Mr. Moderate

By now most intelligent people understand that our genes uniquely describe at some level (high or otherwise) how to make one particular human being, namely ourselves. We may have an argument over how much of some particular feature of some particular person is caused by genes (nature) or environment (nurture), but the default answer needs to be “it is probably some of both.”

We don’t pass our genes from one person to another except when we manage to have children or participate in a transplant (where different genes between the donor and recipient can cause rejection syndromes of various types). But we are constantly passing memes between ourselves as this is part of the essence of human interaction.

Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” as a mental analog to the word “gene.” While it is extremely difficult and rare for me to pass my genes on to another human being, it is much easier (and far more common) for me to pass my memes on to other human beings. In fact, I am doing so right this instant by your reading of this blog posting. Memes are an infectious idea. Literally.

The easiest memes to study are jokes. After all, if you hear a good joke, you feel almost compelled to pass it on. And if you feel that the joke could be just a bit better if it were changed in some particular way, you will probably make that change before you try to pass the joke on to other people. In this way, memes mutate and replicate far more rapidly than do biological organisms. This is why the study of memes as analogs for genes makes such a fascinating topic. The rapid mutation makes them an ideal study vehicle as genes don’t tend to change much at all within the lifespan of an average human being.

So, if you have an idea for improving some particular meme, you will change the meme before you pass it on, and that will put a little bit of your own “fingerprint” on that particular meme. That is very similar to your leaving just a bit of your own DNA at the scene of some particular crime. A clever investigator can track the modification back to you and snag you for making the change.

And of course, blog writers hope to become prolific meme propagators. After all, if nobody reads your blog, is it really worth doing? Maybe, in the sense that a personal diary is worth doing. But I believe that most bloggers yearn to pass on their own peculiar memes through affecting the DNA of other memes along the way.

And the most prolific meme communicators are school teachers. In fact, it is virtually their job description that they are responsible for passing our cultural memes on to future generations. We tend to honor those teachers who do a good enough job at this to produce a truly exceptional student or group of students.

Of course, biological evolution works much the same way, except that we generally need to have offspring in order to pass on our personal DNA. This greatly limits our personal ability to pass our particular genes on to future generations. But in the long run, that could be a good thing, as just how many of each of us does the future want to deal with?