not unique, elect or chosen.  We are natural.

An Alien Intelligence: Turkeys

Wild turkeys are a wonderful example of genetic and memetic evolution.    Imprinting of a parental voice and vocalization begins before hatching. The display by males to communicate dominance is observed in young poults less than a week old.  Wild turkeys have distinctive vocalizations for distress, reassurance and even identification of poisonous and non-poisonous snakes.  Their vocalizations serve to network data about their environment, providing information which increases individual survival within the group.  This is especially vital to the survival of the species during the crucial stages of development, before reproduction, when an individual brain does not have enough experience and memory to navigate the environment on its own. 


In the first couple weeks, turkeys rely on the mother completely for protection.  They play and explore the environment close to the mother.  As they become larger, caution decreases and curiosity increases and they learn about their environment through networked, coordinated behavior as well as individual experience.  This activity appears to be completely dependent on the genes. 


Turkeys do not have language as humans do.  Instead, they have a set of memes directly created by the environmental selection of genes.  These memes trigger chemical cascades in their brains and bodies.  Alert calls create excited behavior, the flight/fight response and close physical proximity to family members.  Roosting calls trigger relaxation, allowing all brains in the network to power down in a synchronized fashion.  These roosting calls may be triggered by a change in light frequency as the sun sets or other environmental cues.  The genes and memes are closely tied to the environment because selective pressure demands efficiency.  Pain and other stimuli elicit vocalizations which trigger chemical cascades in others, facilitating survival.


This is instinctive knowledge, grafted onto emotional (chemical) and physical internal networks.  For a fascinating encounter with this alien intelligence, check out My Life As A Turkey, the story of Joe Hutto's study of the wild turkey in its natural habitat.


Continue to Dinosaurs

The Waggle Dance of Bees

Individual bee brains network through chemical signals, but that's not the only communication they use. The waggle dance, first documented by Karl von Frisch in 1973, helps individuals tell others where sources of nectar and pollen are.  Though the waggle dance does not have grammar or a set of symbols and may not be considered true language, it is the expression and reception of data important to the survival of the bee colony.  These memes, like chemical memes, are strictly tied to genetic interests.  So, like chemical memes, these are not the type of meme that play the key role in shaping human cultures.  Nevertheless, they are memes, transmitting information and encouraging copies of that information (in behavior, data storage, etc). 


[We can call this waggle dance a "posture meme" for now, if we must name it, though let's not get distracted with labels...I'm thinking out loud here. ]


Continue to  An Alien Intelligence: Turkeys

Ants

Ants are evolutionarily elegant.  They are social insects with small brains (read: minimal calorie expense) and have therefore successfully colonized the planet. 


They leave reproduction to specialized individuals (which is more calorie efficient than widespread fertility). 


They create extensive shelters and alter their environments.  Some even cultivate mycelium and milk aphids (meaning: some ants have evolved a symbiotic relationship with some mycelium and aphids). 


Their brains are in total service to the genes.  Though each brain is small, networked with chemical memes (derived solely from the genes and environmental factors) from other ants, their brains are able to join together in a way alien to humans, creating collective choices.


This is advantageous.  Big brains are a liability, not an asset to survival.  They require development, maintenance and experience decline.     They demand calories.  Only those species which have been pushed and pulled by prolonged evolutionary pressures evolve big brains and their long term survival is tenuous.  In the history of the Earth, the best long-term survival strategy has been to keep brains small, if they must exist at all. 


Continue to The Waggle Dance of Bees

Fungal Networks

1.3 billion years ago fungi were the first organisms to colonize the land.  Able to digest rocks and create soils, mycelium began the ecological chain which formed a recognizable, modern Earth. 


Fungal networks are able to transport water and nutrients over great distances, recognize and alert the network to invasive organisms, as well as mount coordinated attacks on intruders and potential prey. 
When cells in the network encounter novel food sources or threats, the chemical strategy of addressing the new item is shared to other cells in the mycelium.  Additionally, fungi has the ability to preserve spatial data and re-apply the information.  This is learning and data storage...memory. 


Fungal networks can signal other species, interacting with organisms in their environments and other colonies of fungi.  Therefore this networking is not simply internal chemical signaling, it is chemical memetics.


In the words of Paul Stamets,  "Mycelium has a neurological archetype which we share as well.  Looking at the mushroom mycelium and how it is organized, it has cross-hatchings.  Computer Engineers call these 'hot points'.  For every branch length going one direction there's another branching in another direction.  This creates an alternative way of transferring information and nutrients in case of a break in the mycelial mat.  The mycelium is Earth's natural internet.  The invention of the computer internet is the inevitable consequence of a previously proven evolutionary successful model."


Continue to Ants

Comparison with Bacteria

One objection to comparing memeplexes to biological organisms is that memeplexes do not simply mutate and evolve over successive generations.  A memeplex can copy parts of other memeplexes, even a competitive memeplex, to gain a survival advantage, taking a practice or concept and reworking it into its own memetic blueprints.  Some would argue, this is not evolution as we understand it in sexual and asexual vertical gene transfer, but rather chaos.


Enter horizontal (lateral) gene transfer.  A tree of life that includes horizontal transmission looks somewhat different than the traditional vertical tree of life.  As species diverge and complexity increases, the mechanisms of gene transfer become more complicated and vertical transmission becomes more pronounced.  With less complicated organisms, lateral transfer is more common. 


The comparison to biological evolution holds.  It was our understanding of biology and genetics that had to advance before we could accept observations about memes, not a flaw in memetic theory.   


Continue to Fungal Networks

How Bacteria Relate to Memes

The last post suggested chemical signals used in quorum sensing by microbes could be labeled "chemical memes".  For some (maybe for you) this is stepping onto questionable ground.  These chemicals are derivatives of the genes--there is no line between genes and memes. And there should be a definite line...right?


There are many similar transitions in biology created by our need to catalogue and classify.  Where is the first human; how do we distinguish "first human" from "closely related hominid"?  The pursuit of that question is not as productive as "how did modern humans emerge from hominids?" or "how did modern humans survive while other hominids did not?".  Yet the pursuit of that first question is deeply engrained in our collective Western tradition.  Something seems incomplete without an answer, but this is a misleading sentiment.  Questions of origin are not evolutionary questions: Questions of development are.


When does a bacterial colony become a superorganism--or cease to be an independent organism?
Is the bacteria in our gut part of us, an individual organism or a colony inside us?  With microbial endocrinology we are learning it is not so easy to separate two species which have co-evolved quite so elegantly.  We are entwined.  But still, the distinction between species is useful in certain disciplines and as such, remains a useful tool, even if it is not wholly accurate from all perspectives.


Let's make a distinction then:   When chemical signals happen within an individual organism, it's a chemical signal triggered by genetic and environmental factors and is not a chemical meme.  When chemical signals are exchanged between two or more organisms, it's a chemical signal triggered by genetic and environmental factors and it is a chemical meme.  It is the transmission of information from one organism to another that makes the meme (this will be an important distinction later).


Continue to Comparison With Bacteria

Not the beginning...Not even close

Before the massive DNA double helix there had to be...something.  DNA didn't appear out of thin air.  Organic chemists and other scientists have theorized about what came before DNA and how it all assembled in the primordial soup of the early earth.  But Evolutionary Biologists stay out of that.  They aren't concerned with origins but with what developed after that first fact.


Evolution isn't interested in first cause, it's focus is rather on development.
How did we get from point c to point d?  b to c?
Evolutionary biology relies on other disciplines to address point a (which is rather fortunate: as far as we can tell, reaching point a is like trying to count to infinity). 


So...where does the realm of memetics (as part of evolutionary theory) begin?
There are no easy lines of demarcation...but let's approach this question from a new angle.


Memes didn't start with the first word or first warble.
They didn't even start with (as Hoyle Leigh might say) the first neurons firing.


They are far older.


Quorum sensing in bacteria is facilitated by the production and recognition of certain signaling molecules.  These molecules allow single celled organisms to aggregate, network and even overpower much more complex, multi-celled organisms. 


This ability to network and collaborate through broadcasted information was foundational to the survival of single celled organisms as well as multi-celled organisms.  Yes, these signals are intricately connected to genes.  Can we be comfortable labeling these as chemical memes or are they simply products of genes? 


(It's a trick question, just like: does light behave like a wave or particle?  The best answer is both OR it depends on the context.)


As we will see later, memes intricately scaffold onto genes.  Leigh can be understood for adapting memetics to a flexible modernization of genetic determinism.  He went as far as his induction into the practice of normal, clinical science would permit & no further.  However, his work did not accomplish a foundation in memetics because he did not question the basic assumptions of his discipline in light of meme theory.  More on this later.


For now, let's be content to say we cannot simply pin-point the branching of memes from genes. Memes originated in service to genes.  Chemical memes have high fidelity (a pheromone has a particular chemical signature, a protein will fold in one particular way--when something goes wrong with this, there is trouble).  This high fidelity in transmission and exclusive service to the genes makes organisms relying on chemical memes highly efficient examples of evolution.


Continue to How Bacteria Relate to Memes

Memes, not Metaphors*

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Continue to Not The Beginning...Not Even Close

Let's crawl before we run...

It's all well and good to claim memetics will create a more humane psychology and social policy, protect the aged and young and address global climate change without resorting to the extermination of our species...but it's all a little...too much.


Too many grand, philosophical dreamscapes, a pinch of magical thinking...out of touch with reality.


Reality is
: the peer reviewed journal(s?) went belly-up a decade ago.
: most regard meme theory as a metaphor with little to offer.
: the inertia of the current paradigm encourages meme theorists to conform memetics to existing disciplines (as any responsible, normal science will do). 


Wake up folkies.  We aren't a normal science yet.  Let's cut the pretense.


We need to be flexible. think outside the biology box and design methodologies to test meme theory.  (A great example of this cutting edge research is Daniel VanArsdale's work on the Evolution of Chain Letters).
  


Hold onto your hats meme-mourners, philosophers and bespectacled lab-rats...we're about to tour a world where memes aren't just an ancillary concern but where they are given the full consideration that genes have been granted for the last hundred years. 


Continue to Memes, Not Metaphors