by the time you realize what's happening the child is a toddler up and causing havoc and it's too late to put it back
we humans are earth 's pandoran species we're the ones who let the second replicator out of its box and we can't push it back in
the consequences all around us
that i suggest is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously
so first of all i'd like to say something about memetics and the theory of memes and secondly how this might answer questions about who 's out there
if indeed anyone
so memetics
indeed some people say it's the best idea anybody
a wonderful thought that there could be such a thing as a best idea anybody ever had do you think there could
why because the idea was so simple
and yet it explains all design in the universe
i would say not just biological design but all of the design that we think of as human design it's all just the same thing happening what did darwin say
there is a struggle for life such that nearly all of these creatures die
if the very few that survive pass onto their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents
you see the idea if if if
had no concept of the idea of an algorithm but that's what he described in that book and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm the principle is
as dan dennett puts it if you have those then you must get evolution or design out of chaos without the aid of mind
must at must
must must
this is what makes it so amazing you don't need a designer or a plan or foresight or anything else if there's something that is copied with variation and it's selected then you must get design appearing out
must is my favorite word
to do with memes well the principle here
applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection we're so used to thinking in terms of biology we think about genes this way
the information that is copied he called the replicator
it selfishly copies not meaning it kind of sits around inside cells going i want to get copied but that
it will get copied if it can regardless of the consequences it doesn't care about the consequences because it can 't because it's just information being
and he wanted to get away from everybody thinking all the time about genes and so he said is there another replicator out there on the planet ah yes there is look around you
here will do in this room all around us still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture is another
by language by talking by telling stories by wearing clothes by doing things
remember that that's the core definition that which is imitated and abbreviated it to meme just because it sounds good and made a good meme an effective spreading meme
so that's how the idea came about
it's important to stick with that definition
the whole science of memetics is much maligned much misunderstood much feared but a lot of these problems can be avoided by remembering the definition
a meme is not equivalent to an idea it's not an idea it's not equivalent to anything else really stick with the definition it's that which is imitated or information which is copied from person to person
let 's see some memes well you sir you've got those glasses hung around your neck in that particularly fetching way i wonder whether you invented that idea for yourself or copied it from someone else
oh well your earrings i don't suppose you invented the idea of earrings you probably went out and bought them there are plenty more in the shops that's something that's passed on from person to person all the stories that we're telling well of course
ted is a great memefest masses of memes
the way to think about memes though is to think why do they spread
they're selfish information they will get copied if they can but some of them will be copied because they're good or true or useful or beautiful some of them will be copied even though they're not
some it's quite hard to tell why there's one particular curious meme which i rather enjoy and i'm glad to say as i expected i found it when i came here and i'm sure all of you found it
you go to your nice posh international hotel somewhere and you come in and you put down your clothes and you go to the bathroom and what do you see
these are all memes they're all memes but they're sort of useful ones and then there's this one
what is this one doing
this has spread all over the world it's not surprising that you all found it when you arrived in your bathrooms here but i took this photograph in a toilet at the back of a tent in the eco camp in the jungle in
some people get carried away
other people are just lazy and make mistakes
some hotels exploit the opportunity to put even more memes with a little sticker
what is this all
so think of it this way
imagine a world full of brains and far more memes than can possibly find homes the memes are all trying to get copied trying in inverted commas i e that's the shorthand for if they can get copied they will
using you and me
propagating copying machinery and we are the meme machines
now why is this important why is this useful or what does it tell us
it gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human all conventional theories of culturalevolution of the origin of humans and what makes us so different from other species
must have been useful for the genes tool use must have enhanced our survival mating and so on it always comes back as richard dawkins complained all that long time ago it always comes back to genes
the point of memetics is to say oh no it doesn 't there are two replicators now on this planet from the moment that our ancestors perhaps two and a half million years ago or so began imitating
with variation and selection a new replicator was
and it could never be right from the start it could never be that human beings who let loose this new creature could just copy the useful beautiful true things and not copy the other things while their brains
having an advantage from being able to copy lighting fires keeping fires going new techniques of hunting these kinds of things inevitably they were also copying putting feathers in their hair or wearing strange clothes or painting their faces or whatever
so you get an arms race between the genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff
and the memes themselves like the sounds that people made and copied in other words
what turned out to be language competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger so the big brain on this theory is driven by the memes this is why in the meme machine i called it memetic drive
as the memes evolve as they inevitably must they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that
this is why we've ended up with such peculiar brains that we like religion and music and art language is a parasite that we've adapted to not something that was there originally for our genes on this view
so this is a view of what humans are
we have new kind of memes now
i do honestly think now we need a new word for technological memes let 's call them technomemes or
because the processes are getting different
began perhaps five thousand years ago with writing we put the storage of memes out there on a clay tablet
but in order to get true temes and true teme machines you need to get the variation the selection and the copying all done outside of humans
and we're getting there we're at this extraordinary point where we're nearly there that there are machines like that and indeed in the short time i've already been at ted i see we're even closer than i thought we were before so
actually now the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines our children are growing up
so we're at this cusp now of having a third replicator on
but i think he concentrated on the wrong things it's been very productive that equation he wanted to estimate n the number of communicative civilizations out
in our galaxy and he included in there the rate of star formation the rate of planets but crucially intelligence
i think that's the wrong way to think about it
so i would suggest that we don't think intelligence we think replicators
and on that basis i've suggested a different kind of equation a very simple equation n the same thing the number of
ok so if we take that equation
because every step
is dangerous
getting a new replicator
is dangerous you can pull through we have pulled through but it's dangerous take the first step as soon as life appeared on this
we may take the gaian view i loved peter ward 's talk yesterday it's not gaian all the time actually life forms produce things that kill themselves well we did pull through on this planet
a long time later billions of years later we got the second replicator the memes that was dangerous all right
think of the big brain how many mothers do we have here
you know all about big brains they're dangerous to give birth to are agonizing
my cat gave birth to four kittens purring all the time ah mm slightly different
but not only is it painful it kills lots of babies it kills lots of mothers and it's very expensive to produce the genes are forced into producing all this myelin all the fat to myelinate the brain
you know sitting here your brain is using about twenty percent of your body 's energyoutput for two percent of your body weight it's a really expensive organ to run why because it's producing the memes now it could have killed us off
but maybe it nearly did has it been
it be that this experiment in imitation this experiment in a second replicator is dangerous enough to kill people off
well we did pull through and we
but now we're hitting as i've just described we're hitting the third replicator point
and this is even more
it's dangerous again
why because the temes are selfish replicators and they don't care about us or our planet or anything else they're just information why would
don't think oh we created the internet for our own benefit that's how it seems to us think temes spreading because they must
we are the old machines
one that is obviouslyhappening all around us now is that the temes turn us into teme machines
why would they do that because we are self replicating we have babies we make new ones and so it's convenient to piggyback on us
because we're not yet at the stage on this planet
the other option is viable
if the planet 's climate was utterly destabilized and it was no longer possible for humans to live here because those teme machines they wouldn't need they're not squishy wet oxygen breathing warmth requiring creatures they could carry on without
so those are the two possibilities
the damage that is already being done to the planet
is showing us how dangerous the third point is that third danger point getting a third replicator
i have no idea
was an incredible talk sb thank you i scared myself
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