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    E arth's eastern side.  Columbus's optimism was based on a portrait of

    an underbelly of the planet that Europeans had never beheld, an image

    of the invisible.71

    Genes are the form of replicator that dominated the evolutionary

    marathon for nearly three billion years.  But in the latest blink of

    geological time these strands of nucleotides have been outpaced by the

    matterless organizers called memes.  Among the most potent memes

    are visions of things unseen.  Like genes, memes do not operate in solo,

    but interlock in the mosaics that form Weltanschauungs, worldviews.

    A culture's view of its world is generally a vast grid of metaphors

    starting with the creation of the universe and designed to answer every

    mystery in life.  That diagram of the cosmos is a tool with which we

    pry open our environment, a tool which creates strange by-products.  It

    offers an illusion of control--the illusion that turns on our immune

    system and our minds.  The worldview also confers power on those

    who claim to be its guardians--sorcerers, doctors, scientists and priests.

    It helps the powerful pull a social organism together.  On occasion, as

    in the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it even impels that

    social creature's members to lash out and kill.

    Yet a culture's picture of the invisible universe, its unifying

    cluster of memes, accomplishes something more.  Though it may be

    riddled with bizarre errors and ludicrous imagery, a vision of the

    unseeable produces some small fragment of real mastery.   Pictures of

    the invisible world helped Columbus cross the ocean, the Eskimo tame

    his winters, and the citizen of Bali regulate his irrigation. Someday they

    may even help us moderns conquer the medical problems that doctors

    still insist do not exist.

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