    6

    the R

    evolution of 1905, the tsar regained control over the country.  But

    in 1917, the less-than-brilliant  Nicholas was losing once again.  This

    time the occasion was World War I.  Millions of Russians died on the

    eastern front.  Soldiers struggled through the snow without

    ammunition, winter clothing and food.  Back home, the railway system

    broke down.  Grain and meat could not reach the towns.  Men and

    women of modest means starved in the boulevards of the Russian

    Empire's most magnificent cities.

    After a new revolution had spontaneously begun to heave

    through the streets of Petrograd and Moscow, Lenin finally got his act

    together.  He took a train from Zurich to the Russian capital.  The

    minute he arrived at the Petrograd railroad station, the bearded book-

    lover began haranguing the crowds with slogans.  And the meme that

    had first been born in the mind of Karl Marx finally fell like a scrap of

    wandering bacteria into nutritive jelly and spread with explosive force.

    By the mid '80s, the ideas brought together by one man's brain in

    the corner of a lonely library, ideas that looked from year to year as if

    their disappearance from the planet was all but inevitable, had gone

    from controlling one 150-pound man to mastering millions of tons of

    this planet's matter.  These memes were alive in the minds and the

    social mechanisms of over 1.8 billion human beings.  They spread their

    influence over the lands, the minerals, the machines and the

    domesticated animals that those human beings controlled.10

    The new replicator took up even less space and mass than the

    tangle of atoms required for a strand of DNA.  That replicator--like the

    ones incubated by Jefferson and Madison and St. Paul-- had assembled

    under its rule more of the planet earth than was ever brought together

    by any gene. Any gene, that is, save one... the human gene.

    The new replicator, the meme, is a vast upward step on the

    ladder of creation.  The old genetic system could take ten thousand

    years to effect a product improvement in a large and complex beast.11

    But memes can rearrange sprawling networks of outrageously intricate

    creatures in only a few centuries...or less.  The meme of Christianity

    <<  <  GO  >  >>