An article I wrote for Salon.com October 11

Ping!  The other day, I got a Facebook friend request in my inbox.  This is now a relatively rare occurrence – I’m long past the frenzy of those first few Facebook months when friend-finding was more satisfying and addictive than chocolate, and I’m done gorging myself on it all.  But, intrigued, I opened it up, to find that this was no ordinary future friend (from the past) – it was a man I’d met while making a film about a tribe from the Sepik Valley in Papua New Guinea. It was a man who was born and raised in a remote hunter-gatherer society, where, to this day, the women spend their time searching out wild sago palms in the swamps to pulp into flour for pancakes, and the men hunt monstrous saltwater crocodiles in tea-colored jungle rivers at night with nothing more than spears. My new Facebook friend no longer joins these hunts – he’s an elder and has managed to find some income in the embryonic Sepik tourist industry – but for many years he was a hunter-gatherer, and now he’s on Facebook!

Of course I accepted the request and was immediately gifted an entrance ticket to a remarkable corner of Facebook – a place where friends comment upon each other’s walls in Papua New Guinea’s wonderful lingua franca, Tok Pisin (a language that started life as a pidgin and is just about translatable if you say it out loud), tag each other in photos of their relatives’ scarification ceremonies (the most disturbing albums you’ll ever spy on Facebook), and post each other links of mining companies’ press announcements (so that they can challenge the frequent ambitions of multinationals to ruin their homeland).

I’ve long since ceased to view the cultures of the Sepik tribes with the romantic and naive preconceptions that we in the West routinely assign to hunter-gatherer societies. I know, from having lived with these people in their magnificent A-frame stilt houses, that Sepik tribes are as modern a group of people as any of us – people who, like you and me, must constantly interrogate and adapt the culture they have inherited so that it best suits the changing world about them.  But even I was astonished to discover that a community that only recently learned that arrows could fly better if they had feathers on their shafts was now into Facebook.

I’m not being flippant.  I was actually in the room when members of the “Insect Tribe” became the first people from the Sepik Valley to discover the “feathers on arrows” idea.  In fact, I was the one who inadvertently introduced them to it in the hall of a community center in Weston-Super-Mare, England.  I’d better explain.

The previous year, the television company I worked for had made the typical documentary where an adventurous Western presenter goes out to visit a tribe in a remote part of the world to see how they live.  While there, the crew had been approached by their hosts, the Insect Tribe, to see if it would be possible for the reverse journey to take place – for members of the tribe to go on an adventure to a remote part of the world to examine an equally strange culture – ours. “After all,” they had said, “your queen is our queen, our chief.  Why shouldn’t we come to visit her territory?”

The company I worked for didn’t have a good reason why they could not, so we pitched it as an idea and got it commissioned.  That’s when I was brought in.  Worried that their visit might pollute their culture with modern ideas, or perhaps make them terminally envious of a world beyond their reach, I talked to some experts on Papua New Guinean tribes, and at that point exposed myself for the blinkered bigot that I was.  “How dare you,” said one anthropologist, “to imagine, without question, that a Sepik tribesman would be envious of your culture.  That’s one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard.  These people are supremely proud of their own culture.  They have a much more rewarding lifestyle than the majority in the West.  Mark my word, they won’t want anything you can give them.”

And, essentially, she was right.  Six members of the tribe came to Britain.  With every whispered observation, they left us powerless to explain the madness of our own social norms, and when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy – envious of their joyously interdependent community, their clear understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their indisputable “goodness.”  Our world appeared an obscene and dysfunctional manifestation of human existence in comparison.

But the anthropologist was wrong about one thing; they did take something back: the idea of putting feathers on arrows.  In the second week of their visit, I took three of the tribe to watch an archery club shoot at targets in a local community center.  One of the archers was a fanatic and made his own arrows from willow, spruced with turkey feathers.  The tribesmen were fixated on the feathers.  “Why these feathers?” they asked.  “It makes them fly straight,” said the enthusiast.  And after a few practice shots, the tribesmen discovered that it certainly did.  Their eyes lit up.  Back home (presumably for thousands of years), they had been making arrows that were three times the size and weight of these feathered arrows, because without feathers an arrow needs to be weighty in order to fly true through the air.  Just adding feathers would mean that they could carry three times the number of arrows out on hunts, and shoot three times the number of feral pigs.  Of all the ideas in England, this was the one that could have an immediate and significant impact on their lives.

But since then, they seem to have taken up Facebook too.  Why, after rejecting all those wonderful English ideas, did Facebook cut through?  The answer must be that they are attracted to Facebook for the same reason that all of us are.  Our species is universally addicted to sharing information.  We will gobble up any technology that enables one human to communicate with another, be it a hollow-log-and-stick or social media – after all, it’s all more moreish than chocolate.  Now Facebook is here, we shouldn’t be surprised that hunter-gatherers will want to log in too.

But, what I am here to tell you is that it’s happening now.  We now live in a world in which a tribe that had not even heard of a feathered arrow until two years ago, can access every idea in the world.  For the first time in history, humanity is truly open-access.  Our entire species is “logged in.”  Should we mourn the passing of a phase in our history when bands of human minds still lived in isolation, or rejoice that we are finally all on the same page?  I’m not really sure, but I do know one thing – it’s time we updated our status.

About half of those who have appeared in court are under 18, and three quarters are under 25 – last week’s looting was a young man’s sport (although some women were also arrested).  From the pleas published in Britain’s hungry papers, it’s clear that most of the youth were swept up in the excitement, throwing their cares away and joining in on a mass law-break, indulging in a collective material gluttony.  “Why would you pass up free stuff?” said one.  “Everyone else was doing it,” said another.

Psychology textbooks give us numerous examples of experiments in which personal responsibility is sacrificed all too easily when the collective behaviour of the crowd takes over.  We are familiar with the defences of brutal prison guards and those who push buttons to electrocute actors who give wrong answers.  We are a social creature, and as such, prone to abandoning sense when the actions of those around us will us to.  But what was at the core of the violence in English cities last week?

Biologists studying social behaviour in animals have spent the last few decades attempting to decode the wildly complex and varied copycat actions of everything from ants to chimpanzees.  Broadly speaking they define three types of copying (pet names are my own):

1. Aping: where one individual consciously and meaningfully mimics the actions of another.
2. Parroting: where one individual mimics the actions of another.
3. Fishing: where one individual and another do the same behaviour in apparent synchrony.

The last one is not that clever.  I’ve called it “fishing” because even fish do it.  Incredible as it may sound, a fish can learn a behaviour from television.  Experiments show that a fish that has never eaten ants’ eggs will ignore them when dropped into its tank.  However, upon watching another fish eat ants’ eggs on a television program, it will gorge on ant’s eggs when they are next encountered.  In other words, fish can copy another fish.  Animal behaviourists tend to conclude that the fish is merely using a newly associated stimulus to trigger a behaviour that it would do ordinarily.  In Britain, this infectious habit-translation has also been seen in populations of blue tits - small garden birds that will readily copy each other’s “clever” trick of pecking the cream from the top of milk bottles.  (Britain is so cold, we leave our milk bottles on the doorstep).  The action of pecking is something the tits do anyway, it’s the stimulus – the bottle top – that’s novel.      

Parroting is a bit smarter.  It involves unthinkingly copying novel actions – behaviours that the animal would not do ordinarily – like saying “pieces of eight”.  However, aping is leagues above.  With aping, the mimicking individual is able to determine which of the actions that its model performs are meaningful, and which are not.  It copies only the meaningful actions, and ignores the others.  For example, when I was about four, my mum taught me how to tie shoelaces.  She must have been patient because four year-olds are pretty rubbish at learning psychomotor tasks.  But one thing I would have been good at is spotting which of her actions were meaningful.  If she looked at her watch during a demonstration, I would have known that looking at your wrist was not part of the essential action – I wouldn’t have copied that bit.  This takes a remarkable bit of cause-and-effect intelligence.  Very few animals have it.  Apes, of course, can partake in a little aping, but not even chimpanzees can stretch to tying shoelaces.

The transferral of ideas in this way is at the heart of every cultural thing that we do.  Our amazing and unequalled capacity for copying the ideas of others is our species’ USP.  But it can also get us into trouble.

Gary Slutkin is an epidemiologist who has changed his focus from studying the spread of contagious diseases to studying the spread of contagious behaviours.  He says that violent behaviours spread like a disease and for the same reasons.  Just as poor sanitation and overcrowding breed disease, mass unemployment and community alienation breed group violence.  He suggests that if we work to prevent such social environments from developing we will reduce the incidence of rioting.  But in order to respond to urgent problems, he proposes an immediate “course of shots” – sending members of the troubled communities trained in negotiation in to high tension situations to interrupt the spread of destructive behaviours – a sort of behavioural containment action.  Two weeks before the meltdown of London, his “CeaseFire” workers successfully defused a potentially violent situation following an almost identical grassroots protest at the shooting of a victim by police.

My question is this: was England’s copycat violence fishing, parroting or aping?  In other words how mindful was it?  Were last week’s looters conscious criminals, kids wrapped up in the moment, compelled to try something new or an unconscious crowd acting like a bunch of tits?  The unique capabilities of our species mean that, undoubtedly, all three were at play in any one situation.  I’m not excusing their actions.  I’m just pointing out that ideas act like organisms, disease-causing organisms in this case, and if you want to police their spread, you have to interrupt their transmission as Slutkin suggests.  Certainly the UK public are now busy punishing the hosts of these diseased ideas.  Yesterday, two men in their early twenties were sentenced to four years in prison for trying to arrange a copycat riot on Facebook.  In the event, their plans failed to materialise, but, it appears, we humans are so aware of our vulnerability to contagious ideas, that simply releasing a malignant strain on such an omnipotent vector is enough to turn a judge to judicial violence.  And his aggressive sentencing is now being copied by other judges up and down the land as the heated political environment fuels a damaged nation’s revenge. 

Burned out car on Clarence Road after the 08/08/11 riots.

The Idea of “Natural Selection” itself had a pretty rough ride to fruition (and of course it’s still evolving today).  In the early nineteenth century it was setting off on its own private journey within the mind of a young Charles Darwin.  It was not alone – his mind was already rich with other wild Ideas that had seeded themselves from the contemporary scientific and philosophical conversation.  There was the early position of the French naturalist Buffon, who in the late eighteenth century, argued that all the world’s four-legged animals had developed from just 38 originals.  There was the proposal of Buffon’s contemporary and sparring partner, Lord Monboddo, a Scottish lawyer, who, after studying the “origin and progress of languages” suggested that humans were once without language, and had evolved language skills in response to a changing, challenging environment.  There were the words of Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who asked in his Zoönomia (1796): “would it be too bold to imagine that, in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, …that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!”  There was the discovery of another Frenchman, Georges Cuvier, who, in the same year, established that the extinction of a species was possible by examining the bones of pre-existing elephants.  There were the claims of the infamous Lamarck, who in 1809 proposed his theory of use and disuse – the first imagined mechanism of evolution – and invented the phrase that so focused the young Darwin: “the transmutation of species.”  There was the influence of Robert Jameson from Edinburgh, who taught the teenage Charles Darwin a course in natural history that closed with lectures on the “Origin of the Species of Animals” and who first used the word “evolve” in the modern sense.  And there was the scandalous work of the anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , a book that, in 1844, fifteen years before Darwin would move to publish, propelled the talk of evolution with such heresies as “…how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence…? Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.”

The primitive ancestor of Darwin’s Idea came from this primeval soup of other Ideas and had to shuffle onwards through his busy brain, competing or falling into a symbiosis with each of these other Ideas, and navigating the greater environment beyond.  We can partially track its course through “Darwin Country” by scanning the messy jottings and scribbles that Charles, the host, penned in a series of “notebooks on transmutation”.  For example, ten months after disembarking the HMS Beagle, in “Notebook B”, p36, Darwin sketched the world’s first “evolutionary tree”.  There had been other stick diagrams drawn by earlier evolutionists, but not with this implication – that species derive from a common ancestor, and that no creator is involved in their inception.  Fourteen months after that Darwin recognised the presence of the Force in a short smudgy passage: “One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.”  The Idea was clearly still journeying!

Page after page, his notebook entries show slow progress.  Often the thoughts and part-notions behind his words are indiscernible – he rambles – but each shuffle must have made its contribution because in November 1838, the Idea had reached a point whereby Darwin could confess to his wife, Emma, that he no longer believed that Life needed God.  She wrote back in letters that she valued his honesty, but feared that his beliefs may now mean they would not be able to share the afterlife.  On November 27th 1838, Notebook E, p58 he wrote a list:

“Three principles, will account for all
(1) Grandchildren. like. grandfathers
(2) Tendency to small change… especially physical change
(3) Great fertility in proportion to support of parents.”

Number one is about inheritance.  Number two is about variation.  Number three is an allusion to a particular form of selection.  The Idea was almost at the Promised Land, but in this form – as muddled musings – it wouldn’t stand a chance in the broader environment outside Darwin’s head; so it remained inside, journeying/adapting for another twenty years, until it was ready.  In November 1859, it was finally formed in ink in the introduction of On the Origin of Species:

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected.  From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”

There are numerous ways in which one could word Darwin’s Idea, but remember: the words are just a front.  Behind the words is an Idea that shuffled through a difficult territory for over twenty years; beginning poorly-adapted, and primitive, but, en route, becoming finely-adapted, advanced.  It reached the Promised Land, in this case mass publication.  Presumably, had it journeyed through the landscape of other minds at that time, the outcome would have been different.  Over the same time period, Thomas Henry Huxley, the man who would later brand himself “Darwin’s bulldog” and defend this Idea in every significant debate, had a mind that completely barred the passage of any Idea on evolution.  Darwin’s Idea would have never found a route through Huxley Country.  Yet when he eventually experienced an advanced variant of Darwin’s Idea, he was compelled to exclaim: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”  Was Huxley stupid not to have thought of that?  Was Darwin a genius because he did?  Or was it the nature of the selective environments in each of their minds that pre-destined intellectual history?

Darwin's Tree of Life

Science’s bravado was, in part, fuelled by the development of a new type of machine – a machine that, had it existed in Descartes’ time, might have ruined the framework of his argument, because this machine was astonishingly clever and built not of heavy cogs and pistons, but microscopic electronics, just like the brain.  The computer – a machine built to compute, to solve problems.  And it had a special quality – it was, theoretically speaking, future-proof.  If you got the hardware right, you wouldn’t need to change it again: all you’d ever need was the latest software.  Of course, we now know that those first, mid-Twentieth century computers were far from future-proof – the size of a barn and barely able to remember their own names – but suddenly, with a machine like this in existence, it wasn’t so hard to imagine that we were simply very impressive, organic machines, and that Descartes’ “mind” had been a phantasm: he’d heard the wind rattling the windows and jumped to the conclusion that we were all haunted.

But Descartes’ dualism didn’t end there.  The scientists had forgotten something – many of their fellow scholars still believed in ghosts.  The thought that humanity might only be a matter of matter – of brain tissue – was too much to bear for the majority of social scientists and humanists.  They thought that they saw so much more.  The only option available to them was to declare that the experiments of Science can tell you only so much – that there is something else to believe in, something beyond the observable.  Belligerent and proud, they grabbed hold of Religion’s “mind” and sheltered it in their studies.  Their number included psychologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, cultural theorists and sociologists – in short, all the people that we collectively hire to investigate humanity.

So it is that Descartes’ dualism is alive and well, manifest in the way that we study humankind today.  The natural scientists, the brainiacs, maintain that humanity is just a machine, a matter of matter, and get on with their work with that in mind.  The social scientists and humanists, the mentalists, are convinced that something “extra” lies within, and continue their work on that basis.  The two bands don’t talk to each other much, and when they do it’s often not nice.  Natural scientists are labelled “reductionists” – people who consider complex systems as nothing more than the sum of their simple parts.  Social scientists and humanists are accused of being “antipositivists” – people who reject scientific explanation in favour of untested theory.  What neither side seem to appreciate is that, for the recipients of the abuse, these terms are often not insults but accurate depictions of their positions.  People differ on how they find truth, and that truth is likely to continue.

How do I find truth?

We forgot about the computer.  While everyone’s been arguing about whether our brain is like a computer or not, computers have changed.  Instead of standing mute in the corner of a room, beeping while they carry out inane routines, they’re all talking to each other down telephone lines, planning our days and entertaining us.  Across the net and via the web, every connected computer is swapping files and software with every other.  They keep themselves up to date with updates, whether they’re the latest, shiny offering from Apple or a rattling box of plastic made in some developing world sweathouse with a modem stuck in its rear.  They don’t have to have a huge memory, because the weird thing about the internet is that the information doesn’t appear to exist anywhere real.  It must be housed on hard-drives somewhere, but because everything is shared out, because the memories of the millions of individual computers are now inter-connected, it doesn’t exist anywhere, but everywhere, in a space that doesn’t relate to any volume in the physical world.  It’s a non-physical world – cyberspace.  There’s so much more to machines these days than cogs and pistons.  How would Descartes have been inspired by all this?

Here’s my stab at a modern Cartesian model:

•              machine = body – just as before;

•              computer (a very particular machine) = brain (a very particular part of the body) – every individual machine can operate alone, and has its own memory and operating system, and it’s own unique loading of files and software;

•              network protocol = channels of communication between these special machines, i.e. language, the stuff that connects all our brains together and let’s them swap “files”;

•              contents of the world wide web = culture – the files and software themselves, the information and applications that we all have access to;

•              cyberspace = the realm in which this cultural information resides.  There isn’t an agreed term for this place, in fact most people don’t even recognise it as a place at all.  A Russian geochemist called Vernadsky once called it the “noosphere”, the “world of human thought”, so let’s go with that.

Now we have network computers it doesn’t look like Descartes was so far out after all.  Now, we can see two worlds at play.  Not the worlds of “body” and “mind”, but the worlds of “biology” and “culture”.  Our physical selves, our bodies and brains (the machinery), are born of, and operate in the biosphere – the global sum of all biological Life.  All those aches and pains, those teenage spots, those inconvenient bodily functions, those wrinkles and liver spots – they’re all side-effects of our biological existence.  For every other creature on the planet (probably), biological existence is all there is.  But we humans have, quite accidentally, accessed another world, a world of our own – the place of cultural Life.  Mother Nature (who runs the biosphere) lost us to this place, the moment she made us smart enough to swap ideas, the moment she gave us the power to do culture.  When our distant ancestors, (way before cave-people), first dipped a toe in this place, it was vacant.  But the inheritable thoughts of those ape-humans seeded a new kind of Life in that non-physical other-sphere – cultural Life, where ideas were the life forms, subject to a new kind of evolution – cultural evolution.

This evolution did what evolution does, it built upon those simple beginnings to create, over time, an enormous tree of new Life, getting ever more complex and differentiated.  Now, tens of thousands of proto-human and actual-human memories later, this noosphere is vast, in fact comparable, we may immodestly suggest, to its parent biosphere.

Those songs that you can’t get out of your head, those childhood nightmares, those quiz answers that flirt with the tip of your tongue, those awkward remarks that you wished you’d never made – they’re all side-effects of your cultural existence – your engagement with this other world.  The solution to Descartes’ “mind” conundrum perhaps lies in appreciating this different kind of dualism within each of us.  Brains are biological.  Our minds are cultural – our avatars in the noosphere, existent, but only about as physical as a Google search.

EDSAC I, nearly complete, W. Renwick. Copyright Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Reproduced by permission.

In fact, what are ideas?  That’s the preoccupation of this blog.  Are ideas divine sparks of inspiration?  Are they the accidental by-products of our weird ape-based brains?  Are they neuronal fireworks displays that happen to find meaning in our lives?  Or are they more than all these things?

One idea that I’ve spent the last two years of my life researching is that ideas are very much like living organisms, alive in their own right.  This radical notion suggests that ideas are under pressure to survive (in our memories) and reproduce (between our minds); that they are subject to “adaptation” (gradual change) and “speciation” (splitting into two or more independent ideas when the “selective environment” dictates).  Ultimately, this idea is that this similarity between organisms and ideas can not only explain the way in which culture evolves but also the way in which we have evolved over the past few million years.  It’s a big idea.

It’s not my idea – it’s been around in one form or another for well over a century – I’m just reporting on it.  As an evolutionary biologist and ecologist I’m attracted to it.  I can see the sense in it.  It has lots of explanatory power.  And it’s fun.  In my opinion, “meme theory”, as its loose association of advocates call it, has enormous potential to help us understand the sort of creature we are, why we do what we do, and how we may improve our lot on this planet.

So, if it has such potential, why has this particular idea not entered mainstream conversations in all its long life?  Why is it still fringe?  Why do I need to introduce it at all?  Meme theory has historically suffered from a number of complaints.  Because, at its core, it relies on an analogy with gene theory, it’s too easily rejected as just an analogy, or in other words, a metaphor, with no serious theoretical intent.  Beyond this, its proposed analogue, gene theory, together with our modern, rather full and impressive understanding of biology, has often been used as a weapon with which to beat it.  Critics are happy to disable the substance of the analogy before it even gets going.  “You can’t split culture into blocks”, they say, as if no-one’s ever puzzled over splitting the characteristics of living things into locks.  “If memes exist,” they holler, “then show me one”, as if it wasn’t a century between Mendel’s proposal that genes existed and the moment Watson and Crick actually saw one on strands of DNA.

But, perhaps more confounding than all this direct criticism, is the fact that meme theory doesn’t have a natural home in the contemporary academic environment.  It isn’t wholly in the jurisdiction of biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, cultural studies or information science.  It falls into the gap between all of them.  No surprise then that the current cohort of memeticists is drawn from every one of these disciplines.  This situation means that there is a PR issue – it’s tough to promote any idea without a solid, unified foundation of support, especially an idea that threatens the solid, unified foundations of so many other well-supported ideas.  Indeed, meme theory would predict exactly that!  Ideas
must compete and adapt to best fit the existing selective environment.  Any species of idea that does not fit will find survival a genuine struggle and may ultimately go extinct – disappearing from our collective minds forever.

I for one don’t want that to happen.  For my part, I intend to use this blog to offer meme theory in all its incarnations a plot of fertile ground, a place to grow and thrive, to adapt perhaps, to speciate maybe, to evolve.  That’s the idea anyway.  Why don’t you check in from time to time to see how it’s doing?