The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (69 page)

Memes, like scientific theories, are not derived from anything. They are created afresh by the recipient. They are conjectural explanations, which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being tentatively adopted.

This same pattern of creative conjecture, criticism and testing generates inexplicit as well as explicit ideas. In fact all creativity does, for no idea can be represented entirely explicitly. When we make an explicit conjecture, it has an inexplicit component whether we are aware of it or not. And so does all criticism.

Thus, as has so often happened in the history of universality, the human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal function. It evolved simply to increase the volume of memetic information that our ancestors could acquire, and the speed and accuracy which they could acquire it. But since the easiest way for evolution to do that was to give us a universal ability to explain, through creativity, that is what it did. This epistemological fact provides not only the solution of the two puzzles I mentioned, but also the reason for the evolution of human creativity – and therefore the human species – in the first place.

It must have happened something like this. In early pre-human societies, there were only very simple memes – the kind that apes now have, though perhaps with a wider repertoire of copiable elementary behaviours. Those memes were about practical things like how to get food that was otherwise inaccessible. The value of such knowledge must have been high, so this created a ready-made niche for any adaptation that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes. Creativity was the ultimate adaptation to fill that niche. As it increased,
further adaptations co-evolved, such as an increase in memory capacity (to store more memes), finer motor control, and specialized brain structures for dealing with language. As a result, the meme band-width (the amount of memetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next) increased too. Memes also became more complex and sophisticated.

This is why and how our species evolved, and why it evolved rapidly – at first. Memes gradually came to dominate our ancestors’ behaviour. Meme evolution took place, and, like all evolution, this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness. This meant becoming ever more anti-rational. At some point, meme evolution achieved static societies – presumably they were tribes. Consequently, all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations. Innovation remained imperceptibly slow, even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly.

Even in a static society, memes still evolve, due to imperceptible errors of replication. They just evolve more slowly than anyone can notice: imperceptible errors cannot be suppressed. They would generally evolve towards greater fidelity of replication, as usual with evolution, and hence to greater staticity of the society.

Status in such a society is reduced by transgressing people’s expectations of proper behaviour, and is improved by meeting them. There would have been the expectations of parents, priests, chiefs and potential mates (or whoever controlled mating in that society) – who were themselves conforming to the wishes and expectations of the society at large. Those people’s opinions would determine one’s ability to eat, thrive and reproduce, and hence the fate of one’s genes.

But how does one discover the wishes and expectations of other people? They might issue commands, but they could never specify every detail of what they expected, let alone every detail of how to achieve it. When one is commanded to do something (or expected to, as a condition for being considered worthy of food or mating, for instance), one might remember seeing an already-respected person doing the same thing, and one might try to emulate that person. To do that effectively, one would have to understand what the point of doing it was, and to try to achieve
that
as best one could. One would impress one’s chief, priest, parent or potential mate by replicating, and following, their standards of what one should strive for. One would impress
the tribe as a whole by replicating their idea (or the ideas of the most influential among them) of what was worthy, and acting accordingly.

Hence, paradoxically, it requires creativity to thrive in a static society – creativity that enables one to be
less
innovative than other people. And that is how primitive, static societies, which contained pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation, constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.

From the perspective of those hypothetical extraterrestrials observing our ancestors, a community of advanced apes with memes before the evolution of creativity began would have looked superficially similar to their descendants after the jump to universality. The latter would merely have had many more memes. But the mechanism keeping those memes replicating faithfully would have changed profoundly. The animals of the earlier community would have been relying on their lack of creativity to replicate their memes; the people, despite living in a static society, would be relying entirely on their creativity.

As with all jumps to universality, the way in which the jump emerged out of gradual changes is interesting to think about. Creativity is a property of
software
. As I said, we could be running AI programs on our laptop computers today if we knew how to write (or evolve) such programs. Like all software, it would require the computer to have certain hardware specifications in order to be able to process the required amount of data in the required time. It so happened that the hardware specifications that would make creativity practicable were included in those that were being heavily favoured for pre-creative meme replication. The principal one would have been memory capacity: the more one could remember, the more memes one could enact, and the more accurately one could enact them. But there may also have been hardware abilities such as mirror neurons for imitating a wider range of elementary actions than apes could ape – for instance, the elementary sounds of a language. It would have been natural for such hardware assistance for language abilities to be evolving at the same time as the increased meme bandwidth. So, by the time creativity was evolving, there would already have been significant co-evolution between genes and memes: genes evolving hardware to support more and better memes, and memes evolving to take over ever more of what
had previously been genetic functions such as choice of mate, and methods of eating, fighting and so on. Therefore, my speculation is that the creativity program is not entirely inborn. It is a combination of genes and memes. The hardware of the human brain would have been
capable
of being creative (and sentient, conscious and all those other things) long before any creative program existed. Considering a sequence of brains during this period, the earliest ones
capable
of supporting creativity would have required very ingenious programming to fit the capacity into the barely suitable hardware. As the hardware improved, creativity could have been programmed more easily, until the moment when it became easy enough actually to be done by evolution. We do not know
what
was being gradually increased in that approach to a universal explainer. If we did, we could program one tomorrow.

Before Blackmore and others realized the significance of memes in human evolution, all sorts of root causes had been suggested for what propelled a normal-looking lineage of apes into rapidly becoming a species that can explain and control the universe. Some proposed that it was the adaptation of walking upright, which freed the front limbs, with their opposable thumbs, to specialize in manipulation. Some proposed that climate change favoured adaptations that would make our ancestors more able to exploit diverse habitats. And, as I have mentioned, sexual selection is always a candidate for explaining rapid evolution. Then there is the ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ that human intelligence evolved in order to predict the behaviour of others, and to fool them. There is also the hypothesis that human intelligence is an enhanced version of the apes’ aping adaptation – which, as I have argued, could not be true. Nevertheless, Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true. The reason it must be true is that,
whatever
had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity.

Not only is creativity necessary for human meme replication, it is also sufficient. Deaf people and blind people and paralysed people are still able to acquire and create human ideas to a more or less full extent. Hence, neither upright walking nor fine motor control nor the ability to parse sounds into words nor any of those other adaptations, though they might have played a role historically in creating the conditions for human evolution, were functionally necessary to allow humans to become creative. Nor, therefore, are they philosophically significant in understanding what humans are today, namely
people
: creative, universal explainers.

It was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape memes – expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them, and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing – and human memes, which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power. The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity. We have no way of telling, at present, how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes. But, once it began to, there would automatically have been evolutionary pressure for it to continue, and for other meme-facilitating adaptations to follow in its wake. This increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory.

The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species. Our creativity, which evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use, and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well, was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge – the memes – that that creativity preserved. The strivings of individuals to better themselves were, from the outset, perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end: to thwart all attempts at improvement; to keep sentient beings locked in a crude, suffering state for eternity. Only the Enlightenment, hundreds of thousands of years later, and after who knows how many false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity.

Imitation
    Copying behaviour. This is different from human meme replication, which copies the knowledge that is causing the behaviour.

– The evolution of creativity.

– The reassignment of creativity from its original function of preserving memes faithfully, to the function of creating new knowledge.

On the face of it, creativity cannot have been useful during the evolution of humans, because knowledge was growing much too slowly for the more creative individuals to have had any selective advantage. This is a puzzle. A second puzzle is: how can complex memes even exist, given that brains have no mechanism to download them from other brains? Complex memes do not mandate specific bodily actions, but
rules
. We can see the actions, but not the rules, so how do we replicate them? We replicate them by creativity. That solves both problems, for replicating memes unchanged is the function for which creativity evolved. And that is why our species exists.

Easter Island in the South Pacific is famous mainly – let’s face it,
only
– for the large stone statues that were built there many centuries ago by the islanders. The purpose of the statues is unknown, but is thought to be connected with an ancestor-worshipping religion. The first settlers may have arrived on the island as early as the fifth century
CE
. They developed a complex Stone Age civilization, which suddenly collapsed over a millennium later. By some accounts there was starvation, war and perhaps cannibalism. The population fell to a small fraction of what it had been, and their culture was lost.

The prevailing theory is that the Easter Islanders brought disaster upon themselves, in part by chopping down the forest which had originally covered most of the island. They eliminated the most useful species of tree altogether. This is not a wise thing to do if you rely on timber for shelter, or if fish form a large part of your diet and your boats and nets are made of wood. And there were knock-on effects such as soil erosion, precipitating the destruction of the environment on which the islanders had depended.

Some archaeologists dispute this theory. For example, Terry Hunt has concluded that the islanders arrived only in the thirteenth century, and that their civilization continued to function throughout the deforestation (which he attributes to rats, not tree-felling) until it was destroyed by epidemics, caused by contact with Europeans. However, I do not want to discuss whether the prevailing theory is accurate, but only to use it as an example of a common fallacy – an argument by analogy about issues far less parochial.

Easter Island is 2,000 kilometres from the nearest habitation, namely Pitcairn Island (where the
Bounty’
s crew took refuge after their famous
mutiny). Both islands are far from anywhere, even by today’s standards. Nevertheless, in 1972 Jacob Bronowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent television series
The Ascent of Man
. He and his film crew travelled by ship all the way from California, a round trip of some 14,000 kilometres. He was in poor health, and the crew had literally to carry him to the location for filming. But he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series – which is also a theme of this book – that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress. He wanted to celebrate its values and achievements, and to attribute the latter to the former, and to contrast our civilization with the alternative as epitomized by ancient Easter Island.