The Selfish Gene is a book I reference and think about a lot. The main reason is summed up on page 192, where Dawkins describes a new kind of replicator, beyond the most fundamental one, the gene:
When I first read this, at the age of 24 (it was written the year I was born: 1979 in 1976) it got my heart racing. The comparison itself – between ‘genes’ and ‘memes‘ – didn’t do this alone. The exciting part is that many evolutionary theories can subsequently be considered in the context of ‘ideas’. This, to be frank, gives me the horn.
Frustratingly, I am trapped with the brain of a fairly normal bloke. But I continue my slow journey, exploring these ideas in the hope that something amazing pops out. More likely, is that someone else does the amazing bit and I will nod and agree that it is indeed awesome. Speaking of clever people, Russell’s post on ‘more ideas, less stuff’ got me thinking about all this again.
One such evolutionary process that I think about in terms of ideas is what Dawkins calls ‘bottle-necking’. Life starts as a single cell and through growth and evolution it becomes more complex. Then as that life-form prepares to die and create new life in its place, it does so by reducing its generational hand-me-downs to a single cell/seed again. This bottle-necking is what allows life to concentrate itself into ‘discrete organisms’.
This is basically ‘thingyness’.
Culturally speaking, we love things. We give ideas nice names to box them into… um.. discrete things. And to reduce their complexity into something that can, er.. “concentrate its efforts through the bottle neck and into the next generation.” Or something a bit similar.
Ideas are often born as ‘single cell organisms’: a quick blurt-out; a name; a basic thought. And then over time, through the creative process, production and social influence, that idea evolves, grows and becomes complex. It becomes an experience, or more likely, a series of inter-connecting experiences.
Then at the end, we bottle-neck it again. We turn it back into a ‘thing’ so we can talk about it and reference it for future ideas. This is exactly what I did with my old portfolio 13 words. We trade, socially, through bottle-necked ideas. And just as any person can be remembered in the best light through a beautiful obituary, so a ‘cultural unit’ can be bottle-necked into an exquisite ‘thing’ to be passed on and re-imagined.
I’m not writing this to conclude anything. I’m writing it to get it out of my head. All this is in a very messy state, far from either bottle-neck of its existence in my brain. Hopefully this will have helped me to move forward a little.
It is connected to some other stuff I’m thinking about that is also big and messy: that the digital age has accelerated our consumption of ‘memes’ to a point where we are closer, culturally, than ever before to an ultimate truth: that everything is in transition and that permanence is an human-induced illusion. More on that later.
