September 28, 1998
E-mail a Response
Spawn, Spawn, Spawn
Opinion
Great, now you expect this piece to be about sex, or Clinton, or something, and I feel all obligated to fulfill that expectation, not unlike a girl that just got treated to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
Going on the premise that everything has sexual undertones, I want to talk about the wide world we live in. Some people think that every cultural flaw in the world is our fault. But these people ignore the crucial role of the replicator!
Replicators are all around us. They take many forms; from music to Mormons; chain mail to Holocausts; Clinton to Springer. Replicators are ideas that compete for survival like fratboys compete in a game of darts.
They spawn, spreading their fame above that of their contenders. Every T.V. broadcast of Cookie Monster, as it bounces off our planet and out into space, is a replication of the idea of Cookie Monster, originally spawned by his creator who died last weekend.
And every translation of the King James Bible adds another copy of what is probably the most successful replicator of all time. Here we'll take a look at some more of nature's most amazing replicators: ideas, with no physical basis, that still exert major effects in the material world.
E-mail, with its built-in forward and CC functions, is one of the best replicators of all. In general, whenever we build a new environment, we build a place for new kinds of replicators to live. When we gave birth to the Internet, for example, people got all pissed off at the number of chain mails that suddenly starting popping into their inboxes.
"Replicate me and win a trip to Disney World c/o Bill Gates." "Forward me, or you'll never get laid." Of course these e-mails spread like kudzu. Chain letters evolve trickery and threats to help them replicate. By the same token, some religions spur massive families and missionaries.
Music is another amazing replicator. In the U.S., we encourage the replication of musical note patterns that are the most marketable. As a result, country music is by far the dominant type of music, for it has the broadest appeal. It's such big business, in fact, that songs are selected for airplay by tele-marketers.
They call a couple random houses, play a sample of each song that is no more than a few seconds in length, and then ask for an impression ("Good, bad, or no comment"). Amazingly, the songs that are chosen to run are the "no comment," innocuos batch that will not offend most people. Repetitive so it's catchy, simple so it's retained, and short so we don't habituate and change the station: these are the adaptations of an aural replicator in American culture.
An interesting property of replicators is that they often compete for resources. They need minds and hard drives and newspaper pages to live on. Sometimes you get one that is so good at reproducing itself that it takes away all available resources.
Recently, for example, the media has become clogged with the Clinton sex scandal, simply because it makes for the perfect headline, which is what editors look for when selecting a story to replicate. You couldn't have reverse-engineered a more distracting story if you tried.
And suddenly, we realize that these aren't just pretty flowers evolving in our cultural forest. These are sometimes ugly fungi that seek out human life and prey on it as part of their replication. During the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, another replicator leapt like a virus from the mind of Pope Innocent VIII, instructing all members of the Church to turn against and murder one another.
"I would like to report my parents for conspiring with witches." An infectious madness, purely the result of a replicating cognitive structure. Hundreds of thousands slain in an effort towards religious purity. The replicators responsible floated out of the executioners, burying themselves deep in the forest to emerge again centuries later.
Hitler's grand vision was born in a flash of synapses, like lightning in cyanide, to become a brainstorm that would scream across the globe more maliciously than any "natural" disaster. Germany, desperately needing a scapegoat for its economic and social troubles, was a regular incubation ground for the idea.
Replicating concepts, introduced at the right time, can be more deadly than any biological virus.
Our entire history is thus a continuous ecology with the replicator community. We direct its evolution to a point, yet it occurs completely against our whims. While we cannot control the conditions that spawn them, we can control their transmission among us. The scientific mode of thought provides a toolbox of thought patterns to truly separate the good from the dangerous.
As the information revolution increases the rate of transmission for all replicators, it will be critically important that we distribute the vaccine of science to everyone in the population, to innoculate ourselves against the unknown.
As Carl Sagan noted, "In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness." This column is an attempt to replicate his wisdom. It is up to you to implement it.
Nathan Wilson is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The North Façade appears every Monday.
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