We’re all familiar with genes and we’re becoming more and more aware of memes, even though this second topic is still the subject of some debate. Now, people are suggesting that a third form of replicator is appearing and that it needs a name and a more proper definition. This entry contains my attempt to describe and to name it.
New Scientist recently published an article named “Genes, Memes, and now what?” about this third replicator. It ends with a comment-based discussion where people can suggest what to name this third replicator. Before we get to that part of the discussion, let’s look at the background.
Genes are the first replicators that we know of. Through sexual reproduction, genes combine and recombine in a nearly endless variation to produce the species that we know of and all of the individual expressions within that specie. It sets the ground for a nearly limitless amount of other species that could exist but simply do not at the moment.
Memes are the second replicator, and can be considered to be “cultural genes”. Like their relative, the gene, memes combine and spread from person to person. However, they do this without having to go through sexual reproduction but rather piggyback on information, language and behavior. Christianity, veganism, techno music and tribal tattoos are all examples of memes that have spread from their originator to other people, changing and mutating slightly on the way. Languages and culture are also memes that use us people to spread and proliferate.
In some ways, we can compare memes to the old whisper-game where one person would whisper a phrase to the next who would then whisper their understanding of what was said to the next person. Over enough ‘generations’, the phrase “I like to eat hamburgers” might very well end up being understood as “I threatened three vampires”.
The third replicator, still unnamed, is one that we are letting loose on the world intentionally – the first two are results of things beyond our own control. This has to do with information that is electronically processed rather than biologically or culturally. It is copied by computers and servers rather than DNA or human brains.
If one goes to Amazon already today, we have a service that recommends books based on books we’ve already bought. We have services that study your web browsing history to recommend other pages to visit. The information that Google collects about the Web is processed, cross-processed and re-processed ad infinitum to learn more about the world than is on the homepages themselves. Google’s various services – and they are not alone in doing this – add one and one and get much more than two.
In the case of genes, biological information is copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of the biological entities. In the case of memes, cultural information is copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of the cultural entities.
With this new replicator, which I propose we call denes, we have pure information that is being copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of informational entities. We now have computer systems becoming more adept at sifting through large amounts of information, selecting what they consider to be relevant, processing this information to reach new pieces of information that then becomes available for other computer systems.
The next time you get an e-mail saying “Oh, by the way, we think you might be interested in this book” or a suggestion to get another type of credit card based on your purchasing history, remember that – most probably – no human took the time to look at your reading or purchasing statistics to reach that conclusion. It’s all the result of the denes that you’ve left as information about you traverses though – and is processed by – various digital networks.
While genetics and memetics are already established fields of study, I expect denetics – or something by another name but filling the same purpose – will appear as an interesting and important field of study within long.
