Draft of Introductory Remarks to "From Meme to Gene"
Let’s workshop this intro to a piece that explores how cultural memes can, under the right evolutionary pressures and over vast stretches of time, imprint themselves onto our very genetic code
scent of the day: Opus IX, by Amouage. A pissy-floral fragrance whose honeycomb gives it a tight resemblance to 80s powerhouses fragrances like Boss Number One, Opus IX brings us—with its shameless mélange of animalics (skin-salt ambergris, cat-butt civet, urinal-cake honeycomb, and an extremely indolic jasmine)—right to the vulva creases of a brothel whose worn leather furniture reflects years of secondhand smoke and firsthand juices.
Introductory Remarks
We all are familiar with memes. Mainly when we think of memes, we think of internet memes: images, videos, or phrases that spread (mostly due to their humor) across social media, gaining new layers of meaning as they are shared and adapted. But we are also well aware of cultural memes: styles of look or movement, behavior or approach, that replicate across a population through imitation. One kid wears his baseball hat backward, or one pimp slides down the street with an asymmetrical drag-step bop, and then—due to a convergence of subtle factors—bam! The practice spreads like wildfire. Wearing pants halfway down one’s ass (a cultural symbol of defiance that originated in prisons, where inmates were often without belts)—that is a good example we have all encountered. It has spread so successfully over the last two decades, outcompeting countless other styles, that we see it embodied in hip-hop fans across the globe, regardless of race or creed.
Countless cultural memes have gone extinct just as have countless biological species. The pants-sagging-off-the-ass meme likely has the same fate. But perhaps, by some improbable convergence of factors, it could prove not just another phase for the dustbin. For all we know, it could very well drive genetic changes over evolutionary time—much as the standing-on-hind-legs meme, due to its advantages in savannah habitats with sparse clusters of acacia trees, drove genetic changes among certain primates, changes ultimately leading to the bipedal bauplan we take for granted today.
Conditions, of course, need to be just right for such a farfetched scenario to play out—a scenario, in effect, where a meme (itself a way, if you will, for genes to run what-works-best experiments at a quicker pace than they could were there no cultural stratum) coils its influence back down into the genetic code (deep enough perhaps to alter our archetypal code). Environmental pressures would need to remain stable over extended periods. They would need to be strong enough to counter the fashion rebellions of adolescence. The list goes on. But however big these ifs might be, the convergence of factors shaping the long neck of the giraffe or the indolic scent of jasmine or so on would have been itself a mega if from a perspective far enough upstream.
Delving into the details of such a hypothetical narrative—one that considers (1) how the pants meme might, under specific environmental conditions, provide enough selective advantage to outweigh its disadvantages and (2) what genetic changes might arise as a result—is no mere intellectual exercise. Even a relatively cursory glance at its main plot points can provide a fresh appreciation on how familiar traits and behaviors (like bipedalism), which many of us might take for granted as “just the way things are,” emerge from intricate processes that could have unfolded quite differently with just a few small tweaks. Such an exercise invites us to see—with more dispassionate eyes—how, given the right circumstances, even seemingly ephemeral quirks of rebellion (the kind a parent might easily dismiss as “just a phase”) have a chance, albeit slim, to entrench themselves over evolutionary time into the deepest recesses of our genetic makeup.
Let us take the time, then, to appreciate at least the broad-stroke specifics of how the pants meme might drive genetic change—if only to have us appreciate in a more concrete way how so much we take for granted (as just the way we and ants and dinosaurs are) is a function of selective pressures whose smallest tweak could have produced drastically different present results. Even though I say “if only,” the importance of the activity—as fanciful as it is—should not be underestimated. Even many of those who talk about how backwards it is to reject Darwinian evolution are quite ignorant about what it is and what its implications are, which really pisses me off (perhaps even more than the evangelicals who reject evolution). A personal anecdote, which reveals the main emotional root for carrying out this exercise, should suffice to illustrate the point.
During a dinner at my mom’s house (a decade or so back now) I had expressed my belief that eating my son would be one of the highest ways to honor him if he died. I was met with incredulity by my mom’s friend, visiting at the time. She tried her best to cover what was mere emotional outrage behind a scientific veer. What she said, in effect, was that we know cannibalism is wrong because people who eat people get kuru. “Nature’s payback”—that is how she described kuru, a fatal neurodegenerative disease where the ingestion of misfolded prions (proteins that, among other things, help regulate neuronal activity) can induce a cascade of protein misfolding that results in various neurodegenerative effects. I gave the obvious rejoinders. (1) While every human has prions in the brain, not all are misfolded. So there are cases were I eat the brain and am not “paid back” by nature. (2) I could easily just avoid the brain. (3) Some people have a genetic resistance to kuru. In areas where brain-tissue cannibalism has long been popular (such as in Papau New Guinea) this genetic variation has become predominate.
I was still dissatisfied, however. Some part of it was that, the more I listed out the reasons (a listing that, to the monkey brain, too often reads as insecurity), the more her smile grew: the same expression of smug conviction we see, for example, in a diehard Christian too parochial to have even once thought of the fact that he would have rejected Christ’s divinity if born in Iran. A bigger part of my dissatisfaction was what seemed to me a hypocrisy so unbearable that I now think I am further along the spectrum than I long thought: the fact that, for all of the restrained fury with which she was ready to defend the wrongness of cannibalism, we were eating my mom’s meatballs: a mix of pig-and-cow factory farm suffering—and which, for all we knew, might have been full of heat-resistant mad-cow prions. An even bigger part, however, was her deep ignorance of Darwinian evolution. However much she might be one to scoff at the biblical story that God created all the species as they are and call herself—if only for reasons of political alliance (this was a time before the leftwing became anti-science cancelers)—a “believer in evolution,” her words reflected gross insensitivity to how much of all that seems locked in place is but a fluke of circumstance. Even if evolutionary processes had resulted in a situation in which every human would be poisoned to death by ingesting the flesh of another human, the nature’s-payback point—however much she might think otherwise—would still fall flat.
