Fate Deliver Me

12/16/07 Sunday

Central America is a lot like California…those parts of California that slip between the cracks in the sidewalk and hide amid the faux stucco walls….only much more so. That little hint of tropical flora/death metal Indio biker/eight children jaywalking in heavy traffic so distinctive of East LA explodes here like a symphony of multicolored/chicken in the street/big dirt parking lot pipebombs.

My ride from San Jose was an exercise in trusting the gods of fate to deliver me, unharmed, dreamlike, over waterfalls and through cloud forests, past ten dozen stray terriers and six times as many pollo y cerveza stops. My Spanish is terrible. Given that the main autopista is closed, it is amazing I made it here at all. I remember a clumsy communication regarding that matter, and two hours of wondering where the hell I was going. All this time, strange fields of coffee, zebu cattle, misty slopes.

I exchanged garbled bits of dialog with my driver, Ronnie, and pretended not to be on the verge of carsickness.

Costa Ricans drive like lunatic pirates. It is a shared sense of lunatic piracy that delivers them from one place to another, usually unharmed. We did see an inconvenient-looking car wreck along the way. Later, a tiny ambulance bound for rescue action. Jesus adorns the back of busses here.

The rainforest smells like potting soil. It is so thick with interesting birds that they stud the branches like bad theme wallpaper. Just a few hours ago, a snowstorm,. Now lluvia, gentle and soft.

Later that night.

Fireflies at night, the kind that like second-growth forests in Central America, haunt the path from the cafeteria. They emit single, bright flash, no J-shaped trajectory, and are very bright. Toads, crickets, their sounds are everywhere through the rain. Earlier, under the bridge, a cluster of collared peccaries, tiny rufus-tailed hummingbirds, a chestnut billed toucan. How this vegetation must regenerate (I was told, days later, that this forest was a cow pasture less than twenty years ago). Jan, why do I appreciate you so much more at moments like this? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

What I am not telling on 12/16 is that, after a beautiful walk home from dinner, I open the door to my room and find an older, Danish couple, sitting on both beds, in their pajamas. This was less surprising that you might think. Earlier that day, about the time I wrote the first entry, I checked into my room, Zompapa 1. Actually, I let myself into Arriera 1, with assurances from the guard that it was “el primero puerta”. It was, for the second block of buildings. Somehow, with some jiggling, which comes natural to any occupant of an old house, I let myself in to the wrong room. Seeing it already occupied, and having read the OTS guide, I knew that if things were crowded, I would have to share a room. I had a lot of trouble figuring out which side of the room the other person wanted, presuming that they did not know they would share the room when they moved in, days ago. I claimed a bed and tried to settle the place in the most innocuous manner possible.

Just before I wrote that second entry, I moved my stuff out of the last room, hastily trying my key here and there, till I found my own room. Alone, and not on a couch at the reception, or sharing a bed with a lovely, but irked Danish woman in starched Pajamas, I fell asleep to the sound of rain.

Andrena imitatrix

Today is THAT day. It is the last regular day of the semester. Students are busily calculating their points. Various point totals have been tabulated. Glory, failure, triumph and defeat, I can hear it all coming to pass in the hallway outside my cave. I hide in here. If there were any use in hiding under a table, I would hide there. I ignore their knocks. There are no more points for them. They have one more chance, which is to confront the best-four-of-five dynamic inherent in the optional final.

I hate points. I hate their obsessive focus on grades. I understand it, but I hate it. Only a small fraction of them are here for their education. For the others, they have responded to the family ambition to produce a doctor, a pharmacist-something practical and reeking of status. These occupations cleverly control supply, so that given high demand, they can assure their members high salaries, days off, golf, and the luxury of never answering the phone. The students, for the most part, do not understand this. Most of them will never make the cut. My job is to perform the initial phase of weeding. Those of them that cannot learn a great deal of heavy material in a short space of time will not make it to doctorship. Instead, they will do other things with their lives, and most likely, be happier. Nobody should be a doctor unless they have a genuine desire to serve humanity...I wish I could test for that without blatantly abusing my power.

Why did we invent points? They are a cheap, stupid, means of weighting the relative value of assignments. I first encountered points at UCLA and was stupefied. Points, being arbitrary, vary from one class to the next, and are somehow non-transferable.

What do I want from them? Everything and nothing. I want the impossible-for each and every one of the 450 students in bios 101 to blister with intellectual curiosity. I would probably give them all A grades, blisters and all. I do not expect this, I understand their utilitarian perspective. It makes me wish LSD were still fashionable at universities. I see the cosmic all.

This day, every semester, I remember the opening scene to Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, where the protagonist escapes out the window to his office, and think fondly.
Unfortunately, my office has no windows.
Soon, I will escape to an undisclosed location.

Every semester, they start as a list of names. Soon, they become points on a spreadsheet. Some of them become unique challenges; cheaters, squeaky wheels, the wonderful ones who are incredibly smart and learning a great deal-but do not do well in the class, because they overthink everything. Others quietly come and go. Every semester, one or two become friends.

The lost mariner is my friend now. She might last. I have another in the works, perhaps, and perhaps a few from the other place I teach.

The others, become a list of grades. Next semester, the process starts again.

A week ago, I corrected one of my species identifications. A species I had identified as Andrena fenningeri was actually Andrena imitatrix. This is the sort of mistake a taxonomist makes if they follow a key too precisely, and have no real fee for the various subgenera of Andrena. The latter bee is highly polymorphic, exhibiting widely different colors, textures, and, most likely, other aspects of its phenotpye, in different parts of its range. The former bee is rare, but widely-ranging. I wonder of fenningeri exists at all, actually, or is part of the variation in another polymorphic species. Labels.

Andrena imitatrix is born, after months spent under the ground, knowing precisely what it needs to locate food sources, build nests, reproduce, survive. Millions of years of coevolution with flowers, huge triumphs and tragedies as ice ages came and went. In general, Andrenas prosper in Northern latitudes, exploiting that guild of vegetation that flowers in spring before the trees leaf out. By the hundreds, Andrena species have migrated north and south as the ice ages, six of them at least, waxed and waned over the face of Eurasia. In my collection, it is a name. A record. Names.

Memes, ideons

Some Definitions Regarding the Particles of Culture

Sunday, I helped the emo kid move out of the emo hole he has chewed in the basement. The basement is now a powerful bastion of metal rehearsal space, full of the suggestion of creepy and dark practices. Peeling plaster has a wonderful aesthetic property to it.

The emo kid is adorable. He is the living embodiment of Parsifal, from the Wagner opera….the teutonic archtype of the wild man, innocent and powerful, who charges out of the woods. He is like the Sumerian Enkidu and just as ambiguously homosexual. It is always very difficult to get him to do the things he says he will, but that is another story.

We are carrying a plastic tub full of books out of the emo hole, and a shiny silver book floats to the top. It is Aunger’s The Electric Meme. This is all both memetic and Hegelian, dear readers, so humor me.

I recognize the title as a book as one the giantess who makes paintings of eyeballs had recommended to me. From the giantess, I already know the major thesis of the book….that a meme has a physical existence as a configuration of electrical activity in the brain of an organism. She and her ex ex ex ex lover have discussed it, on drugs. I dispute her notion that a meme in one brain would be recognizably similar to the same meme in another person’s brain…I think it most likely that we are all wired differently because of idosyncracies of our development. I am not sure this notion, of fixed configurations for memes, comes from Aunger, or from the giantess. Has the meme mutated and acquired a new ideon? I shall see.

My relationship with memes goes very far back. The first person who said “meme” in my presence, and thus, infected me with the meme that memes exist, was Robert Boyd. Boyd is a relatively obscure figure, unless you study memes. He is a legend in the meme world, as the man who co-wrote a book explaining that, in fact, the whole system of brains, memes, and culture (he never used the word meme-too much of an anthropologist for that….I think he used the saner and less sexy term, “cultural trait”), a book called Culture and the Evolutionary Process. I am one of the few people who talks about memes who has actually read that book. Like the giantess, I lend books out to people who do not return books.

So, I grab the shiny book off the stack. The shiny cover made it “stickier” to me, though the title of the book was already an ideon in my mind-part of the collection of books that have been written about memes. This book might actually make it back to the giantess. It displaced Hegel on my task list. Hegel’s writing is so densely packed with memes, and their smaller ideons (soon, soon, I will define), that it takes much more thought to read than Aunger’s salesmanlike, often pedantic, memetic tract. Hegel is dead and Aunger is alive, I think. It does not matter for the purposes of this argument, because I am experiencing the ideas of the two authors in the form of latent memes (soon, I will define). They authors wrote the ideas down, so that they could be found, on top of plastic tubs, or in Borders….and later, infect other minds. Unlike genes, memes modify themselves as they pass from one person to another. I think this is because they acquire new ideons as they enter a new mind, harvesting ideons from the mind of the bearer to reach either a stable structure, or to fall apart and fail to persist.

I have actually mulled over the ideas in this passage since 1990, the year Boyd first introduced me to the Meme, Richard Dawkins, and other things too numerous to mention. Robert Boyd might actually read this, if he compulsively googles himself (seems out of character for the man though)…and he would realize that I am invoking his idea because I am documenting the horizontal transmission of information, though since he is an academic father of sorts, it is vertical in some sense as well. In Culture and The Evolutionary Process, he details the process of horizontal transmission of cultural traits. Vertical is favored in stable environments, horizontal is favored in rapidly changing environments. The mere mention of his name makes my ideas “sticker”, because any person who googles “Robert Boyd, meme, Dawkins, etc…will find this, and also, since I name drop a known figure, read.

Horizontal transmission. That is what I am attempting to perform here. This is the first time I have sat down to write them. I will proceed to create several novel memes, inspired by a single meme. Even better, the original meme will acquire numerous new ideons in the process of my writing this.

Memes are composed of smaller units. There must be a point at which an idea can be broken into a series of smaller ideas which are simple enough as to be essentially dichotomous, categorical, or refutable by a competing idea. These fundamental particles are called ideons. Many ideons together, in one of several possible stable configurations, and you have a meme. There must be thousands of potential unstable configurations for every stable configuration, so only certain memes are allowable.

Ideon. This term is both mine, and not mine. I remember it from a science fiction story I read in the 1980’s. It was serialized in Analog magazine, and had Babbage engines. Mostly, I remember that the terms meme and ideon were used, in a single throwaway sentence, to define particles of culture in an imaginary plan to control history via primitive computers. As a reader, I was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation novels tremendously, and loved the notion of a particulate, gas-law-like theory of culture. Here were two names for particles (I had not yet read Dawkins, though there was the term meme, early in its existence, in front of me, having already spread from The Selfish Gene). I preferred ideon. Here, it is my fundamental particle.

Meme complexes result from the combined action of many memes. Just as ideons cluster into memes, so do memes cluster into meme complexes. For instance, Christianity is a meme complex, composed of thousands of smaller memes. Recognizably different versions of this meme complex have been given different names by different people. These competing versions are sects of Christianity. They compete for meme space with other religions. Most of them have key memes encoded within them to ensure 1) transmission (both vertical and horizontal; evangelism is adaptive for horizontal transmission, and the rule that children must be raised within the faith is good for vertical transmission), and 2) exclusion of other doctrines (to avoid corruption by incompatible ideons, and to increase fidelity of transmission), 3) fidelity (laws against heresy are essential for this.

The notion of immaculate conception, of Jesus, by Mary, is probably a meme. Within this single meme are hundreds of ideons. These include the notion that Joseph was visited by Gabriel before the conception, her status as an embodiment of divine mercy, etc. Many of these ideons come from the New Testament, obviously, others do not. Perfectly stable versions of the Virgin Mary exist without some idons (For instance, the Gabriel visit-not everybody accepts the story, but it is not essential for her existence), but some ideons are not permissible, because the would cause the meme to fall apart (for instance, Jesus must exist for Mary to have any relevance). There are millions of possible Mary memes that do not exist at the moment (For instance, the one where she wields a sword and fights monsters in Hell, and the one where she and her nemesis, the black virgin, are twins. I just made these up, though obviously, the black Madonna is another meme that has existed for hundreds of years). Meme complexes must cross over into other meme spaces as well, at least occasioinally.

Memes must share ideons with other memes, and meme complexes must share memes with other such complexes. Altering one meme, or even one ideon, can have far reaching effects on other memes. For example, the dichotomy; Mary conceived immaculately/Mary had sex with Joseph (there seem to be no alternate possibilities at the moment that I know about) are alternate ideons. They cannot coexist. Alternating between these two ideons has vast consequences to the meme, to the meme complex, and other memes in other meme spaces.

Latent meme. Aunger has spent a lot of space on the notion that memes cannot be objects, and I am only a few chapters into The Electric Meme. I will contradict him here. Latent memes are memes, in nonliving form, that can incite the existence of an actual meme in the appropriate target. I am creating an interconnected series of latent memes right now as I type this.

Meme space. This is akin to a habitat in ecology. Memes occupy, spread within, and compete for, meme space. There are different meme spaces. Cookware norms are one meme space, and as I will mention later, so is the notion of what constitutes an appropriate rock band. Some cultures have more meme spaces than others. Some cultures completely lack meme spaces that are very important in other cultures. For instance, many cultures have meme spaces associated with tattoos, the rituals associated with getting them, the appropriate rituals, etc…others lack them. Same for tobacco.

Memes have certain traits.

Adaptive value. I cast this in terms of the change in Darwinian fitness conferred to the bearer by possessing the meme. Whether or not a person benefits from the meme, independent of their fitness, is a larger and tougher issue.

Social Consequences. At the moment, societies do not seem to undergo radical group selection, such as the kind that Wilson (not E.O., the other one, D.S. Wilson, the group selectionist) imagined…but perhaps they can. Today, human groups are too changeable and temporary to act as targets of selection. If such selection existed, memes would affect the fitnesses of such groups, sometimes at least, and thus memetic selection would exist on multiple levels. Independent of that, memes have social consequences, and in many ways, they affect the transmissibility of other memes, their stickiness, etc.

Stickiness. This is not my term. It is an expression of how likely a meme is to be picked up by the appropriate target once it has found on.

Transmission rate. Not the same thing. An entity can broadcast nonsticky memes continuously. This is the rate at which the bearer of a meme, consciously or unconsciously, tries to infect other individuals.

Resistance to replacement from a competing meme. Fairly self-explanitory.

Memetic fitness. This, of course, is the ability of a meme to go about creating more copies of itself. It might be a function of the three attributes above.

Memes exhibit a memetic epistasis and memetic pleiotropy. Epistasis is the genetic term for the situation where multiple alleles at different loci interact to produce a phenotype. Pleiotropy is the attribute of an allele such that it affects multiple phenotypic traits. Some memes interact epistatically so as to render the target susceptible by other memes, or immune to invasion by other memes.

At some point, if I stay on this track, I will obsessively show how the notion of what constitutes an appropriate metal band is composed of memes, ideons, etc….

Dear Genevieve

My maternal grandmother is 87 years old. She was in the hospital with some sort of bleeding from the colon. She had a minor stroke, etc..all the things that remind a person that their organ systems are on the verge of cataclysmic failure. They sent her home, presumably because it is Christmas, and there is not much they can do to cure being OLD. I just sent her this letter snail mail. I have been a very distant grandson, partially because I am one voice among very many grandchildren and partially because my huge, extended, Midwestern Catholic family live in totally different mindspaces. Here is an attempt to bridge the gap. One more letter, before she surfs off into the primordial cosmic ocean. Annotations are in red.

Dear Grandma,

I am so glad to hear that you are back from the hospital. Christmas, snowfall, great grandchildren (How many do you have, at this point?)….all still here and waiting for you. I am an evolutionary biologist, so at the wedding, last summer, I tried to count how many copies of your genes are represented in this next, coming generation. The figure was staggering. You are, in a very immediate and real way, responsible for so many of us being here. Thank you. I like being here, on this Earth, and some of what makes me the person who I am comes from you.

I think that, from you, I have inherited a certain dogged, persistent, indestructible serenity. In your life, you have been through so much, and done so much. You have every reason to be ornery. However, every moment I have ever spent with you, regardless of the circumstances, you have been serene, calm, thoughtful. This was certainly the case when you cut the head off of a chicken in front of me. I was six or seven at the time, I think. You didn’t exactly charm the head off of that chicken. You manhandled it with the grim determination of a job that needed to be done. Despite this, there was something accepting, calm, resolute, and patient about the way you did it. It was work, not violence. That was an invaluable lesson for me to learn. I kill insect specimens during my work, many of them, all beautiful bees, and I dispatch them all with a certain dignity.

ALSO I got to see a chicken run around with its head cut off. Thank you. That was awesome for about a million different reasons.

By then, mom and dad had already done a good job of teaching me where food comes from, and also, that farm animals are not pets and that some of them have to die. That day, I learned another lesson, a different one, something stranger, much more interesting. The brain really does control the body. What we are-what makes us real, is locked up in our heads, somewhere. It seemed to be very important to avoid decapitation.

Thank you, once again, for every single time you have sent ten dollar checks, in Christmas cards, to me. When I was a kid, this was some of the only money I had. I love you so much. Among other things, that money has taught me how to start a bank account and how to keep money in it. It has also helped me to buy my first car. It has helped me to buy Dungeons and Dragons modules, so that I could spend my youth drawing maps of nonexistent caverns.

I am so glad I got a chance to see you at the wedding last summer. It was a particularly fun wedding, and Jan and I chose a good moment to go out and see my enormous extended family. Strange, isn’t it? Watching so many people grow up. When I was a kid, on the farm, I remember Jane attempting to cheer me up. For some reason, I think, a horsefly bit my eye. She stuck a penlight up her nose and made her nostril glow. She was an independent, feisty, powerful girl. I looked up to her. She will be a grandmother soon, most likely (or is she already? I forget...oh well).

It is Christmas, and I am sure you miss Lee. To me, he was a giant of a man-a force of nature. It might seem odd to you, since you know I am not religious, that I have arrived at some of the same conclusions about immortality, the soul, the spirit. I think like a scientist, and I ask big questions. Recently, I have had plenty of my own experiences that indicate there is something about all of us, some essential element, that lives on somewhere after we die, which was probably present before we were born. (These experiences were on LSD, by the way, some of them on my friend Lauren's bed, listening to Dvorak, as strange tendrils of my being that extend into other people, other times, became as palpable and real as the roach I was about to light. I didn't share that. I have had other times, such as the time at the Cradle of Filth show, high as a kite on marajuana brownies, that I saw the cosmic all, and a million possible incarnations of my recently dead pet, Limonata (a cockatiel), flapping and squaking down at me appreciatively) I can’t imagine what it will be like to ride that big wave back to wherever it goes next, some primordial ocean of the soul. It happens to all of us, sooner or later. When I was a kid, I used to think of the people in heaven as a place full of old people, except for the relatively few among them who died young. I imagined a very geriatric heaven, full of canes and wheelchairs. More realistic, don’t you think, to consider the notion that a person becomes the sum total of all of the people they were over their lifetime?

I know you heard Susie’s story about the day Lee passed on. Here’s mine. That same day, I was at the Field Museum in Chicago. I went to see a Lecture, but I had the time completely wrong. The security people let me into the museum long after closing time, because of the Lecture, which was over. Realizing that there was no lecture, I spent hours, alone, in the museum. Finally, I had the place to myself. Some strange extension of my grandfather passed through me that day, about the same time he passed on into the next world. I was standing in front of an enormously old shark skeleton, wondering if there was any evidence in the museum that I could use to convince him that it really was three hundred million years old. I felt him there, somehow. I checked my messages outside and learned that he had finally gone on, and I nodded goodbye to the man, imagining him, as a young man with a square jaw, wearing a fedora hat, behind the wheel of an enormous combine, threshing up extinct trilobites and crionoids, listening to the farm report from the Paleozoic, spraying pesticide on giant cockroaches out the window of the cab.

I love you, grandma.

Very much.

Alan