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

even if this didn’t kill them, it is difficult to see how it could have promoted their reproductive success.
    Ideas such as these, and others such as celibacy, drug taking, recklessness, birth control, or notions of courage and bravery, can enter into direct conflict with our genes, often damaging our ability to survive and reproduce. Add to these the many silly rituals and customs so common to cultural behavior, and we don’t have much encouragement that it is our genes that win against the cultural replicators. In fact, it has become something of a badge of the true believer among those who study memes that there is no reason to expect our genes to win—that there is no reason to expect, as the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson maintained, that our “genes hold culture on a leash.” It is the theme of films such as the Matrix and Terminator series, or the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey , that the machines we create will ultimately take over and hold us (genes) on a leash. If we scoff at this, we need only think back to the “millennium bug” or the Y2K (year 2000) scare that engulfed the world at the turn of the millennium. Owing to the design of software systems that could not represent a year date beyond 1999, there was a widespread belief (meme!) that computer systems around the world would fail at midnight on the last day of that year. Billions of dollars were spent preparing for this eventuality. If this now seems a long way in the past, it is, but our dependency on machines has only grown since then.
    Still, in spite of all this, and in spite of much of the hysteria that can surround the ideas of “exploitative” memes, there is a fundamental reason why we can expect ideas to be rare that directly hurt our chances for survival and reproduction, and for the same reason that brain flukes and rabies are rare. Daniel Dennett has said that “the haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.” Dennett is right; memes do depend upon reaching our minds, and they do structure our brains. I might hold the belief that there is only one true and just God. Once that idea has lodged in my mind, it might invite other beliefs such as that people who believe in other gods are a threat to me, and to my way of life. And this might make my mind vulnerable to the further idea or meme that people who stop believing in my god, or people who profess a belief in other gods, should be punished, maybe even killed. These memes are structuring my mind and working together to promote each other.
    We know these things happen because we see people being killed for their religious beliefs all over the world. Even so, we shouldn’t take this restructuring to mean that our minds are passive in the face of ideas that might act against our good wishes. Our brains are the descendants of the brains of a long line of survivors, and we know this has given them certain predilections, abilities, and biases for dealing with our world. One of these is the ability to make decisions that promote or preserve our well-being. This can give us some hope that rogue and selfish memes that bring us harm can be kept in check. These cultural replicators must contend with the biological ones—our genes—that build the minds these memes need to inhabit. And indeed the memes that promote celibacy, suicidal acts, debilitating drug use, giving your life in battle, mindless sensation seeking, or endlessly playing computer games are not all that successful despite the attention they receive and the number of people they could “infect.”
    None of this is to say that genes win, and memes lose, but that our genetic selves are not unquestioning havens for memes and their machinations. The invention of agriculture—a set of memes—beginning around 10,000 years ago is a particularly interesting example. Agriculture