Everyone has heard of evolution right? Darwin and natural selection? What if I told you that there is a whole new branch of evolution that is being explored right now. No longer is biology, the life on our planet, evolving alone. A whole other system of evolution is occurring at the same time. Memetic evolution is what I am going to talk about today. I will hopefully give you an understanding of how the information that we pass from humans to humans, also known as memes, is evolving right alongside biological evolution.

So Darwin presented us with the theory of evolution. In that theory he showed that if any information has variation, selection, and a way to pass on that information to the next generation then it has to evolve. It has to. Darwin was before the knowledge of DNA and genetics, but what he was referring to was the biological information that has the variation, the environmental selection, and the ability to replicate. This is the first replicator that we have recognized. The next two are quite different.

Memes are information that is passed between humans. Our brains and bodies present the medium by which memes can reproduce themselves. They do so unbiased, following a course of evolution that is identical to what biology does. Survival of the fittest, the ones that replicate get to keep replicating. It is that simple. What causes the desire doesn’t matter it just occurs. At some point way back in human history, about 2.5 million years ago humans started to imitate each other. If Ug makes a fire and stays warm and I imitate him I will stay warm. The meme that transferred was making fire. It gave us a huge evolutionary advantage. We no longer were stuck on figuring out everything on our own we could learn from others. And the memetic evolution began.

We can see the progress of memetic evolution as new inventions came about to increase the rate of information transfer. Inventions were created to give memes the most replication possible. First our brains began to get bigger, than we started using languages, and tools to keep us alive longer, and to have more children. More children mean more meme replicators. The printing press and the internet both aid to the replication of memes. But all memes are equal and will replicate if possible. This shows the parasitic nature of memes. Memes that are not good for our biology still replicate regardless, because, that just it, memes don’t care. They just want to replicate

The third evolutionary replicator hasn’t been invented yet. This is the replicator for memes that doesn’t require the humans to be around anymore. The memetic evolution moves off of biology and onto better things, faster replicators, and easier ways of producing more and more memes. Artificial Intelligence will provide the host for memetic evolution in the future. What will happen in the course of memetic evolution when the life of the human host to carry them no longer matters? If the production of memes can be done more efficiently with say the use of all the oxygen on earth what would stop it from using the oxygen? The memes don’t care it is only a process of evolution, the same way ants don’t care where the sugar came from inside your kitchen, memes won’t care if to reproduce themselves requires our sun.

Don’t worry too much though. We are our thoughts and actions. You might say our consciousness is the memetic parasite on our human construct. Our ideas, and the basis for ‘ourselves’, will evolve right on out of the human body with memetic evolution. What it means to be alive is changing as we discover new ways of looking at the world. I hope it all ends well.

Richard Dawkins-original person to coin the term Meme, no work read.

Susan Blackmore, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/269, “Memes and Temes”