Ideas that infect

Let's take a side trip, while on the subject of human thought. To begin, we must backtrack to skim a little biology.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, describes how our genetic heritage seems to have resulted from struggles by nearly invisible clusters of DNA against nature and each other. Nearly all of evolution could be regarded as a winnowing of those genes that failed to achieve the central goal of making copies of themselves. Of course, molecules do not contemplate goals. "Wanting" is a human emotion. Still, the effects of natural selection often do look eerily as if different genetic heritages have been striving against one another for niches in the ecosystem.

Put it this way: if, by fortuitous happenstance, a set of genes stumbles onto the right attributes, enabling it to create an organism that, in turn, lives to make and pass on more copies of the genes, then most of those copies will also share the original successful trait and have an improved chance of making copies of themselves. And so on. The process works as well for autonomous creatures, like you and me, as for a virus that invades a host organism and uses it as a tool for replication.

This is but a crude summary of insights Dawkins depicts so well (which led to my story in this volume, "The Giving Plague"). Here it is only a prelude to Dawkin's next step, when he discusses another type of bundle of information with similar traits-not genes, but "memes."

Memes are raw ideas. Pure concepts that, like conquering genetic codes, seem capable of thriving in and via host organisms, in this case human minds.

What would such a "living idea" be like? Well, for one thing it would survive by making its host think about it. In contemplating a concept you in effect keep it alive. For example, some time ago I read a notion-the very one we're discussing now-the notion of memes. You could say this idea was successful at "infecting" me, because I've continued thinking about it, giving it continued existence, or "life."

But a virus or bacterium that just sits inside its host doesn't accomplish much. An effective pseudo-organism must do more. It must reproduce.

How would a living idea proliferate?

By getting its host not only to think about it, but to make and spread copies… by telling other people! And now, if you've been paying attention, you'll realize that's just what I've been doing the last few minutes for one particular meme-the meme of memes! By telling you about it, I am doing the memic equivalent of coughing on you. Infecting you with the transmissible, self-replication notion of these infectious ideas. If it's a successful self-replicating notion, some of you will go out and tell others about it. And so on.

Of course life would be impossibly dull if we didn't share ideas, while constantly mutating and adapting them to our purposes. But let's imagine that some of these self-reproducing ideas pick up more attributes. What if one of them helped its host become prosperous, charismatic, or influential-to spread the meme more effectively. Or what if another meme caused its hosts, or host tribe, to keep other memes out. To expose their children only to old, familiar ideas. What a powerful trick that would be!

Does this sound like some bizarre science fiction scenario?

Or is it, rather, a pretty good model for what's been going on throughout most of human history? Examples abound. Take the dogmatic exclusion rule of most religions, which call competing idea systems "heresy."

One of the Iranian ayahtollahs once said of America-"We don't fear your bombs, we fear your pagan ideas." Why would he say such a thing? Dawkins' theory seems to offer as good an explanation as anything.