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Q: Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer but given genetic technologies, our descendants will be. What does this mean about the future of evolution?
Dawkins: "It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That's increasing and we're getting more technologically clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight. <snip> That never happened in natural evolution; there was never a "let's temporarily get worse in order to get better, let's go down into the valley in order to get over to the other side and up onto the opposite mountain." So yes, I think it well may be that we're living in a time when evolution is suddenly starting to become intelligently designed."
I believe Dawkins fails to respond to the full pertinance of this question in regards to possibly the most successful meme he has created- the meme meme. I would have thought he would have pointed this out, but heres what he fails in saying in this interview:
Memes will be responsible for the designing of future generations. Memes such as the sceintific method lead to enough people becoming scientists in order to make these discoveries, so I definately feel that if it wernt for memes this intelligent design wouldnt be possible, if it isnt the memes themselves that are doing the designing.
This backs my view that memes become what we call God. The Metameme is God. God created humans in his immage, humans created God in their immage, memes create humans, and humans create memes- depending on how you look at it.
I want to know if anyone agrees with me, and what do you feel is the future of Evolution?
This backs my view that memes become what we call God. The Metameme is God. God created humans in his immage, humans created God in their immage, memes create humans, and humans create memes- depending on how you look at it.
Are you saying that if there is a god in the future it will be the product of our memes? If so, then I partly agree. If there is a god in the future it will be the product of someone's memes, but maybe an ET civilization, not ours.
The Metameme usually refers to the meme meme, that is memetics itself. I don't equate that with god.
Memes and humans co-evolved, so in a sense they created each other. Humans created the god meme, but have not yet created god. God hasn't created anything yet.
Re:Future of Evolution
« Reply #2 on: 2005-06-04 00:46:38 »
i didnt know that metameme refered to the meme meme. I though I could make up my own definition, now I know what yall think of when metameme is mentioned. I dont think ill abandon using my own created word though. I looked it up, and I see where the confusion arises. Meta Data is data about data, and so I can see why you and others of the community, with your computer knowledge, think of the meme meme when you hear metameme. I am seeing the meme as another stage in biological development, however, much in the same way as the animal was developed from chemicals. primitive animals, zooids or whatever you want to call them, are very simple replicating cells. (im equating memes to cells rather than viri here) a more complicated system of these cells becomes a metazoan. So to me, a more complicated system of memes becomes a metameme- like a meme society all working together for the common good of themselves, as if they were an organism. Only instead of being called an organism they are called a god. And the ancient pagan gods were actually just that- the metamemes, collection of memes, a meme society. Its a stretch to conclude that there is one God from this, but if one looks again at the meta meta meme then one finds themselves closer once again to God. You can continue to take these steps in this direction the same way scientists take steps in the opposite direction breaking chemicals into atoms, atoms to protons, protons to quirks etc...
Back to the topic, you say God hasnt created anything yet, but what do you call his creation? God, or any god, works through man, in the same way the pharoah-gods of egypt didnt build their own pyramids, although they were real living people, neither did Zeus himself build temples. But I would argue that Cheops created a pyramid. If you say Cheops created a pyramid then a god did create something. the very ideas that Zeus embodied caused people to erect temples to him. The God that Christians know as the one and only God has created churches. You may argue he didnt build the chuch(people were holding hammers, carrying the stone, placing it) , but would the church have been built if it were not for God? churches are built by the idea of God at least... and if thats all He is than it IS God himself creating. If you still dont agree that memes are gods, then I hope you at least agree with me that memes make things happen. If a meme makes you happen, if you are intelligently designed, then you have a creator. no longer will advocates of evolution be able to say that everything just happened, and that there wasn't any particular design.
If we are intelligently designed, then can we say that we were the end result of just evolution, or will it mean that creationists start winning arguements once again that we are intelligently designed (even if it is by physical beings that dont have as many powers as we would equate with a singular God.)
My answer is that no creationists dont gain an edge all of a sudden because of the fact that evolutionists can, and in order to win the arguement I feel they MUST, explain that memes were the next step in evolution after organisms, and that our creation is a result of their evolution, not of their intelligent design, since they were merely evolved to be creators. We then become nothing more than an oversized overexagerated protein created by memes (instead of genes) to their advantage.
I would also like to point out that once we realize we are nothing more than proteins to our ideas, we will realize that our homo sapian sapian form isnt the only important protein, and that there could possibly improvments that are drastically different from ourselves. What I mean is that we would realize that it wouldnt be so bad to be replaced by computers that are at least as intelligent as us. If the future of evolution finds something better for the job of supporting memes, we may lose our place as the hegemonic meme bearers.
Pabreetzrio, I like the way you think, because I think that way too. I agree that God (the meme) has created Man in his own image. I wrote an essay on this a couple of years back, but I can't find it right now. But essentially, this is my version of the evolutionary history of mankind, that I wrote in the essay:
Evolution by natural selection creates hominids with large portions of their nervous systems devoted to replicating memes.
Before development of scientific understanding of the world around them, these hominids need another mechanism to motivate them to carry out such not-so-obviously useful tasks as burying dead, washing food, and being nice to others.
Happily, the hominids have a built-in tendency to tell and unquestioningly believe stories about the spirits that inhabit the world around them. Each spirit has its own story and its own demands upon behavior, and rituals to be carried out. Each of these memes is belief in a certain spirit. Spirits coding for useful behaviors are selected for because they increase the fitness of their hosts.
When the number of spirits becomes too large to keep track of by any one brain, the behaviors associated with each spirit become lumped together as homage to a single god. Gods become personalities in order to have the ability to make multiple (sometimes unrelated) demands upon their followers.
The behaviors that spirits and gods code for are useful to hominid socieities and therefore these spirits and gods are selected for. The world of homo sapiens is full of gods, constantly battling for evolutionary supremacy, for control of memespace. Of course selfish gods are selected for.
Because the behavior is the really useful (selected for) part, gods frequently kill one another and adopt the behaviors of the vanquished. Codes of conduct associated with various gods begin to include non-utilitarian rituals which serve only to stabilize the image of the gods themselves.
Temporary alliances and communities of gods arise, forming the first polytheistic religions. But in terms of necessity, one god can always perform the duties of two, since one god is enough to serve as a motivating factor for specified societal conduct (still washing food, burying dead, etc). So the numbers of gods in each religion slowly decline, whereas the perceived power of each remaining god increases (to maintain the motivating power necessary to overcome instinctual behaviors). Eventually monotheistic religions dominate the scene. God (with a capital G) finds Himself conrolling the minds of pretty much everyone in the western world.
God (capital G), being evolved as a monotheistic god, is very much separate from His religion (as opposed to the first spirits which are almost one and the same with their specified codes of conduct). Furthermore, the concept of Sin allows the religion to be openly evolving while the God meme is essentially unchanged. Any behavior can be "methylated" by the label of sin, which is easily shifted around. God can, in this manner, adopt the religion (set of practices) of any other god it encounters without changing significantly. God has evolved a certain non-deterministic nature, where behavior is not directly linked to nature or identity. In other words, this meme has surrounded itself with a coating that allows it a certain degree of adaptive freedom. Finally, sin is sometimes defined in higher-level terms, ecouraging the believer to use his own mental resources to carefully sift sinful behavior from non-sinful behavior.
Because God is perceived as unchanging, as the unaffected affector of the universe, His will is seen to exist a level different than that of the visible world around us, which changes constantly. Because of the subtlety of the concept of sin, believers in their quest to know the will of God attempt to discover unchangine laws that determine the changing phenomena of the universe. Science is born.
The science meme takes as necessary and fact the presence of an objective observer, one who seeks to perceive truth independently of benefit or of desire. Behavioral codes are attached to a rational understanding of unchanging principles; man's own mind is the arbiter of truth of these unchanging principles; man becomes, loosely, self-determined; man attains the same freedom on an individual level that God attained as a memeplex.
Man's new freedom nullifies the demand for a deistic motivator; scientific understanding of the world begins to justify behaviors that the well-evolved gods of the past had coded for (washing food, burying dead, etc). God, having created Man in His own image (universally adaptable self-designer), finds Himself in a war against science, the instrument of our freedom.
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