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MEMETICS; THE NASCENT SCIENCE OF IDEAS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION

J. Peter Vajk

An Essay Presented to the Outlook ClubBerkeley, California

January 19, 1989

In 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 years

he 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 trouble

picking 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

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_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 the

edges 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 of

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proteins 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 complicated

modern 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 passing

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uses minds to get itself copies into other minds; it is the basic unit ofreplication and selection in the ideosphere. The word meme is taken fromthe same Greek root as the word memory; a memory is a more-or-less organizedcollection of memes and other things. Memes float about in the soup of humanculture where they grow, replicate, mutate, compete, or become extinct.Dawkins writes:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagatethemselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via spermor eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leapingfrom brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can becalled imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea,he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in hisarticles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said topropagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

Dawkins then quotes the comments of a colleague, N. K. Humphrey, on adraft by Dawkins:

"...memes should be regarded as living structures, not justmetaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme inmy mind, you literally parasitize by brain, turning it into avehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virusmay parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn'tjust a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life afterdeath' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, asa structure in the nervous systems of individual (people) the worldover."

It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are notencoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. Thememe for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example,which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded andtransmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, orin algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of theseforms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizableelement of realism which appears only in art works executed by artistsinfected with this meme.

Jokes are an interesting group of memes. Because the recipient of a joke cancollect nearly as much reward each time he passes the joke on to yet anotherrecipient as he received when first hearing the joke, jokes are very fecundmemes, and very infective as well.

Given that memes are encoded in many different ways, it is not surprisingthat memes also occur in species other than Homo sapiens. Some species ofbirds learn a neighborhood repertoire of songs, rather than inheritingthem. Such birds, raised from hatchlings with other species, will sing onlyin the foreign throat. Humpback whales learn songs from one another, andchimpanzees pass on the art of fishing termites from their nests with longtwigs or reeds from generation to generation.

Of course, not all ideas are memes. A passing thought which you nevermention to anyone else, or an idea which no one else ever takes aninterest in, is not self-replicating. On the other hand, I firstencountered the meme about memes four or five years ago, and that memeis tonight attempting to infect each of you as well. In a science articlein ANALOG magazine appearing in August 1987, space activist Keith Hensonwrote:

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"The important part of the "meme about memes" is that memes aresubject to adaptive evolutionary forces very similar to hose thatselect for genes. That is, their variation is subject to selectionin the environment provided by human minds, communications channels,and the vast collection of cooperating and competing memes that makeup human culture. The analogy is remarkably close. For example,genes in cold viruses that cause sneezes by irritating noses spreadthemselves by this route to new hosts and become more common in thegene pool of a cold virus. Memes cause those they have successfullyinfected to spread the meme by both direct methods (proselytizing)and indirect methods (writing). Such memes become more common in thememe pool."

In the title of this essay, I referred to memetics as a science, albeit onein a very early and poorly developed stage. What does it take for a fieldof study to deserve the name "science?" Without getting too rigorous aboutthis question, two factors are of major importance here. First, does theputative "science" explain a diversity of phenomena by a small number of

underlying principles or laws or theories? In other words, a science is notmerely a vast catalog of facts or case histories, although most sciences,especially the natural sciences, have gone through a stage of amassing suchdata before any patterns emerged with sufficient clarity to permit theformulation of theories which would account for large portions of those data.Second, are these laws or theories testable? To be testable, a theory mustmake predictions about phenomena which have not previously been considered indevising the theory. If observations match the predictions, then the theorystands. If the observations differ from the predictions, then the theorymust be either modified until it fits both the old data and the new, ordiscarded.

The science of information theory, which has developed during the past halfcentury as an outgrowth of the needs of the telecommunications industries;the cryptographic needs of military services; and the burgeoning field ofartificial intelligence research, basically says that, regardless of thespecific content of information a message may have, and regardless of theparticular method of encoding that message, certain universal laws apply tothe copying and transmission of the information. If memetics has anysubstance, then, we should expect that phenomena observed among genes shouldhave analogs among memes. Let us consider briefly then a few of the thingswe understand in the biosphere and see if there are analogs in theideosphere. Consider first epidemiology, the study of the transmission ofpathogens, disease-causing microorganisms.

It is fairly easy to find phenomena in the propagation of memes in theideosphere analogous to the spread of pathogens. While some pathogens caninfect only by direct contact (such as most sexually transmitted diseases),others are usually transmitted by intermediaries, usually called "vectors."The Girl Scouts in my earlier example were infected with malaria transmittedby mosquitos which had previously bitten the Vietnam veteran while he as inthe throes of a malarial relapse.

Similarly, some religious memes are very difficult to transmit except by theforce of personal example at close quarters. Other memes, particularly thoseof a commercial nature, like "Things go better with Coke," are veryeffectively transmitted by the vectors of modern electronic media.

Occasionally, a pathogen may be successfully suppressed in most places, butsurvive in a few tiny pockets or reservoirs until the large environment isonce more susceptible to infection. Tuberculosis is one such disease;

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reservoirs of the bacillus can survive among the fringes of society or evenin tiny calcified spots within a particular person, who will show nosymptoms of the disease until his or her immunological resistance isweakened by malnutrition or another disease. Most of the intellectual andesthetic memes of classical Greece were "lost" for a millennium, survivingonly in tiny reservoirs in the monastic communities of Ireland until theRenaissance made it possible for these memes to again infect significantnumbers of people.

A correct understanding of some of the mechanisms involved can be veryimportant to survival of human genes. Thus, for example, human cultureshad little or no success in combatting epidemics of the plague, smallpox,or malaria, to name a few, while the dominant meme (which survived for overfive centuries in Western civilization) of the miasma theory of diseasesheld sway. With the advent of the germ theory (a meme which correspondsmore closely to reality), quarantine measures, innoculation and immunization,and suppression of vectors (like rates, mosquitos, or contaminated watersupplies) finally enabled human genes to compete more successfully againstthe genes of the germs.

A major problem in the United States today is drug abuse among teenagersand young adults. The growth curves for numbers of drug abusers have thesame shape as the curves for influenza epidemics or for AIDS, and effortsup to now in the war against drugs have been about as successful as werepublic health measures based on the miasma theory. The drug-abuse meme,since it is particularly prevalent among teenagers and young adults andsince it increases mortality among these individuals, reduces the survivaland reproduction of human genes. If we are to make headway in the war ondrugs, we must understand the characteristics of the drug-abuse meme;clearly identify its vectors; and find ways to immunize those populationsat risk of infection.

Later in this essay I will return to examining some of theseepidemiological analogies, including issues of susceptibility and resistanceto infection; possibilities of immunization against particularly nastymemes; and some of the strategies used by memes to increase their infectivity.Now, however, I would like to discuss the concept of competition among memes.

If memes are only ideas in our heads, and our minds can hold unbelievablylarge quantities of information, why would memes have to compete? Simplybecause the amount of time and attention a human can spend on efforts topropagate memes is limited. Most of the external channels used to spreadmemes are also limited resources, whether they be air time on radio ortelevision, shelf space in a book store or library, or column inches in amagazine or newspaper. Moreover, some memes by their very nature attemptto discredit other memes; still other groups of memes are self-reinforcing.Thus we should expect that most competitive strategies used by genes in thebiosphere will also be observed in use by memes as they compete in theideosphere.

How does a new gene initially become sufficiently common, even if it isstill in the minority among genes competing for a particular niche in thegene pool, to survive over many generations? If the gene is dominantover its immediate alternatives, then the traits of the survival machinewhich it encodes will promptly be subjected to selective pressures. If thenew gene has a competitive advantage, it will likely spread steadily throughits gene pool. If, on the other hand, it is a recessive gene, it can spreadeasily in the early stages, free of selective pressures until enough bodiescarry the gene that some offspring will inherit the recessive gene from bothparents, and the new genetic trait is actually expressed in the body of the

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offspring, becoming subject to selective pressures. If the new gene isharmful, selection will keep a ceiling on the fraction of the livingpopulation carrying that gene.

But a seriously harmful gene can become prevalent under certain specializedconditions, namely, if a small gene pool (that is, a small population ofsurvival machines carrying a group of genes) is isolated from most of thecompetitive forces which would hinder that gene's propagation through thegene pool. Then in a modest number of generations the new gene could becomeendemic. If this population carrying the deleterious gene is now broughtback into contact with the larger population from which it originallysplintered, the results can be disastrous.

Such as been the case several times in recent history with some extremereligious cults. Jim Jones' People's Temple cult was such a case. A basicmeme for Christianity mixed together with the meme for Marxism ricochetedaround among a small group of people who deliberately isolated themselves>from the general meme pool of American culture. Social and intellectualcontact with the outside was discouraged; other memes were attacked and

discredited by the leadership of the cult. Lacking competitive pressures>from more standard religious and cultural memes, the People's Temple memeevolved into ever more bizarre forms. Fleeing to Guyana, the cult becamestill more ingrown and bizarre, until renewed contact from outside led tothe collapse both of the meme itself and of the genes carried by 911members of the cult and by four outsiders, including Congressman Ryan ofSan Francisco. The Rajneesh cult is another more recent and somewhat lessextreme example of this pattern.

Lest I give you the impression that all memes are dangerous to thegenetic survival of humans and other gentlebeings, let me give a few quickexamples of benign and beneficial memes. Many commercial products aretangible embodiments of memes; most of these are benign, since the mostvirulent are quickly eliminated by regulatory agencies or civil lawsuits.Hula hoops, pet rocks, and frisbees were memes deliberately designed bytheir inventors to propagate rapidly. Like many genetically engineeredmicrobes (such as those used today to produce insulin and otherpharmaceutical products), these memes are reasonably successful in atailored environment, but do not have great longevity in the "wild." Petrocks were highly successful as long as they were highly advertised andpromoted, and as long as a large population which had not read the Owner'sInstruction Manual could be found. After that, the meme lost its vigor.Other benign to slightly harmful memes include rumors about media starts,superstitions, and chain letters.

Beneficial memes include the taming of fire; the ideas of cultivating foodplants and of herding animals; the notion of antisepis in medicine andsurgery; and writing and reading. One important meme in American culture(to which we shall return a little later) is the idea of tolerance. Duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States was a country ofimmigration. Immigrants came from every country in Europe as well as fromparts of Africa, Asia, and South America, all speaking different languages;observing different customs of dress, behavior, and diet; practicing differentreligions; and using different styles of non-verbal communication. Whileconflict was at times inevitable among these groups, in a surprisingly shorttime, it became apparent that the notion of live and let live required lessenergy and effort than did the competing meme of forced conversion. Not onlywas this approach more beneficial in terms of personal effort, but it provedto be economically productive as well, to accept and adopt individual memes>from the meme-complexes of other immigrant groups and combine them withelements of one's own ethnic meme-complex. By the end of the nineteenth

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century, tolerance was publicly recognized as an important civic virtue inAmerica.

To be sure, the meme of tolerance is still in competition with the memes ofracial supremacy and jingoism. But a number of memes active in the legalsystem strongly support the meme of tolerance and inhibit its competitors.(Note how paradoxical this is: the meme of tolerance accepts help fromcertain intolerant memes!)

Let me turn now to the category of memes or meme-complexes commonly knownas religious beliefs or creeds. No one knows how the meme of belief inGod originated; indeed, it probably arose independently many times. Whyshould such a meme arise and flourish in human meme pools? To answer thisquestion by saying that God revealed Himself to us in various times and waysdoes not really suffice. Even a believer can see that that is circularreasoning: the only out is to recognize that a leap of faith is required toaccept that God exists. That leap transcends pure reason, but it is notincompatible with reason. Just as it is possible and reasonable to acceptboth the meme of biological evolution and the meme of an initial act of

creation by a Creator who built the laws of mathematics and physics in sucha way as to make the appearance of life inevitable, so is it possible toaccept the idea that human brains and minds have evolved structures orprograms for belief in things unseen and unprovable.

In fact, some evidence that just such a structure exists in our brains comes>from split-brain research. Michael Gazzaniga describes one such experimentin his book The Social Brain. Because part of each eyeball's visual fieldis connected to the brain hemisphere on the same side as the eyeball, andpart is connected to the opposite hemisphere, it is possible to directvisual images exclusively to one or the other hemisphere of the brain. Somebrain lesions destroy the neurological connections between the twohemispheres, so the two halves of the brain act essentially independently.Since the speech center is located almost exclusively in the left hemisphere,such a patient can report verbally on activities in the left hemisphere, butnot in the right side. Gazzaniga presented each side of the brain in some ofhis patients with a simple conceptual problem. Special viewing equipmentprojected a picture of a claw to the left side and a snow scene to the rightside. A variety of cards were then placed in front of the subject who wasasked verbally (via the ears, which feed each hemisphere directly) to pointwith each hand at a card matching what he had seen. The correct response forthe claw was a picture of a chicken; for the snow scene, a shovel. Gazzanigawrites:

"After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjectsare required to point to the answers. A typical response is that ofP.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand and the shovelwith his left. After his response, I asked him, 'Paul, why didyou do that?' Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation saidfrom his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goeswith the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.'"

Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was pointingto the shovel when the only picture (the left half-brain) saw was a claw.The left half-brain is not privy to what the right half-brain saw because ofthe brain's disconnection. Yet the patient's body was doing something. Whywas the left hand pointing to the shovel? The left-brain's cognitive systemneeded a theory and instantly supplied one that made sense given theinformation it had on this particular task...

This mechanism in the brain, which appears to overlap the speech center, may

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be called an "inference engine:" given limited information, it leaps to somesort of initially plausible explanation for phenomena the brain must handle.Such a mechanism has obvious survival value if it can suggest that therustling in the bushes behind you might be a large predator.

On the other hand, as Gazzaniga's example shows, the inference engine willwring blood from a stone: you can count on it to manufacture causalrelations whether or not they exist. Nor does it seem to be able to tellwhen it doesn't have enough data. Given an increasingly complex world, theinference engine is more and more likely to generate stuff having the qualityof National Enquirer headlines. Memes originating in this way can be weededout by exercise of a fairly modern meme complex, the meme complex forming thefoundation of modern science, a healthy degree of skepticism. "What's theevidence?" this meme complex asks. Actually, we should call this a metameme,since it is a meme about memes.

Thus the human mind has a need for explanations or theories about itsperceived reality. Given the complexity of mind which has extensive anddetailed memory and vivid imagination, the ability to conceive of times past

and future as well as present, and to foresee the death of the self,explanations are called for. Given the existence of evil and death, theinference engine seeks meaning. Religious meme complexes (frequentlyincluding such memes as belief in God, belief in an after-life and animmortal soul, belief in rewards or punishments in the here-after) satisfythe need for explanations or theories about these cosmic issues, which maybe sufficient explanation for the prevalence and persistence of these memesin human culture.

Related meme complexes are those of political belief systems. To someextent, these overlap some or all of the meme-space occupied by religiousmeme complexes insofar as they, too, attempt to explain good and evilwithin human affairs and give meaning and purpose to activities in the humansphere. For people who have little power or influence, political theoriescan explain why they are so unfortunate.

Let me return now to some issues I mentioned in passing. Can we predictwhat sorts of brains will be more or less susceptible to infection by aparticular meme" Can we immunize people against infection by morepernicious memes? Can particular memes be modified to make them moreinfective? A few observations suggest some lines of inquiry andinvestigation. Although the gene itself was unknown until Gregor Mendel'sexperiments on sweet peas near the end of the last century, farmers andanimal breeders had a practical, intuitive grasp of genetics and evolutionby selection thousands of years ago. Similarly, advertising agencies andpolitical propagandists have been putting analogous concepts into practicefor a long time, despite lack of the meme metameme.

Infection by the memes of television advertising is more likely amonginexperienced, uneducated, or unsophisticated individuals. Children are morelikely to catch these infections than adults; highly educated individuals whohave previously been infected to some degree by the skepticism meme are muchmore resistant. A strongly developed sense of humor also appears to confer ahigh degree of resistance, perhaps because humor and skepticism are relatedby way of irony.

What about religious or political memes? Note first that most religiousmeme complexes are mutually exclusive: one cannot simultaneously adhere toGreek Orthodoxy and to polytheistic Hinduism, albeit hybridization betweenseveral seemingly incompatible religions is possible. (On the other hand,it is possible to subscribe to several of the Asian religions simultaneously:

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it is possible to be a Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianist at once, forexample.) Political meme complexes, as I mentioned before, seem to occupysimilar locations in our mental landscapes. Patty Hearst, who had beenexposed only superficially to either Christianity or to the American civicreligion, had a near-vacuum in that space. So we should not be surprisedthat intense personal exposure to the far-fringe political belief systemof the Symbionese Liberation Army successfully infected her with a ratherbizarre meme complex, one which had very little genetic survivability, sincemost of that group died in a firefight and conflagration in Los Angelesabout a year after she was initially kidnapped.

During the Korean War, American prisoners of war in North Korean prisoncamps were subjected to intense brainwashing procedures. Many prisonerscracked; others did not. The only consistent difference between thosewho did and those who did not succumb was the degree to which they had beeninfected with the traditional religious beliefs and/or traditional Americanvalues, i.e., belief in the American civic religion. An important exceptionwas POW's who were "True Believers" in Eric Hoffer's sense. Most of thePOW's who actually defected to North Korea had such a personality. It is

interesting to note, however, that the True Believer personality usually hasa poorly developed sense of humor.

In the present century, two major meme complexes in the political sphereare in active competition. Make no mistake: the conflict between the Westand the Sino-Soviet bloc is not over physical resources such as landor petroleum; neither is it about weapons systems or trade items. It is abattle between competing memes for survival and replication in the minds ofhuman beings. At the cores of the respective meme complexed lie Westerndemocracy and Marxist-Leninism, respectively, and it is these memes which Iwish to discuss now.

The Marxist-Leninist meme complex has to date been highly successful whenviewed from the perspective of memetics rather than economics, I have alreadyreferred to the role of Lenin and a handful of his companions who arrived atthe Finland Station in St. Petersburg in April 1917 and successfully capturedcontrol of the government within eight months. It is worth looking at someof the competitive strategies the Marxist-Leninist meme (MLM for short) hasused to achieve this success.

Many of these techniques are directly analogous to techniques in thebiosphere. Like the common cold virus and the AIDS virus, the MLM frequentlychanges its outer appearance to prevent immunological systems from immediatelyrecognizing it and combatting it. Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, forexample, pretended to be patriotic liberators; once in power, they shed theirsheep's clothing to pursue the original purposes of the MLM. Like thepenicillin bacterium, the MLM emits toxins that impede the replication ofcompeting memes: secret police or Red Guards harass, imprison, or killcarriers of competing memes: secret police or Red Guards harass, imprison,or kill carriers of competing memes. Like the AIDS virus, the MLM improvesits chances of success by weakening the immunological systems of its targetsby an extensive disinformation and propaganda machine. (In the Winter 1989issue of GLOBAL AFFAIRS, John Lenczowski, _The Soviet Union and the UnitedStates: Myths, Realities, Maxims_ makes a strong case that the current eraof glasnost and perestroika is one more cycle of deliberate strategicdeception.)

Like retroviruses which coopt the genes of their hosts to make copies ofthe retroviruses themselves instead of whatever proteins those genes wereintended to manufacture, the MLM seizes control of the machinery fortransmission and replication of memes: radio, television, and the press are

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totally coopted, and other channels (such as mimeograph machines andtelephones) are restricted or closely monitored. Lenin was so successful insuch a short time because the German Foreign Ministry secretly funded hispropaganda campaign to the tune of some 50 million gold marks or more,equivalent to a few hundred million dollars today. (See Michael Pearson,

_The Sealed Train: Lenin's Eight-Month Journey from Exile to Power_,New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1975.)

In order to lodge itself more firmly in the mental space occupied byreligious meme complexes, not only does the MLM actively suppress standardreligions, but it takes on some of the trappings of such religions, endowingthe Party leaders with godlike attributes and offering a Marxist-Leninistvision of the future colored by a Heaven-like mystical aura.

Let me turn now to the meme complex of the West. Democratic institutions,some variation of capitalism, and significant personal liberty are thetraditional values attributed to the West, but one other piece of the complexis especially important in this discussion, namely, the meme of tolerance.

The meme of tolerance evolved in America under conditions of partialisolation: relatively small doses of outside memes kept coming in, andcould be absorbed and assimilated into a larger, fairly stable, meme pool.But the American meme pool was not being tested overseas against other largeand fairly stable meme pools. Thus the tolerance meme was not exposed tocompetitive pressures in the global ideosphere until the middle of thiscentury; it is not clear whether or not it is a "dominant" or a "recessive"meme; and it is not clear what its effect on the competitive survivability ofthe meme complex of American culture will be in this larger arena.

Note that in its nineteenth century form, the meme of tolerance did notassert that all meme complexes were created equal. To allow other memes tocompete freely in the American ideosphere was all the tolerance meme stoodfor; it did not in any way inhibit the meme that the American politicalsystem was preferable to any other. In recent decades, a mutated version ofthe tolerance meme seems to have become more prevalent in the United States.In this form, the meme asserts that cultural and political meme complexes areof equal worth; in particular, the Soviet MLM complex and the Westerndemocracy meme complex are held to be "morally equivalent." Judged by thevalues of the American cultural meme complex, however, a meme complex suchas the MLM in which intolerance is inextricably embedded is clearly NOT ofequal worth.

It would seem at the very least that the mutated version of the Americantolerance meme weakens the immunological capacity of American culture toresist the MLM. It is even possible that the political-cultural memecomplex of the Western democracies contains the seeds of its own destruction,not in the sense in which Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted, but in the senseof memetics.

Can anything be done to immunize our populations against infection by theMLM? Simple anti-Communist hysteria is inadequate and, given the tolerancememe (either in its conventional or mutated forms), is even counterproductive.Greater education in the metameme of skepticism would certainly help. Renewedemphasis in the schools on the benefits of traditional American values wouldbe expected to help, as would cultivation of adherence to traditional,mainline religions. (How the latter can be achieved with the framework ofthe American cultural system is difficult to see.)

The outcome of this competition between the meme complexes of the East andthe West is of vital concern for the next few generations of the survival

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