Randles JE 7

Colin Randles

Journal Entry #7

 

 

I found Susan Blackmore’s idea of the evolution of humans very interesting, and much different than I have been taught my entire life as biology major. Now that I have taken many upper level biology classes along with lower level and high school ones, many of the broad biological themes come clear to me. Given a system, I could predict what would happen, or give an educated guess at an explanation of a biological process that I did not know. This is satisfying to me, as a certain way of thinking has been drilled into my mind, and I can use that knowledge to make predictions about the world.

The TED talk gave me an entirely different view on humans and our evolution. Blackmore’s theory was that we evolved as a result of the propagation of memes (information being copied). We developed larger brains because we needed the ability to store more information, and the women that could breed babies with larger heads without dying at childbirth were the ones with the most reproductive fitness, therefore moving the population along its evolutionary path. The fact that she described the information as parasites was mind-blowing, in the fact that I never thought nonliving things could act as one. I especially did not like the fact that the smartest species on Earth has been “used” for hundreds of thousands of years as a way to propagate knowledge, and was at the mercy of these memes.

We are now heading into the “third replicator” stage, as she describes, where we are creating technology that is more advanced than we are. She described two scenarios that could happen, where humans adapt to live with the technology we are creating, or it overtakes us as a species.   These transitional periods do not happen that often, and are very dangerous to break through. Maybe one of the reasons we have not gotten contact from other advanced life forms is that most of the species that have been as advanced as we are have killed themselves during a transitional period. We are on the brink of merging with machines, and this will create a whole new level of replication of memes, with unlimited memory capacity, and much more advanced technology. The first replicator was the gene, which is the basis of biological evolution. The second replicator was memes, which is the basis of cultural evolution. What will this next replicator bring? This is digital information that is stored, selected for, and copied by machines. We are the stepping-stones between an unbelievably more efficient way of processing information. Our brain is the second replicator, but we have created things possibly more powerful. These memes are everything that make up human culture, and are easily imitated.