In 1976 in The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explained that the unit of selection for evolution is not the group or species or individual but the gene. Genes that are best at causing themselves to get replicated are the ones that do get replicated, and so those genes then become predominant.
An organism’s body is a gene’s “survival machine”. Individual organisms die but a gene can survive indefinitely. A gene “uses” an organism to propagate itself from one generation to the next. Since an organism’s design is determined entirely by its DNA, the genes are in charge. The genes are the masters and the organisms are the slaves. Everything an organism does, it’s been programmed to do by its genes in order to propagate those genes.
In The Selfish Gene Dawkins also introduced the idea of a meme. A meme is kind of like a gene but instead of a piece of DNA it’s a behavior or idea. In The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch uses the idea of a joke as an example of a meme. If a joke is funny, it will make people who hear it want to tell it again, causing the joke to be proliferated. But the joke may not always be retold word-for-word. Some people might remember the idea of the joke but tell it in their own words. Some people might misremember the joke and accidentally tell it a bit differently. Some people may intentionally change the joke in order to try to improve it. Just as a gene will compete with variants of itself, a joke will do the same thing.
The versions of the joke that are best at getting themselves replicated are the ones that become predominant. Note, importantly, that this does not necessarily mean that the best version of the joke will become predominant, just the version that’s best at getting itself replicated. “Survival of the fittest” is a myth. The versions of genes and memes that survive are the ones that are best at getting themselves copied, nothing more.
Before internet memes our culture had many others. Quotes are often memes, for example, like “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and “practice makes perfect”. The content of a meme can be true or false, helpful or unhelpful. “Practice makes perfect”, for example, is sometimes refuted with the expression “practice makes permanent”, which is closer to the truth. “Practice makes perfect” didn’t become a meme because it’s true, it became a meme because it has the attractive qualities of being snappy, alliterative and memorable, and superficially seeming wise and true.
Programming principles can also come in the form of memes. “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) is memorable thanks to its slightly amusing pronounceable acronym and the fact that its advice is useful and approximately true, although only approximately. The refuting advice, “Write Everything Twice” (WET) is cleverly formulated as the antonym to DRY, and has been very successful in replicating itself, despite the fact that its advice (allow duplication up to two times, and only de-duplicate when the number of instances reaches three) is, at least in my opinion, completely nonsensical.
Just as genes don’t obey “survival of the fittest”, memes, including programming memes, don’t obey “survival of the truest”. The programming principles that replicate themselves the most are simply the ones that are the best at getting themselves replicated, not necessarily the ones that are the truest or best. Sometimes an idea proliferates simply because it’s easy to learn and easy to teach, or because repeating the idea makes the repeater feel wise and sophisticated.
Having said that, sometimes a meme is good at causing itself to be replicated precisely because it is true. Newton’s laws of physics, for example, successfully proliferated because they were genuinely useful, and they were useful because they were true—at least true enough for many purposes. Then, later, Einstein’s laws of physics became successful memes because they were an improvement upon Newton’s laws of physics, and succeeded in certain areas where Newton’s laws failed. This phenomenon of memes proliferating precisely because they’re true should give us hope.
We all know people who seem to be slaves to some particular sort of fashion. Some people repeat the political ideas they hear on a certain news channel, for example, or get caught up in a succession of get-rich-quick schemes. These people seem not to have minds of their own. Like genes’ survival machines, these people in a way exist only as a vehicle for memes to replicate themselves. But of course, not everyone has to be a slave to memes. Instead of uncritically accepting memetic ideas, we can examine them with a careful combination of open-mindedness and skepticism and demand a good explanation for why the idea in the meme is supposedly true. In this way, perhaps our false programming memes can wither away and gradually be replaced with ever truer ones.