Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind Read Online Free PDF

to be carried off to infect some new ant or even some grazing animals. Tiny worms known as brain flukes can do the same.
    Successful rabies virus, brain fluke, or fungus genes hijack another animal’s body or phenotype , including its brains and sensory organs, and use it to walk around, make decisions, and clamp jaws down on things. All of this is in service to the parasite’s interests rather than the host’s, which is normally killed anyway once it has served its purpose. We instinctively recoil at the specter of one of these parasites infecting us, but we equally instinctively recognize why they can exist. These parasites can live and evolve at our expense because they do not share the same route into the future as the rest of our genes. So long as one of these parasites can get itself transmitted into another body before you die, it will go on to live another day, and this means it can do with you more or less what it likes. The same principle explains why common viruses and diseases can prosper. Thankfully, it also tells us why extremely virulent diseases in general are rare. If you caught a virus that killed you before you could pass it on to someone else, your death would also be its death. This is why, terrifying as it is, the Ebola virus—which kills around 90 percent of its victims and frequently within twenty-four hours of symptoms appearing—is quite rare.
    With the advent of culture, another sphere of evolving entities arose that does not share the same route into the future as our genes. This new sphere of evolution was the world of ideas. They are cultural replicators that exist by inhabiting our minds, and their “purpose” is to get us to transmit them to other minds. Richard Dawkins coined the term memes to describe these units of cultural evolution, which, like the biological brain parasites, will not necessarily evolve to have our interests in mind but theirs . Thus, when we recite advertising jingles or tell jokes, or can’t get a tune out of our heads, things that are of little or no value to us have somehow commandeered our brains and even acquired mouths and vocal cords to help them invade someone else’s mind. This is not to say that all elements of cultural evolution evolve to exploit us, or that all memes are viruses of our minds. Among the most common memes will be those that do us the most good. The success of ideas like how to build a better hand ax or spear, or how to navigate by the stars, skin a newly killed animal, fish, or tie a knot in a rope, comes from these being ideas we want to tell others.
    Still, the sheer volume of possible memes tells us that competition among them for space in our minds has been intense. This raises the question of whether, just as we cannot defend ourselves against some biological viruses, we might often be at the beck and call of selfish memes that get us not just to sing a tune, but to behave in whatever ways they decree, and then like a biological brain parasite dispense with us. The philosopher Daniel Dennett once quipped that perhaps “a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” Far-fetched? Maybe, but don’t forget that some medieval monk scribes devoted their lives to creating libraries full of copies of revered books, even if they didn’t go quite so far as replicating entire libraries. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the memes are in control when hearing of yet another religious martyr who has sacrificed his or her life in the name of some religious cause. That act of martyrdom might be very effective at spreading a religious or political idea to others’ minds, or at killing minds the meme has not been able to infect, but it surely does nothing for the martyr. Or what of the Christian Stylites ? These were the religious ascetics who in the early days of Christianity took up residence perched atop tall poles or pillars. What could have possessed them to do this? Some remained on these perches for years: