The Primal Memes of Bacteria

In Programming Clay and Crocheting Software, I explained that since the origin of software was such a hodge-podge of precursors, false starts, and failed attempts that it was nearly impossible to pinpoint an exact date for its origin. And I think the same is true for all forms of self-replicating information, including carbon-based life. Again, for newcomers to softwarephysics, let me recap the essentials of self-replicating information:

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:

1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic.

The Rise of the Memes
In this posting, I would like to examine the origin of the memes more closely. Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. These memes are being replicated by the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a carbon-based DNA survival machine that runs on the old metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA of yore, but also has a very large neural network that is capable of storing and replicating large numbers of self-replicating memes. Richard Dawkins first established the concept of the meme in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976). The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). For those of you not familiar with the term meme, it rhymes with the word “cream”. Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins described memes as “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.

Over the past 200,000 years, the memes residing within the neural networks of Homo sapiens have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that its predecessors had previously sequestered in the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors. But now that software is seemingly on the rise, like all of its predecessors, software has entered into a very closely coupled parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the memes. In today's world, memes allow software to succeed, and software allows memes to replicate. So the current rise of software to predominance is just another example of mother nature at work. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Since all forms of self-replicating information cannot think, they cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over a planet, and they certainly do not need to do so to be successful.

The Very Early Origin of the Memes
Now all along, I have unwittingly maintained the conventional wisdom that the memes first arose in the minds of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. But all of that changed after viewing the very enlightening TED presentation of nanophysicist Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktch at:

To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language https://www.ted.com/talks/fatima_alzahra_a_alatraktchi_to_detect_diseases_earlier_let_s_speak_bacteria_s_secret_language?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-03-30&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=top_right_button

This very interesting TED presentation really got me to thinking. Perhaps the very earliest of memes did not first arise a mere 200,000 years ago. Perhaps they really first came to be about four billion years ago with the appearance of the very first bacteria! As we saw in Susan Blackmore's TED presentation, the distinguishing characteristic of a meme is that it is a copied form of information that passes from one individual organism to another. From Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktch's TED presentation we see that the organism need not be a member of the species Homo sapiens, it might just be a simple prokaryotic bacterium. Yes, the memes that are passed from one bacterium to another may consist only of a single molecule, but as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness, the memes in the vast neural networks of Homo sapiens simply arise from the passage of neurotransmitter molecules from on neuron cell to another. This new view on the origin of the memes might just be characteristic of the origin of all new forms of self-replicating information. They may all have a very murky and nebulous beginning with no distinguishing "Aha!" moment of coming into existence, as I pointed out in Did Carbon-Based Life on Earth Really Have a LUCA - a Last Universal Common Ancestor?.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston