Bitcoin: Everything divided by 21 million by Knut Svanholm

Author:Knut Svanholm [Svanholm, Knut]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-06T04:07:00+00:00

MEMETICS

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his book "The Selfish Gene" from 1976. The term is a variant of the word "gene." It refers to how ideas behave like DNA in many ways. Ideas, much like genes, either survive and reproduce or die out and become forgotten. Genes and memes well adapted to their environments have a better shot at reproducing and surviving than those ill-adapted. Memes are viral phenomena that evolve by natural selection analogous to biological evolution. They spread through behaviors that they generate in their hosts. An idea, for instance, can survive and thrive because people tell each other about it. Some ideas become extinct, while others survive, spread, and mutate. The perpetuation of ideas depends on how well they proliferate. Note that whether the idea is good or bad for the host’s survival doesn’t matter much, so long as the concept itself survives. Like parasitic life forms, human thoughts have an evolutionary process of their own. It is a process that can be more or less detached from the host’s evolution. Put another way, bad ideas can survive for a long time too. Consider organized religions, organized crime, and the organized confiscation scheme of taxation. These concepts have flourished over a long span of history, but their hosts may not have. Ideas don’t have to be truthful or beneficial to believers to survive. Successful memes remain and spread like genes, whereas unfit ones stall and fade away. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving stay in the meme pool. Don’t confuse this meme pool with bitcoin’s mempool,1 by the way. Even though the two have some similarities.

The longer a meme or an idea stays in its host, the higher its chances of survival. A meme’s lifetime gets extended every time its host broadcasts it to other minds. A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. Conversely, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. Despite this, transmissibility is more critical to the meme itself than the survival of its host. This is, after all, the only thing a meme needs to survive. The concept of suicide bombing is an example of a meme detrimental to its hosts. The idea survives because of the attention its host’s death gets. Not its host’s survival. Thus the act itself provides its own transmissibility.

A similar example from the biological world would be the sting of the common honey bee. The individual bee dies after using its stinger. The swarm survives, and therefore, so do the genetics required to spawn suicidal stingers. The genes that put the stinger on the bee in the first place. Both genes and memes are more powerful evolutionary entities than their respective hosts. Life-forms copy genetic information from parent to child. But genetic information can also spread through viruses and similar means. Memetic information, or ideas, can replicate in even more ways. Memes reproduce by copying themselves from one mind to another.

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