    2

    From Genes to Memes

    "How noiseless is thought...it will not rule over, but in all heads,

    and with...solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas bend

    the world to its will."

                                                   Thomas Carlyle

    Let's return for a moment to Richard Dawkins' concept of the

    replicator.  Dawkins' proposal squares brilliantly with the reality of

    upwardly spiralling life.  But the eminent zoologist's individual

    selectionist contention that self-reproducers operate on their own, as

    I've mentioned before, fails to fit the facts.  Despite the high degree of

    competition between individuals in evolving systems, every form of

    replicator is nestled in a team.  Genes that fail to work effectively with

    their partners on the chromosomal string are doomed.  And the self-

    replicating wonder we are about to meet is also forced to fit into a

    constellation of its fellows, or it, too, disappears.

    What is this relative newcomer in the field of auto-duplication?

    It has no physical substance, and can not be studied under a

    microscope or kept in a jar.  The new replicator, like its predecessor the

    gene, is capable of assembling vast amounts of matter.  Like genes it

    can pull together products the earth has never seen.  But unlike genes,

    it can manufacture forms of order that mere genetic stuff could never

    dream of.

    Pinpointing the date of the new device's birth is difficult.  Its

    primitive precursors may have begun to wriggle across the planetary

    face roughly 22 million years ago with the emergence of proto-

    chimpanzees, whose modern bands devise widely varying dialects,

    ways of using tools, and methods of cooperative hunting.1  Yet its first

    fully identifiable forms may not have gone to work swallowing sub-

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