This is Part 2 of a 3 part series on the Theory of Evolution and its implications Show notes: I spent the first 2 years at @columbia primarily focusing on the education of evolutionary theory. 🎓 📚 After having read enough books, research papers - having written a few myself, I bring to you a quick summation of the entire concept in a 3 video series.
_You can also watch this episode on Youtube
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As soon as language and art kicks in
the growth is exponential
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We find an exploration out of this world
because of memes
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Chimpanzees are still playing the 'Genes' game
Humans are playing the 'Memes' game on a massive level
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Capitalism, Democracy, et cetera
Intellectual property rights
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Alright
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We talked about the theory of evolution
But we left out a very very important piece
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And this important piece... A lot of people
a lot of people who talk about evolution, and the determinism of it
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In the way things play out, people overestimate the things that will
surely happen because of evolution
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Because they miss out this one
seminal piece
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And culture is referred to as a collection of memes
in biological theory
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Internet memes are popular nowadays
but their origination, they are with, what is called
Memes by Richard Dawkins
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Richard Dawkins is a very famous evolutionary biologist
who coined the term Memes
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What Memes are, are ideas, are structure in the outside
external ideas, that are so compatible with our genes...
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...that they ride on our genes
and survive
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It's almost as if, ideas have a life of their own
They stick on our genes because they are such good ideas
compatible with our genes
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...they keep surviving and propagating
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One example of this is...
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Our body is based around submission to authority
Our physiology has a hierarchal structure
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...where we listen to authorities, we need authority
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And the most interesting example of that is
God
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Now, the evolution of these memes is called...
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And Memetic evolution also works along the lines of
genetic evolution, it has a filter system
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If the meme helps you to survive
it will be propogated
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Or else whoever believes in the Meme, whoever
has that idea, whoever is carrying it on their genes
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...will not move forward,
it will lose
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So, if the gene loses
the meme lose
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So, the meme has to increase the
strength of the gene
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To put simply, Natural Selection
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Or, the meme should increase your
sexual desirability
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Humour, jokes, there was a trend of
guitars, in engineering colleges
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So, it had became a desirable meme
in a local population
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So the concept of these memes is
they ride on our genes and propagate themselves
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And even though ideas don't have a life of their own
if we take the literal interpretation
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Because some great philosophers make the case
that ideas are sentient in some sense
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But we'll take the base case
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But we'll imagine that they operate in an algorithmic fashion
in a dynamic, active fashion to preserve themselves
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And only humans have the privilege
of this memetic evolution
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Because all the fundamental units of culture
language, art, symbolism, all of that
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The culture is made up of symbolic association
and we won't go into symbolic association today
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Humans are the masters of it
this is a simple fact
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Alright? But these memes have a strong speciality
They can often, undo genes, and the behavior coded in them
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And we don't notice this influence, this control
when we theorize in evolutionary theory
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But it's a very strong component of culture
in guiding evolution
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For instance, if we go back 2 million years
whiles we are still apes
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So, whichever one is stronger, whichever on stumbled
upon a rock, whichever one got more resource, survived
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Whichever one had longer hands, escaped
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But if we go 200 or 300 years in the past,
when the British were going around colonizing other countries
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They had strength, they have a colonial strength
they have military strength, industrial strength
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It wasn't a contest of genes
it was a contest of memes
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Who has a gun and who has a sword
whose swordsmanship is better, whose fighting is better
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Whose military organization is better
will decide who wins and who loses
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So, on some level...
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So for instance, let's just say,
we like educated people, alright?
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Every father in the entire population
wants his daughter to marry an educated man
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And suppose there's enough supply of
educated men
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So those who are not educated
are selected out
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Out of those who are not educated,
maybe there are some people who are actually no very intelligent
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Now, we're automatically selecting for
smart people
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So the concept of arranged marriage
in some sense, if we're playing only on one index, education
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So, the society automatically starts
selecting for smart people
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And this is one of the explanations, why jews have
won so many Nobel prizes
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One of the fundamental explanations for that is
that they have a very simple instruction
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"Marry your daughter to the smarter one
instead of the rich one"
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But you know
that's a far out theory
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But, that is how memes, operate within
the genetic parameters
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Where, they create a strength
through the exchange of genes
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That propagate themselves further
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And in that sense, sometime memes become
more powerful than genes
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And, a lot of times, the memes that our genetic predisposition....
we talked about how genes are the operating system and it's default software
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...it's default appearance, it's default mode
Memes can superimpose on that
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So, suppose the concept of genes is that
you're on windows XP and you're desktop looks a certain way
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Meme is a new widget
which will rearrange your entire desktop and make it different
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There are memes that can do that
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And from here we can understand
that basically, basically, first of all...
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The difference between us and our closest cousin,
chimpanzee, is that of memes
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As soon as language and art kicks in
the growth becomes exponential
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We find an exploration in an entirely new world
because of memes
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Chimpanzees are still playing the 'Genes' game
Human are playing the 'Memes' game on a massive level
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You see what I mean?
We're playing on another abstract level
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This superset is called Memes
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So, the basic idea is, the entire difference between the
most intelligent animal, and human beings is that...
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That we can play with Memes, that we can
play with ideas, which other animals can't
Â
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...majority animals are still playing the genetic game
there's a little bit of meme complexity
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They have one or two styles, one or two trends
one or two cultures, not a lot
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We're playing on very complex levels
with memes, and that influences our evolution
massively
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And majority evolutionary theorists miss out
on giving the devil it's due
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And this debate, roughly, about which behavior
which population pattern, is genetically expressed, or
memetically expressed
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It's called the...
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This concept of memes, give a very different life
to a phenomenon we call...
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And we know it as...
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That people do things because of other people
I want to buy a car because my neighbour has a car
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I'm not invested in the car
I'm invested in the idea of the car
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How will I look in that car?
how will that meme, that concept of the car
, enhance my self concept
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So that's how memes supplement our genes
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And that's how we scan memes
in our environment
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Mercedes, spending millions on a wedding
destination wedding, a job at McKinsey
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Right? All of this is what? These are Memetic tools
to enhance my genetic experience
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So basically, genes operate on this level
Memes operate on top of that are sometimes become
stronger than them
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And after this, there's a very interesting phenomenon
which is not very popular, evolutionarily
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But it's implications are very intense
we call it...
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And we'll talk about Temes
in the next video
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