June 25, 2009

• The Viral Menace

  Life as we know it would be impossible without them. They are what separate us from the animals. They allow us to function as a unit despite our individual needs. They reproduce in our brain and are passed on to our children.
  
  Just by reading this essay, you may have picked up a few. and they are impossible to excise from the host animal.
  
  

  What the heck am I talking about?!?!?!?!
  

  
  

  Memes… they’re viral and they’re everywhere.
  
  A meme (according Wikipedia… itself a major vehicle of the great mnemonic migration that is the internet) is a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices from the Greek word mimema for “something imitated.” Memes are transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena (like blogging). Many consider memes an analogue to genes, self-replicating and responding to selective (environmental) pressures. Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976), applying evolutionary principles in the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.
  
  Like genes, memes evolve by natural selection through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual meme’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts. An example of a very profligate meme is religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian-Islamic branch, which has proven both beneficial and detrimental to their hosts and other competing memes. The Christian meme almost wiped out the Pagan meme, but it rallied and is now competing in an altered environment.
  
  Memes are viral. Like the first single celled organism which adapted by uniting with other single celled organisms, keeping the best qualities to pass on to their offspring, our memes pick up or pass over other memes all the time, adapting, changing, and synthesizing offspring which can sometimes, but not always be traced back to their origins. We can say the concepts which evolved into our ideas concerning modern law came from Hammurabi, but we know that before his tablets, there were laws which governed human behavior. His laws, by our standards are quite barbaric, but through the process of mnemonic evolution, our thoughts concerning justice have evolved.
  
  Though the existence of memes is only speculative, by studying the past, we begin to see a pattern of intellectual, cultural, and emotional evolution which has nothing to do with physical evolution. The human animal has not evolved in millennia, but our thought processes continue to change even on a day to day basis. We clothe ourselves in memes. We use them like fire to light our way in the darkness of our own ignorance. Without them, we would only be animals, scurrying around in the dark, three meals away from barbarism (Thank you Plato). Without memes, we would have no recourse but to descend into anarchy, unable and ill inclined to pass our a-ha moments on to the next generation. It is through memes we communicate, sharing the concepts that grip us like an unwashed hand (eeww, gross! lol Germs…). Memes spread and cannot be stopped, no matter how hard any regime tries to sterilize our thought processes. Ideas change, memes seek new outlets. Like society, they can stagnate and turn on their hosts. Look at the Inquisition and witch trials.
  
  Genes and memes both have a biological imperative to spread. It’s impossible for any human being not to interact and seek to share with others their experiences in life. We learn in childhood to keep some things private, but memes, like genes, seek expression. In terms of evolution, nothing exists without purpose. Even the appendix has been found to be part of the immune system. Memes serve a function, even if, like the appendix, it is not clearly understood yet what that function is.
  

  
  
  

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  June 25th
  

  
  

  The Feast of Aine, once part of the Midsummer rites, honors an Irish fire and cattle goddess. Trips to holy wells was another feature of this holy day. In a procession, torches were waved over the fields for fertility.
  
  
  

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  A law was introduced in Germany in 1233 discouraging the burning of heretics in favor of conversion.
  

  
  
  

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  • 8:37 am
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