Prakhar Ke Pravachan

Evolution of Memes | Evolution Theory part 2

Episode Notes

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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Episode Transcription

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,230

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

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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

100

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But it's implications are very intense

we call it...

101

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And we'll talk about Temes

in the next video