Mems And Their Relation To Human-Level-Intelligence And Evolution
What are “Memes”? Do they really exist? What’s the relation between memes and human-level-intelligence? Are they part of the human evolution? These are the capital inspirational interrogations that made me think while reading one mind-blowing book. To answer these questions, I started to find counter and supporting convincing arguments for the outcomes related to these queries. To start with and in my humble opinion, memes deem to be ideas, styles or even behaviours that hop from mind to mind, from person to person through generations and within a culture making copies of themselves as they go. In a way, they are similar to DNA in its spread through genetic. In other words, they are things we learn, imagine and share with others through speech, writing and gestures. According to Dennett “Memes are a kind of way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned, denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.” However, some critics claim that the mechanism in which memes are copied is unknown.
On the contrary, others assert that it could be feasible namely through inference and observation. In talking about memes, I remember social networks’ memes, that one can encounter while scrolling through Facebook posts or any social networking sites. Generally, they are inspiring, humorous and entertaining delivered through videos, images or even text and they usually spread rapidly through online communities. Now, let us switch the discussion to the tie between memes and human intelligence. In this context, Dennett shed light on memes’ role in making human brains more intelligent than any other living thing on earth. Even though he cited some arguments in his book against memes, the author is a strong believer in this theory and consider that human consciousness and mind can be attributed to memes. In my opinion, the human brain is good at acquiring ideas or information, store, process and thus retransmit them such they affect our biology in different ways. One can learn from others’ mistakes, observe another individual success and therefore draw conclusions, improve their selves and build on it. More precisely, Dennett affirms that meme structure is likely to be different in any two brains. This some-how reminds me of the quote “know better. Do better”. A meme is considered viable and good if it contains a certain element of truth. Memes are inventions and other more, which are widely spread and who are taken over by others as an example to imitate. Just like a hit as it suits to the listeners, it becomes widely popular, and thus, experiences an enormous success. A concrete example in this context would be the recent boom of the Blockchain technology, and particularly, cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin was the first mover in the market, and since then, it has been performing very well. Its success since its launch in 2009 has triggered the emergence of alternative cryptocurrencies and people started copying the idea. New coins are in this context trying to present themselves as improved versions of bitcoins. Hence, this latter is no longer the market dominator as it once was. Now, there are over one thousand and a half coins out there and the number is increasing every day. On the down side, there are some destructive memes that could potentially harm human. This inspires me all the misconceptions around smoking cigarettes or even drinking alcohol. Added to that, we have seen during the last years the massive involvement of thousands of extremists in Jihadism. These hijack religion or for instance use dishonest interpretations of Quran verses to spread fallacy and justify their crimes for what called “fight the enemies of Islam”. To sum up, the whole point of memes is assumed to be information being replicated in an evolutionary process. Given that, memes are still not yet a real science, soon, scientists will presumably seal the gap between psychology and neuroscience.
