The Other Biology

Long ago, the West used to think that many living creatures just suddenly formed out of inanimate stuff.

The theory was called spontaneous generation. Like how flies just start appearing in swarms around rotting things: the guess was that the rot actually created the flies.

And the idea wasn’t entirely wrong. Flies like that stuff because it makes a great place to lay eggs. Their newly hatched young can then eat what’s there, grow into flies, mate, and lay more eggs. As long as there’s plenty of stuff to eat, the fly population will explode.

The key difference is that in spontaneous generation, current flies have nothing to do with future flies. There aren’t generations. So if a fly is too slow to avoid getting swatted, that doesn’t matter. Spontaneously formed flies won’t be any different either way.

But we now know that if a fly gets killed before it lays eggs, its traits don’t get passed along — not unless it has something like siblings that also have those traits and don’t get killed before laying eggs.

In the language of evolution, we call this natural selection. I think of it as death’s filter. Flies have the kind of erratic zigzag flight pattern they do because it confuses animals like us when we try to swat them — but it’s not like flies are thinking about it. It’s automatic and instinctual. The flies who didn’t develop these patterns were easier to kill and less likely to lay eggs. So it’s now intrinsic to most flies the way breathing is to us.

It turns out that anything with a life cycle — which is to say, a way of reproducing — is subject to natural selection. It adapts to challenges. Unlike things that spontaneously generate.

For instance, a puddle will spontaneously generate in a pothole when it rains. If we fill in the hole, the puddle just doesn’t happen. Filling in potholes doesn’t put pressure on puddles to find ways of forming in roads anyway. They just… don’t form anymore.

The key reason it works this way is that puddles don’t have offspring. If they did, their formation would be less like physics and more like biology.

To spell this out a bit: let’s suppose that every body of water that gets big enough gives birth to an invisible sprite. Sprites want to protect their pools; they’ll die if their pools are destroyed. They also “mate” by working together to form new bodies of water that will give rise to children that have some of their parents’ traits. Then which sprites survive best? Well, for one, the sprites that passively let humans fill in potholes will tend to die off much more than the ones that find ways of stopping the pothole repair. Meaning that natural selection — death’s filter — will make sprites better at protecting potholes to the extent that potholes need protecting.

Obviously that’s not what we see. At least not for puddles in the road.

But if we did, it’d make a lot of sense to say that puddles are alive. Or more accurately, that they’re the visible part of some living organism.

The punchline is this:

Ideas are alive.

Ideas have life cycles.

Or to be more precise, an idea is the visible part of something that reproduces through us.

A joke is a simple example. A joke dies by being forgotten forever. It reproduces by transmitting from one person to another. Reproduction matters only if the listener later passes the joke on. So you end up with a few strategies:

• Lots of jokes try to be both memorable and funny. Because the versions that weren’t tended to be forgotten.

• A few manage to become endemic. (“Why did the chicken cross the road?”)

• Some are offensive. They are memorable and get passed on because they get the listener riled up or horrified. (E.g. “dead baby” jokes.)

• Some are just incredibly sticky in memory. Like jokes that are attached to catchy songs.

• Lots of them encourage their hosts to find ways of telling them better.

• Quite a few of them encourage their hosts to write them down, like in books of jokes.

I’m sure there are other strategies too.

The point here is to see that these are adaptations to death’s filter. Jokes survive by being retold in ways that have them retold yet again. Things that get in the way of that retelling put a pressure on jokes to survive. The ones that adapt make it. The ones that don’t… well, we just don’t remember them anymore.

So in this sense, jokes are alive. They have a life cycle, and a kind of survival drive, and evolved strategies for insuring they have grandchildren.

In one sense this is just a metaphor. Jokes don’t have physical bodies or DNA or anything like that. If humans lost the capacity for language, possibly all jokes would suddenly cease to exist in a way that trees and bacteria wouldn’t.

But what makes biology interesting isn’t that its subjects have physical bodies.

What makes biology interesting is that there’s a kind of intelligence in how nature works. Animals hunt for food. Trees bear fruit. Hormones offer incredibly complex signals in our bodies. Forests thrive in intricate food webs. It’s all about life cycles interacting, adapting to one another and to their environment.

There’s a way of looking at ideas the same way. Ideas develop strategies for being transmitted from one mind to another. They create alliances with each other. They use human creativity to develop variations of themselves. They form mental ecosystems. They gather people in large groups to make themselves endemic. They plug into the tiniest details of how we use language and thought — often without us noticing.

Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” to point at these patterns. He meant it to be a mental analog of a gene in biology. But I think that’s the wrong metaphor. A meme is more like a biological creature.

It seems to me that memetics — the study of memes — is currently at the stage that biology was after Darwin named evolution but before Watson & Crick discovered DNA. The right unit of study is the memetic life cycle, not some hypothesized modular self-replicator.

We can observe memes’ life cycles, and deduce what their evolutionary pressures might have been. We can predict how they’ll adapt in contact with threat to their survival.

We can also just examine how they work. A kind of zoology of memes. It turns out that lots of evolutionary biology applies very directly to memes, such as symbiosis and r-selection versus K-selection. It’s just that since the “terrain” is human behavior rather than a physical environment, the adaptations are quite a bit different than we see in biology. Much like how marine ecosystems look very different from the world a virus navigates.

I think memetics is a critical subject for humanity to grapple with. We’ve done so in bits & pieces so far. I hope to talk about some of those efforts in a future post. But we have yet to take a unified clear-minded stance toward understanding these intangible living creatures. I think that ignorance leaves us collectively confused and hurting. We don’t just have ideas; ideas have us.

And that can be a good thing! There’s a way ideas can have us the way a loving parent or a community can have our backs.

But I think discernment is key here. Folk can fall in with “the wrong crowd” or get in abusive situations basically because they naïvely trusted the wrong people. They just didn’t know better.

I think we can — and very much want to — learn healthy discernment when it comes to memes. What I’ve come to call “memetic literacy”.

I don’t know if I’ll talk about that next. My writing evolves in ways that often surprise me. But I have it in mind to talk about quite soon.