MEMETICS;  THE NASCENT SCIENCE OF IDEAS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION                      J. Peter Vajk           An Essay Presented to the Outlook Club                   Berkeley, California                     January 19, 1989In April 1917, a 47-year old lawyer-turned-journalist and a handful ofcompanions enter Russia by train.  By November, they take control ofthe government of Russia.  Within another four years, a devastatingcivil war kills some 10 million Russians.In 1924, a 34-year old handyman and would-be artist and architect isarrested for starting a brawl in a tavern in southern Germany.  Injail over the next nine months, he writes a book expressing hisdissatisfactions with life and the world in which he lives, and laysout a blueprint of what he plans to do to change it.  Within nine yearshe has total and sole control of the entire national government.  Overthe ensuing thirteen years, his exercise of that power leads to thedeaths of some thirty million people across two continents and threeseas.In the early 1970's, two young men, both of them Vietnam War veterans,go camping in the Sierra Nevada in California, about a mile from a GirlScout campground.  The second afternoon of their stay, one of the menbreaks out in chills, sweats, and violent shivering, like he hadexperienced a few times in Vietnam.  About a week later, in theSan Francisco Bay area, six Girl Scouts become ill, with high fevers,severe headaches, and violent shivering.In the mid-1970's, a charismatic minister attracts a large followingamong the poor and disaffected population of a Northern California urbancenter.  After their activities draw increasing attention from the press,the minister and nearly a thousand of his adherent move en masse to anobscure village in the jungles of a small South American country.  ByNovember 1978, he and 910 others, including children, lie dead in thejungle, having drunk KoolAid which they knew was laced with cyanide.In the late 1970's, a handsome young French Canadian steward working forAir Canada begins to make regular visits (using his free airline passes)to New York's Greenwich Village, Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, and SanFrancisco's Castro, Polk, and Mission Street areas.  He has no troublepicking up dates with dozens of gay men over a period of two or threeyears.  By 1980, over a hundred men from coast to coast are dead of dying>from a strange form of cancer or from a rare form of pneumonia.In the fall, of 1988, a graduate student loads a short program into a fewmainframe computers.  Within two days, dozens of mainframe computers allacross North America and Great Britain come to a halt: each computer isrepetitively doing nonsense copying of files, leaving no time at all forproductive computing.  It takes as much as a week to get some of thecomputer centers back to normal activity.These six episodes, from the disparate fields of politics, human disease,religion, and computer technology, have a great deal in common.  It is myaim tonight to explore memetics, a science in the early stages of birth."Meme" (pronounced to rhyme with "cream") is a neologism, coined byanalogy to "gene," by the writer-zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book_The Selfish Gene_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).  By the endof this essay, the deep similarities (as well as some of the vitaldifferences) among these six episodes will, I hope, become clear.  I willalso engage in some speculation about the implications of this nascentscience for current affairs.The roots of the idea of memetics as a science lie in the study ofbiological evolution, in genetics, in modern information theory, inartificial intelligence research, in epidemiology, and in studies ofpatients with split brains.  To set the stage for my discussion of memetics,let me briefly recapitulate the modern understanding of biological evolutionand the role genes play in evolution.We now know that life originated on Earth about four billion years ago.The earliest things we might consider to be on the threshhold of livingbeings were in all probability complex organic molecules capable ofreplication, that is, able to make identical copies of themselves fromless complex molecules in their environment.  Complex molecules of thissort, given a few hundred million years, could arise by chance at theedges of the young oceans out of the primordial broth of substances likewater, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, which wereall abundant in the original atmosphere of the Earth.  This broth wasstimulated by ultraviolet light from the Sun (more intense since the Earthhad as yet no ozone layer); by lightning and tidal action (both of whichwere more intense because the Moon was considerably closer and the day wasshorter); and volcanism (also more intense since the Earth's crust was newlyformed and thinner).  Such stimuli, acting for a period of just a few weekson such a primordial broth, have been demonstrated in laboratory experimentsto produce molecules of intermediate complexity such as amino acids fromwhich all proteins are made.  These amino acids, in turn, give rise in thesame laboratory experiments within a few months to nucleic acids, from whichthe DNA in all living viruses, plants, and animals on Earth are made.Once even one self-replicating molecule had come together, evolution towarddiversity and greater complexity was inevitable.  Once in a while, a copyingmistake would happen; if the new copy could still make copies of itself, anew "species" would have emerged.  Soon (speaking in geological time scales)there would be a number of species of self-replicating molecules competing forthe shrinking supply of raw materials in the broth at the edge of the sea.The populations of these different species would depend to a large extenton three characteristics of the molecules: longevity, fecundity, andcopying-fidelity.If a particular type of molecule were only moderately stable againstdisruption by ultraviolet light or by the acidity of the broth, forexample, it would not have much time available to make copies of itself.On the other hand, even a short-lived molecule could come to outnumber avery stable molecule if it can make new copies of itself very quickly.  Amolecule which is not very selective about which bits of raw materials ituses for a particular part of a copy may have numerous offspring, but theywill be of different species, so that the numbers of molecules which do nothave high fidelity replication will not grow; the species may, in fact,become extinct fairly rapidly.As the numbers of self-replicating molecules increased, their food supplydeclined, since the food was increasingly embodied in the replicatorsthemselves.  Any molecule which accidentally had the capability ofbreaking other species of molecules apart would then have access to moreraw materials, and predation appeared on the scene.  In turn, moleculesresistant to being eaten in this way (perhaps by carrying around a coat ofproteins like modern viruses) would then increase in numbers relative tothose which molecules which could be eaten easily.  At some unknown stagein this process, the class of self-replicating molecules we know as DNA,appeared on the scene.  We do not know whether or not DNA was the originalreplicating molecule, or whether it evolved from some earlier class ofmolecules.  In any case, it has been highly successful, since no otherclass of self-replicating molecules survives on Earth today.At some later point in time, by processes which are still unknown, simplesingle-celled organisms which we would clearly recognize as "living" arose.These early creatures were still dependent on physical processes (lightning,ultraviolet light, etc.) for the production of foodstuffs, on predation, oron scavenging.  Finally, about two billion years ago, a new molecule was"invented" which changed the whole picture.  That molecule was chlorophyll,which enabled its inventors, the blue-green algae, to make complex foodstuffs(sugars and starches) directly and rapidly from two of the simplest and mostabundant molecules in the environment, namely, water and carbon dioxide, witha little help from the sunlight.  This made it possible for several differenttypes of simple primitive cells to fuse together into the more complicatedmodern cell in a mutually helpful, symbiotic relationship.  The more complexcell could now form multi-cellular entities, and higher plants and animalsappeared on the scene, creating the sort or biosphere we know today.But underneath it all, the self-replicating DNA molecule, the gene, is thevery essence of life.  Trees, dogs, mosquitos, robins, earthworms, and humanbeings are from a certain perspective nothing more than huge, elaborate robotswhose only function is to enhance the ability of the minute genes inside toreplicate themselves.  In other words, a chicken is merely an egg's way ofmaking more eggs.While individual chickens or salmon or human beings have fairly shortlifespans, a particular gene, that is, a particular pattern of amino acidsin a DNA chain, may survive through many generations.  Ignoring some of thefiner points of the way in which chromosomes are scrambled during theformation of sperm cells and egg cells in sexual reproduction, a given genemay actually survive for millions of years, although the survival machine,the body it wears, is replaced frequently.Any particular body reflects the particular collection of genes it carries;natural selection operates, not on species or on particular populations, buton individual genes.  As environments change, the survival probabilities fora particular gene may be enhanced by tagging along with a different collectionof genes.  Thus it is not surprising that the gene for Rh factor in humanblood is virtually identical to that in chimpanzees, and just a little bitdifferent in rhesus monkeys in which the expression of the gene was firstdiscovered.  Each gene, like its distant ancestors, the primitive self-replicating molecules of four billion years ago, is "selfish:"  the survivalof that gene depends on making its survival machine (its body) act or grow ina way that increases the changes that more copies of that gene (rather thansome other competing gene in the gene pool) will be made in new survivalmachines.Let us turn now to human beings.  It has been observed frequently thatcultural evolution has, by and large, become more important for humans thanbiological evolution.  It is, in any case, far faster:  a new cultural ideaor mutation can spread through all the individuals in the same generationwhich invented the new idea.  A genetic mutation, on the other hand, canonly begin to spread when the next generation is born, and it will take manygenerations before the mutation has any chance of being expressed in asignificant fraction of the population.  It is thus of much more than passinginterest to consider how ideas are transmitted; whether and how they compete;and what effects they have on the survival machines, originally built to helpgenes propagate, which house the minds in which ideas are born and live.An early hint at some of these issues is in an article by neuro-physiologistRoger W. Sperry titled _Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values_ (In John R. Platt,ed., New Views on the Nature of Man.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1965.)  Sperry writes,	Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas.  They interact with each	other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring	brains, and, thanks to global communications, in far distant, foreign	brains.  And they also interact with the external surroundings to