The Futurica Trilogy by Alexander Bard / Jan Söderqvist

Author:Alexander Bard / Jan Söderqvist [ Bard, Alexander; Söderqvist, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS086000, PHI034000, SOC052000, Business & Economics/ Forcasting, Philosophy/ Social, Social Science/Media studies
ISBN: 9789187173035
Publisher: Stockholm Text
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

9.

Neo-Darwinism and Horizontal Biology

THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS only moves very sluggishly, and it takes a serious shake-up before any effects at all can be discerned. The consequences of powerful upheavals are therefore all the more noticeable, and give rise to acute shifts in the social sense of balance, setting the whole routine of life in flux. A state of crisis arises: ideas which have formed the intellectual foundations of an entire epoch, so deeply ingrained in our idea of self that they have never been questioned, and rarely, if ever, even noticed, show themselves to be so completely riddled with decay that they are ready to collapse. The constant adjustments which occur on a microlevel within society suddenly become visible as a whole. We are being forced into the great change known as a paradigm shift.

Now that two truly fundamental factors in our understanding of self – digital information technology and new reproductive genetics – have begun to develop in phase with each other and to use the same language, the combined power of these upheavals is greater than at any previous time in history. Our obsolete truths are being subjected to a barrage of attacks. The situation is driving a series of concrete, drastic, and more or less welcome changes in our work and private lives. We are being compelled to think in completely new ways in order to make life even remotely comprehensible. And if any of the mass of regulations governing the new technological complexes that are increasingly in demand are to be even theoretically imaginable, then a credible political development towards the inception of the global state is required.

But before we have even had time to think through the consequences of a Darwinian, evolutionary view of nature and developments, or of what ‘the selfish gene’ can tell us about history and our own position in the scheme of things, we are confronted with yet another dramatic shift in our worldview. Instead of being the antithesis of nature, as humanism has been preaching for centuries, culture is beginning to appear as nature’s own continuation of itself. This is an insight which overturns precisely everything: as human beings, we do not stand above evolution, as we have hitherto believed. There is nothing higher than evolution, apart from in fairy tales. In actual fact, we are nothing more – and could never be anything more – than the self-produced evolutionary machinery.

Even within culture the intractable laws of natural selection apply. The cultural equivalent of selfish genes are the equally selfish memes, the conceptual (in the broadest sense) packages of information with whose help we think and communicate. A combined term for genes and memes, the evolutionary agents with an apparently endless capacity to produce copies of themselves, is ‘replicators’. Our consciousness is ultimately the product of the infinitely complicated interplay between these two replicators, our genes and our memes, an interplay which is further complicated by the fact that the replicators often have diametrically opposed interests and seem to want completely different things from us.

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