Interior Dialogue

“Meme” is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” He used it to refer to those ideas that humans communicate and that can therefore become viral. The analogy he drew between the way some living things spread and thrive, and the way some ideas and concepts spread and thrive has become common place in recent years, for instance, in relation to articles or you-tube videos that “go viral.”

The original idea was picked up and taken further, among other people, by Susan Blackmore in her book “The Meme Machine.” In a more recent talk given at TED she contributed a new term: “temes,” i.e. physical objects, in particular technological objects that can also “go viral.” Instances of viral gadgets are the iPod or the internal combustion engine.

It would be interesting to try extending this view to all objects with which humans interact, especially the man-made ones. In this case one may see humans living in symbiosis with the various ideas, technologies and gadgets they make; the world economy would then correspond to the subset of the biosphere directly dependent on human activity.

Admittedly, many might at first feel uncomfortable with a conception of “living thing” so radically general as to include, in addition to humans, chickens and cows, microchips, oil refineries, books and every other object humans produce for their own use. They may object that this definition is so broad as to be useless.

I believe the analogy goes sufficiently deep to warrant further consideration, and that the relationship between humans and their houses, for instance, is very similar to the relationship between trees and the monkeys feeding on their fruit, particularly when the monkeys are totally dependent on the trees for their existence (in the same way that houses are totally dependent on humans for theirs). In both cases the relationship is one of symbiosis (a biological term). Living things replicate, and none is completely independent from the rest; some feed on other replicators directly, some depend on other replicators only indirectly. Many plants, for instance, depend indirectly on the fungi, and various microorganisms and worms without whom there would be no soil. In the same way, we need clothes and houses to survive, to replicate ourselves, while clothes and houses need us to replicate themselves.

There is no suitable term to describe this situation. “Reproduction” is already used in the life sciences and has a relatively precise, and narrow definition. The same is true for “symbiosis”. “Interdependence” is too broad. So I propose “reciproduction“. In my view, there is no fundamental distinction between the natural, the artificial and the memetic replicators. They all reciproduce, or reproduce interdependently.

The biosphere  includes natural replicators such as trees and cats, as well as artificial replicators such as clothes, cars and houses. However, the amount of energy and other resources is limited, so some replicators spread at the expense of others.

When memetic replicators disappear we call that a paradigm shift. When artificial replicators disappear, we call that an economic crisis. When they spread at the expense of “natural” replicators we call that an environmental disaster. When natural replicators disappear we call that an extinction. In general, when the equilibrium between natural and artificial replicators shifts, we call that an environmental disaster.

I am not saying that environmental disasters are in some sense “natural” and that we should therefore not worry about them. On the contrary. We should worry about them very much, because we humans, our memes, our food, clothes, and homes are all part of the same ecosystem, and if we keep upsetting the equilibrium, the next thing that goes extinct may be us.

From a more academic point of view, an interesting consequence of this view is that an economic crisis may be understood by analogy to waves of extinctions in biology, except it’s not species that disappear, but temes: goods, factories or even industries. This analogy may  open the way to a synergy between our understanding of evolutionary biology on one hand and economic theory on the other (largely, I suspect, to the benefit of the latter).

I believe that this is only one of the many benefits and insights that may be gained by adopting the unified “reciproductive” ontology described above.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2009.