By Shin Chul-hoFive months ago I read ``The Selfish Gene'' by Richard Dawkins. The reason why I am now putting pen to paper is that the book left an indelible impression on me.
Most impressive for me in that book was the `'meme," which Dawkins coined. He describes the meme as follows: ``The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a unit of cultural transmission, or unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.''
Genes' evolution takes millions of years or hundreds of millions of years. It would take an astronomical amount of time for man to fly like a bird or to swim like a fish. Memes are different in time. Education is a typical example of how memes work. Teaching students means that teachers try to ingratiate themselves with their ideas. In the process memes are transmitted to students' brains like genes propagate themselves. As they grow up, humans absorb more memes, combine old memes with new memes, produce state-of-the art memes which spread from brain to brain. That is human history and becomes human culture.
The Confucianist meme is ingrained in most Koreans' brains through experiences from childhood, whether it is good or bad. A person's behavior incompatible with Confucianism is severely criticized in Korean society. Koreans pay tribute to their ancestors on festive days. Hierarchical order is emphasized. All these social phenomena derive from the Confucianist meme that dates back to the 5th century B.C.
Park Tae-hwan won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle at the 2008 Beijing Games, becoming the first Asian to do so in 75 years. He might have inferior genes for swimming compared with European or American competitors. How could he overcome genetic handicaps? Definitely, he was coached in very scientific ways. Superior memes concerned with swimming were implanted into his brain indeed and his body was controlled by the learned memes.
Estonia stretching along the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland has reached a per capita income of $16,000 since its independence from the Soviet Union 17 years ago. Its people mostly belong to the Ural-Altaic division of the human race like Koreans, which means they share a lot of genes with us. However, I dare to say that their memes are much better than ours, considering their brilliant and very rapid economic achievement.
In this sense human kind are under the influence of memes far more than genes. Richard Dawkins writes, ``We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.'' Here, the selfish replicators are our genes whose only concern is to replicate themselves.
Ernst Mayor asserted as follows in his book, ``What Evolution Is": ``Even if something parallel to the origin of human intelligence should indeed have happened somewhere in the infinite universe, the chance that we would be able to communicate with it must be considered zero. Yes, for all practical purposes, man is alone.''
Perhaps he did not come to the realization that the human race has the ability to create fantastic and unimaginable memes. Human memes will gallop forward in leaps and bounds enough to travel faster than the speed of light and come across alien intelligence in the universe.
Anyway, any nation that has more powerful memes will dominate the globe. Currently, powerful memes are moving in the direction of human culture where democratic principals, market economy, social justice, free communication regardless of age, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, the equality of sexes, and scientific research and technology flourish in every inch of a nation.
The writer teaches English at an elementary school in Seoul. He can be reached at heemy123@hanmail.net.
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