12.1. Evolution and Memes#

In order to understand what we are talking about when we say something goes “viral”, we need to first understand evolution and memes.

12.1.1. Evolution#

Biological evolution is how living things change, generation after generation, and how all the different forms of life, from humans to bacteria, came to be.

Evolution occurs when three conditions are present:

  • Replication (with Inheritance)

    • An organism can make a new copy of itself, which inherits its characteristics

  • Variations / Mutations

    • The characteristics of an organism are sometimes changed, in a way that can be inherited by future copies

  • Natural Selection

    • Some characteristics make it more or less likely for an organism to compete for resources, survive, and make copies of itself

When those three conditions are present, then over time successive generations of organisms will:

  • be more adapted to their environment

  • divide into different groups and diversify

  • stumble upon strategies for competing with or cooperating with other organisms.

12.1.2. Memes#

In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins1 said rather than looking at the evolution of organisms, it made even more sense to look at the evolution of the genes of those organisms (sections of DNA that perform some functions and are inherited). For example, if a bee protects its nest by stinging an attacking animal and dying, then it can’t reproduce and it might look like a failure of evolution. But if the gene that told the bee to die protecting the nest was shared by the other bees in the nest, then that one bee dying allows the gene to keep being replicated, so the gene is successful evolutionarily.

Since genes contained information about how organisms would grow and live, then biological evolution could be considered to be evolving information. Dawkins then took this idea of the evolution of information and applied it to culture, coining the term “meme” (intended to sound like “gene”).

A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next. In this view, any piece of human culture can be considered a meme that is spreading (or failing to spread) according to evolutionary forces. So we can use an evolutionary perspective to consider the spread of:

  • Technology (languages, weapons, medicine, writing, math, computers, etc.),

  • religions

  • philosophies

  • political ideas (democracy, authoritarianism, etc.)

  • art

  • organizations

  • etc.

We can even consider the evolutionary forces that play in the spread of true and false information (like an old saying: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”)

1

While we value Dawkin’s contribution to evolutionary theory, we don’t want to make this an endorsement of any of his later statements or views.