Of all the species that share our planet, humans may well be the most aberrant. Aberrant in the willful rejection of nature’s guideposts. In part that’s because we’ve developed ethical and moral imperatives at odds with nature’s survival and improvement mechanisms. Thus, rather than discard the weak as inefficient, we protect and cherish them, at least on some level. Rather than propagation through biological natural selection so that the human race is constantly physically improving, our breeding selection criteria have become largely incoherent. No other life form that we know of does that on a consistent basis. We have counterintuitive dominant emotional motivational instincts such as love and mercy which lead us to react in manners different from other biological variants.

On the other hand, no other life form is as compulsively selfish and greedy as are humans who seem to have developed a manic addiction to accumulation, thus the majority of humans are deprived so that a very few can, not only gorge themselves, but hoard even what they cannot ever use. Mere survival has become inadequate to quench our thirst for things and power. We are perhaps the only species that values individualism above the collective good and we have moved from instinctively acting to assure our survival as a species and from survival of our diverse personal biological lines towards immediate gratification of whims. In that light, we are the only species that places a “moral” value on the ability to terminate the gestative life of healthy progeny. However, like many species, we have ingrained territorial instincts that make us as aggressive as any other species in the waging of war, something we do from tiny individual battles through battles between huge groups of states seeking hegemony.

What accounts for such anomalous tendencies?

I posit that it may involve a phenomenon described by atheist advocate Richard Dawkins as “memes” and, in operative combinations, as “memeplexes”.  Memes are akin to biological “genes”. Genes are the primary blueprints and building blocks for life based on the information they carry, perpetuate and share and through which they provide other genes and enzymes, etc., with orders that are usually carried out. When they are not, mutations occur with mutation also being an evolutionary tool seeking, through trial and error, to accomplish biological improvements. Memes perform similar functions but in a less direct biological context and, apparently, without an exterior guiding principal. They are the most basic units serving as a carriers of non-biological information.  While combinations of genes result in biological lifeforms ranging from amoeba to humans, combinations of memes form cultural quasi-life forms such as belief systems, philosophies, religions, nations, perhaps even history, etc., all of which share common elements associated with life forms such as birth, evolution, growth, instincts towards self-preservation, mutation, propagation, self-defense and aggression.

What seems to have occurred is that memeplexes have mutated into nature’s antagonists, into opponents of nature’s tendencies within us and, currently, memes and memeplexes seem to have proven dominant over genes, perhaps even reprograming genes and complexes of genes. In a fascinating albeit disturbing manner, memes and memeplexes use the human brain as their primary operational echanisms, both on an individual basis and collectively. In essence, memes hijack our brains and direct, or at least significantly impact our conduct through manipulation of our emotional reactions including our disposition and predisposition towards accepting things as accurate and true notwithstanding contrary physical and biological realities. Thus memes have converted truth from an absolute to a relative concept. They operate as a cancer infecting reality.

As we enter the age of what is termed “artificial intelligence”, really a complex series of programmed reactions used for both evaluative purposes and as mechanisms to impact our responses to diverse stimula, memeplexes become more and more controlling over the “rules” established through trial and error by evolutive nature and we become less and less a compound complex part of nature’s scheme seeking instead to bend nature to our memetic will.

If the religious concept of an antichrist or malevolent satanic figure applied to nature, then it seems reasonable to at least hypothesize that such “force” would be memetic based. Memes first conquered humans and then, using humans, memes have evolved as the antithesis to nature.

One wonders if a synthesis between nature and the bizarrely cancerous virtual world evolved through memes is possible, and if so, what it would be like.

It seems fascinating that Richard Dawkins, a bitter rival of anything associated with religion, was so prominent in sensing the basis for the subversion of nature.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.