Destroying the Fourth Dimension

The human species is unique in having the ability to store knowledge than any one brain can contain, and the ability to pass this knowledge on from one generation to the next, especially in the form of writing. This is one of our greatest evolutionary adaptations. It allows a fourth dimension of adaptation: time.

When religious extremists, of whatever variety, wish to brainwash people into following them, one of the things they sometimes do is to attempt to erase the knowledge of the past. Their message is clear: God’s work begins right now, with them, and whatever has gone before is irrelevant. The extremists present themselves as the sole and unprecedented source of God’s words and will.

This is nothing new. According to Edward Gibbon, Christian zealots destroyed the Library of Alexandria, the last and greatest collection of ancient writings. During the Reformation, Catholics destroyed Protestant books, Protestants destroyed Catholic books, and everybody destroyed Jewish books, along with the persons who read them. Nazis burned Jewish books. But we sometimes think that, in modern times, we no longer do this. But do you remember when, in 2009, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC, planned to burn Bibles? They failed to get the necessary fire permit so they just tore them up instead. They wanted to destroy all versions of the Bible except the King James Version.

Just this past week, religious extremists struck again at the fourth dimension. Before fleeing Timbuktu, in Mali, Islamist militants set fire to as many as twenty thousand ancient manuscripts. The manuscripts were Muslim books and writings, but the militants were passionately convinced that nobody before them really knew what Allah wanted people to believe. They tried to erase the past and make people think that they have the one true interpretation of Islam, and that everyone who went before them is irrelevant. They claim to venerate Mohammed, but to them Mohammed is just a stick figure that they use to justify their own blasphemy.

Perhaps the main reason that no group of zealots has ever been able to wipe out all of the knowledge that preceded them is that this knowledge was widely distributed. Especially after the invention of the printing press, lots of copies of books were spread everywhere, and no one could track all of them down. I wonder if this might be changing. If all of our books are eventually released only online; and if the books themselves are not sold, but only the temporary right to read them; is it not possible that a centralized, religiously-crazy government could use the internet to destroy all copies of a book that they oppose? This sounds like a weird story for a dystopian future, but it may be closer to reality than we like to think. I have no doubt that, if they had this ability, the Islamist extremists in Mali would have destroyed all writings except their own interpretation of the Koran.

One of our main evolutionary adaptations is the distributed network of brains and books—interconnected, but independent.

Natural Selection of Economic Models

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2011 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority. The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. He says that it is the next stage of human evolution. When I first read this, I assumed that he simply did not know what evolution was. But after I had read more of his book, I could see that he may be right. He did not mean biological evolution. He meant cultural evolution—some memes are propagated more than others. I have written about this process in books. But after reading Gilding’s book, I found a new example of cultural evolution: the economy.

The economy consists of many memes, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive memes that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic memes: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of memes; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic memes, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the sustainability memes, which already constitute a significant minority of the memetic variation in our population. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. Like a bunch of walnut trees suppressing other plant species by poisoning the forest with juglones (a process known as allelopathy), these CEOs are suppressing the sustainability memes. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge, by the process of cultural evolution.

On this last day of the year, we sigh in relief that we have not yet fallen into disaster. We look forward to a new year in which, if we are lucky, the memes of sustainability will have a chance to make progress, and in which the collapse will not yet occur. If we are lucky.

Almost Everything Evolves

The following appears in my book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books. I also just finished lecturing about this subject in my evolution class this morning.

The process of natural selection involves these elements: variation; reproduction; limitation. We usually think of genes in this context: natural selection favors the best genes, which must cooperate with other genes to create the best organisms, within populations. But there is nothing about the process of natural selection that requires that the evolvers be organisms. As it turns out, almost everything evolves.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out that it is not just genes, but any kind of information, that evolve. Dawkins called non-genetic pieces of information memes, a counterpart to genes. The result is cultural evolution, the counterpart to biological evolution. Cultural evolution turns out to strongly affect biological evolution, because for most complex animals, the most important part of the environment is the culture of its species.

All that is necessary for something to evolve, according to Dawkins, is a faithful but imperfect copying mechanism for instructions, and a system that is ready to obey those instructions. DNA and the cell fulfill these requirements. So do computer programs and computers. And so do memes and the human mind.

A meme can be as simple as an idea. Somebody thinks of an idea, which is a mutant form of some earlier idea that somebody else had. This is the variation step. In the population of human minds, this new idea contributes to the memetic variation of ideas that is available in the culture. The person then tells the idea to another person, or publishes it or sends it. This is the reproduction step. The human mind has a limited capacity for recalling and using ideas. This is the limitation step. The result is that the most successful ideas get propagated in the culture. The less successful ideas remain rare, the arcane knowledge of a few people, or become extinct. The most successful ideas are not necessarily the best ideas, but just the ones that people like the most. For every good and true idea, there are probably a dozen bad and stupid ideas that rattle around in people’s brains. Many of us try to eradicate the bad ideas from our minds, but with only partial success.

Usually, memes are parts of complex sets. As a result, memetic selection not only favors the memes that are most useful to the animals that think or learn them, but work best as part of a memetic set. Human languages are sets of memes. All humans have an innate capacity for language, but they always learn their particular languages from other humans. The result is that languages evolve.

Evolution is like a branching tree. The branches become separate species when the animals no longer recognize one another as potential mates. Languages have the same pattern. The main Indo-European branch of evolution split into smaller branches, one of which was Latin, which then evolved into smaller branches such as Iberian and French, which evolved into twigs such as when Iberian evolved into Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Mutations accumulate in languages, and memetic selection preserves the variations that are most useful or most appealing to the speakers. After awhile, so much divergence has occurred that the speakers may be mutually unintelligible, as when a speaker of Spanish tries to understand French, or when a Parisian pretends he cannot understand a Frenchman from Dijon. An awareness of the branching evolutionary pattern of languages grew during the nineteenth century at the same time as the awareness of biological evolution. A successful word-meme is one that functions best as part of a language, not necessarily by itself.