Life in Postwar America After Our Stunning Defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016

In case you have not noticed, the United States of America has now gained the distinction of being the very first world power to be defeated by cyberwarfare. Our defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was so stunning and so complete that hardly any in our defeated nation even know that it has happened. In my posting Cyber Civil Defense, I warned that, since it was impossible for the government of the United States to fend off cyberattacks by foreign powers, that it was up to each individual citizen of the United States to stop believing in the stupid political memes to be found on the Internet. That is what we learned to do back in the 1950s when it was openly admitted by the United States government that we could not be protected from a nuclear attack by the Russian strategic bomber force. Instead, we were told to build private and public fallout shelters across the country. Unfortunately, nobody paid heed to my warnings and we now find ourselves living in a deeply divided and defeated post-cyberwar country that is politically paralyzed and incapable of even acting in its own best interest. How could this possibly have happened?

A Possible Explanation Based on Softwarephysics
The key finding of softwarephysics is that it is all about the interactions of self-replicating information. For more on that please see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. In this case, I contend that the dramatic defeat of the United States in the very first large-scale cyberwar resulted from a controlled manipulation of the interactions between political memes and domestic software by foreign and domestic powers that then went viral and ran amuck. Things are now so bad in postwar America, that I can already sense that my assertion has about 40% of the surviving Americans withdrawing to one tribal corner and the remainder withdrawing to another tribal corner in preparation for combat and that is the problem. So let's use some softwarephysics to see why. In softwarephysics, Homo sapiens is modeled as a hardware platform of carbon-based Intelligence 1.0 that primarily stores and replicates memes. So Homo sapiens is both a DNA survival machine and a meme survival machine that has a very dense and complex neural network that stores and replicates memes. In this view, Homo sapiens is an example of Deep Learning at its best and is far superior to anything that Intelligence 2.0 currently has running on silicon. This is a significantly different model than most people use on a daily basis. Most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but I do not think that it adequately explains our current predicament.

So let us all finally admit that we all have Minds that are infected with political memes just trying to self-replicate and that these political memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, as outlined by Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996) and by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). These political memes are just trying to survive and self-replicate and have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA uses to ensure its own survival in the DNA survival machines known to us as Homo sapiens. In this view, these political memes are neither inherently "good" nor "bad" - they just are. Next, let us explore how the Russian FSB brilliantly used these facts to defeat the United States of America with cyberwarfare. Only a few Russians were lost in this cyberwar and perhaps there was not even a single American casualty through it all. What a spectacular victory! Contrast that to the 27 million Russians who died during the Great Patriotic War of World War II. Now how in the world could the Russian FSB manage to do this? Well, all they needed to do was to convert a good portion of Americans into unwitting Russian assets. Thanks to the bizarre electoral college process for electing a new president of the United States outlined in our Constitution, you do not even need to convert a majority of Americans into Russian assets. All you have to do is to convert more than 50% of those casting votes in certain key states into Russian assets. But how do you do that?

I just finished episode two Friends for the Moment of the new Netflix series Inside the Mossad. The Friends for the Moment episode covers how the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, recruits foreign assets and manages those assets with Mossad operators. Now I am quite sure that the techniques portrayed in this episode are the very same techniques that are used by all of the intelligence agencies throughout the world, like the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Russian FSB. And there is nothing wrong with that. I find that the use of espionage by nations is far better than the use of war to achieve political ends. Think of the countless lives that espionage has saved compared to the millions lost on the battlefields of World War I and World War II. In Friends for the Moment, it is explained that the ultimate objective of recruiting a foreign asset is to get the asset to provide information and to perform actions that betray his country. This is not an easy thing to do. An operator must be very patient as he very gently and very carefully leads the asset down a path that ultimately leads to treason. The operator does this by using the same techniques that conmen use to trick and seduce normally honest people into giving up their money while in pursuit of a shady deal that is too good to be true.

For example, suppose an operator needs some photographs of a secret foreign installation in a Middle Eastern country and needs a foreign asset to obtain them. One approach would be to befriend a film student in the target country. Then the operator tells the potential asset that he has contacts in Hollywood and that his Hollywood contacts need some Middle Eastern stock footage for an upcoming film. All the film student needs to do is to take some footage along any road in the desert of his choosing. When the stock footage comes back, the operator heaps praise upon the potential asset and explains to the potential asset that his Hollywood contacts would like to buy the footage for a very good price. Next, the operator tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts need some stock footage of a chemical plant or oil refinery - anything with lots of distillation towers and piping. When that footage is returned, it is again purchased for a very good price. Next, the operator then tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts really liked all the work that the asset has already performed, but that they are especially interested in some footage of a specific facility along a certain road and would like to contract the asset to provide that footage. This goes on and on as the asset unwittingly provides more and more sensitive footage. At some point, the "penny drops". This is when the asset finally realizes that he has been the victim of a con and finally comes to grips with the implications of the very serious things that he has been doing. By that time, it is too late for the asset. There is far too much incriminating evidence that the asset has committed traitorous acts for money. At this point, the operator can then request the asset to perform obviously traitorous acts because the operator now has a great deal of leverage over the asset. None of this has to be explicitly articulated. Both the operator and the asset now know what is going on even if they do not specifically lay it out in words.

For example, suppose you were a brash young real estate developer with a string of bankruptcies that prevented you from obtaining large loans for real estate deals from the major banks. A number of Russian FSB operators might approach you with the offer of investing in your real estate deals. Then, over a number of years, it might become apparent that these investments by Russian FSB operators might be deemed to be money laundering activities by the authorities. At some point, the "penny drops" without a spoken word needed between the Russian FSB operators and their newly recruited asset. Both parties now know what is truly going on and that it is too late for the asset to back out now.

The Power of Parasitic Political Memes
In SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software I discussed the potential power of parasitic interstellar self-replicating information. In particular, I quoted a passage from Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures (2000) by Carl Zimmer which follows an earlier tale about how a certain fungus makes house flies die at the top of blades of grass so that they can drop spores onto other house flies.

“Another species of fluke can be found in the meadows of Europe and Asia, along with a few in North America and Australia. Known as Dicrocoelium dendriticum, or the lancet fluke, it makes cows and other grazers its host as an adult, and the cows spread their eggs in their manure. Hungry snails swallow the eggs, which hatch in their intestines. They drill through the wall of a snail’s gut and settle in the digestive gland. There the flukes produce a generation of cercariae, which make their way to the snail’s surface. The snail tries to defend itself from the parasites by blocking them off with walls of slime. The slime balls up around the cercariae, which the snail coughs up and leaves behind in the grass.

Next, along comes an ant. To an ant, a slimeball is positively delicious. Along with the slime, the ant may also swallow hundreds of lancet flukes as well. The parasites slide down into its gut, and they then wander for a while through its body, eventually moving to the cluster of nerves that control the ant’s mandibles. The parasites all travel together on this trip, but after visiting the nerves, they split up. Most of the lancet flukes head back to the abdomen, where they form cysts, but one or two stay behind in the ant’s head.

There they do some parasitic voodoo on their hosts. As evening approaches and the air cools, the ants find themselves drawn away from their fellow ants on the ground and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Like flies infected with a fungus, the ants clamp down on the tip of the grass. But the lancet fluke has a different goal than the fungus does. The fungus uses its host as a catapult to shower its spores on other insects. The lancet fluke can continue to live only if it can get inside its final host, a mammal. Clamped to the tip of a grass blade, the infected ant is likely to be devoured by a cow or some other grazer passing by. When the ant tumbles into the cow’s stomach, the flukes burst out and make their way to the cow’s liver, where the flukes will live as adults.

But the lancet fluke, like the fungus, is very aware of the passing of time. If the ant sits the whole night without being eaten and the sun rises, the fluke lets the ant loosen its grip on the grass. The ant scurries back down to the ground and spends the day acting like a regular insect again. If the host were to bake in the heat of the direct sun, the parasite would die with it. When evening comes again, it sends the ant back up a blade of grass for another try.”

Now just think of what the Russian FSB operators have been able to achieve by simply exploiting the already existing greed, anger, hate and fear of their American hosts by spreading parasitic political memes and using our very own social media software platforms to do it! They have us in a trade war with China, making friends with our former adversaries in North Korea and Russia, investigating the counterespionage wings of our CIA and FBI for wrongdoing, forsaking all of our traditional American values, at odds with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south and making enemies of our former NATO allies, all while we cozy up to every fascist Alt-Right regime on the planet. We are now also politically paralyzed and in no way capable of leading the free world as we once did. In fact, we cannot even manage our own affairs. And like an infected ant, we do not even know that the world order has drastically changed for at least a decade or more.

But do not blame the Russian FSB for our present situation. We did this to ourselves. We started to climb out onto this ledge all by ourselves about 60 years ago. The Russian FSB only had to give us a gentle nudge into political oblivion.

Postwar Recovery
Another thing that we learned back in the 1950s was that immediately following a major nuclear war, it was expected that it would take an extended period of time for the federal government of the United States to reconstitute itself and recover. The same would be true for the local and state governments, so it was important for individual citizens to help out with the postwar recovery process. Otherwise, the entire United States might descend into a number of tribal groups ruled by local warlords. I would like to suggest that postwar America has indeed descended into two tribal camps following the Great Cyberwar of 2016 and that it is now up to the survivors to recover what we once had. Now kids were taught civics back in the 1950s and so we knew about how the United States Constitution and the federal government were supposed to work. Since civics is hardly ever even mentioned these days, let's review some basic civics to help with our postwar recovery.

The United States Constitution was a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. These philosophical movements brought forth the heretical proposition that rational thought, combined with evidence-based reasoning, could reveal the absolute truth, and allow individuals to actually govern themselves, without the need for an authoritarian monarchy. This change in thinking led to the 18th-century Enlightenment and brought forth the United States of America as a self-governing political entity. But unfortunately, the United States of America has always been a very dangerous experiment in human nature to see if the masses could truly govern themselves, without succumbing to the passions of the mob. That is where the genius of the United States Constitution comes into play. The United States Constitution sets up a representative republic designed for an electorate that is only mildly paying attention to the events of the day but that can sometimes get riled up over certain issues. The representatives of this largely ill-informed electorate can also many times become scoundrels. On the face of it, it would appear that such a system could not possibly work. But it does work because the United States Constitution places many layers between the electorate and the governing bodies and has a large number of checks and balances to limit the powers of the political representatives.

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published The Leviathan, in which he argued against the divine right of kings, but maintained the absolute supremacy of the monarchy. In The Leviathan, Hobbes argued that in “a state of nature" without government, life would be totally insecure. Under such conditions, people should willingly surrender their civil liberties to an absolute sovereign, who would protect them from all dangers. Hobbes argued that the sovereign's power was absolute - he made the law, he was the decider, and no other institution could limit the sovereign’s power. This was the position of the Loyalists or Tories during the American Revolutionary War, who comprised about 25% of the population. The Tories were 18th-century conservatives who wished to remain loyal to King George during the Revolution and fought on the side of King George to preserve his sovereignty over the colonies. On the other hand, about 25% of the population were 18th-century liberals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams who were followers of the 18th-century Enlightenment that rejected the ideas of Hobbes and believed that people could live in a state of liberty and self-governance tempered by individual responsibility. Many of the Founding Fathers had a great distrust of the Powers That Be. These anti-Federalist Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had a great fear that Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist theories would result in the presidency becoming a new sovereignty in a Hobbesian sense, like the King George they had just freed themselves from. In response, they were instrumental in amending the newly minted Constitution of the United States (1787) with the Bill of Rights (1791) to limit the powers of the Powers That Be. Since political movements are meme-complexes and subject to change, it is interesting how the Jeffersonian 18th-century liberal concepts of a federal government, with very limited powers, evolved into 20th-century conservativism, while Hamiltonian 18th-century conservativism, which advocated a strong central government, evolved into 20th-century liberalism. Now it seems that 21st-century liberalism is returning to its 18th-century roots and so is 21st-century conservativism, in that 21st-century liberals seem to be more wary of the president of the United States trying to become a king with absolute powers than do 21st-century conservatives, who support an unrestrained president to achieve their political goals.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was devastating for the United States of America and it will take several decades for us to recover from it. The most important thing for us to remember is that we did this to ourselves, and we did this to ourselves because of parasitic political memes infecting the vast neural networks in our heads that we call our Minds. So we all need to go on a twelve-step program, similar to the ones used to deprogram cult members, to help bring back some political civility. The first step is to recognize that our current political worldviews probably contain many false memes. One way to remove false memes from your political worldview is to use the Scientific Method that I outlined in How To Think Like A Scientist. Galileo pointed out that the truth is not afraid of scrutiny, the more you pound on the truth, the more you confirm its validity. False memes do not stand up well to close scrutiny as I described in The Danger of Believing in Things. I contend that the only way to restore the United States of America is to go back to our foundations in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. At one time, these memes were so prevalent and were considered to be so American that no one even bothered to bring them up because they were so obvious. Perhaps that is when we started to lose our way as Americans.

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

The Role of Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software

I just finished reading The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) by the very famous evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson who is the world's expert on myrmecology, the study of ants. Edward O. Wilson also became one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, the explanation of social behaviors in terms of evolutionary biological thought, when he published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson presents a new theory by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and himself for the rise of eusocial behavior in species by means of multilevel selection. Now Darwin's theory of evolution maintains that given a system subject to the natural processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that things will have no choice but to change into new things that are better adapted to the current state of affairs. But for the past 160 years, ever since On the Origin of Species (1859) was first published, people have always had a difficult time with figuring out on exactly what level of organization natural selection works. For carbon-based life, does natural selection work at the level of an entire species, a group of individuals in a species, a sole individual in a species, groups of genes in a species, a single gene of a species or at the level of a single DNA base pair? Softwarephysics agrees with Richard Dawkins' contention that most selection for carbon-based life operates at the level of the individual gene as proposed in his The Selfish Gene (1976). Multilevel selection, on the other hand, maintains that for each individual member of a social species there is a balance between individual selection and group selection. Individual selection encourages the selfish behavior of individuals in order to replicate the genes of each individual in a society, and those selfish behaviors are governed by the selfish genes of the individual. Group selection, on the other hand, encourages the selfless altruistic behaviors of individuals that advance the survivability of an entire societal group. Clearly, the opposing concepts of individual selection and group selection are at odds with each other and have been much debated.

The Social Conquest of Earth covers in detail many observations of eusocial behavior in both certain species of social insects and the human species Homo sapiens and then goes on to explain the rise of such behaviors with the new theory for the rise of eusocial species that differs from the current standard theory. Thus, The Social Conquest of Earth is a very interesting popular book that covers the 2010 paper first published in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson that is available at:

The Evolution of Eusociality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

But The Social Conquest of Earth then goes on to expand this new theory for the origin of eusocial behavior in Homo sapiens.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Multilevel Selection
This new theory for the rise of eusocial behavior can best be summarized by the last paragraph of the above paper:

To summarize very briefly, we suggest that the full theory of eusocial evolution consists of a series of stages, of which the following may be recognized:

1. The formation of groups.

2. The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest.

3. The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the silencing of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains a key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to springloaded preadaptations.

4. Emergent traits caused by the interaction of group members are shaped through natural selection by environmental forces.

5. Multilevel selection drives changes in the colony life cycle and social structures, often to elaborate extremes.

The main idea of this new theory is that once a group of individuals forms, the group itself can become another environmental factor amongst the many environmental selection factors that select for genes that enhance the survivability of the individual. Being a member of a group that has been selected for genes with altruistic behaviors can certainly enhance the survivability of an individual up to a point. But these altruistic genes necessarily have to be balanced with selfish genes that only benefit the survivability of the individual too. Thus develops the coevolutionary battle between group selection and individual selection that is known as multilevel selection.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Kin Selection
The more conventional theory for the origin of altruistic and eusocial behavior can also be summarized by the above paper as:

For the past four decades kin selection theory has had a profound effect on the interpretation of the genetic evolution of eusociality and, by extension, of social behavior in general. The defining feature of kin selection theory is the concept of inclusive fitness. When evaluating an action, inclusive fitness is defined as the sum of the effect of this action on the actor’s own fitness and on the fitness of the recipient multiplied by the relatedness between actor and recipient, where “recipient” refers to anyone whose fitness is modified by the action.

The idea was first stated by J. B. S. Haldane in 1955, and a foundation of a full theory was laid out by W. D. Hamilton in 1964. The pivotal idea expressed by both writers was formalized by Hamilton as the inequality R > c/b, meaning that cooperation is favored by natural selection if relatedness is greater than the cost to benefit ratio. The relatedness parameter R was originally expressed as the fraction of the genes shared between the altruist and the recipient due to their common descent, hence the likelihood the altruistic gene will be shared. For example, altruism will evolve if the benefit to a brother or sister is greater than 2 times the cost to the altruist (R = 1/2) or 8 times in case of a first cousin (R = 1/8).

Personally, I have never been a big fan of kin selection and inclusive fitness theory. I know that Orgel's Second Rule states that evolution is much smarter than I am, but I have never been able to see a way for genes to figure out the c/b ratio and the degree of relatedness R for very distant relatives by the standard means of inheritance and innovation honed by natural selection. Yes, taking care of your offspring should have a relatively low c/b ratio for your genes since your offspring have 1/2 of your genes and an R of 1/2, at least if you are the mother. But even so, many species do not do that, and even for those that do, the fathers never really know for sure. When performing the c/b ratio calculation for contacting a very distant relative of apparently very low relatedness R, I just keep thinking about all of those surprised customers on 23andMe commercials who may have found themselves in all sorts of family squabbles at Thanksgiving dinner. However, I can see a way for inheritance, innovation and natural selection to stumble upon the fact that living in a group of similar organisms with a shared gene pool can sometimes improve the survivability of the individual when individual selection and group selection operate in a mutual parasitic/symbiotic manner.

Multilevel Selection Generates Controversy
The above paper generated quite a bit of controversy in academia that got a bit nasty. For example, see the 2011 response by F. Rousset and S. Lion at:

Much ado about nothing: Nowak et al.’s charge against inclusive fitness theory
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02251.x

After reading the above paper, I was taken aback a bit by the level of the academic "Nature, red in tooth and claw" concerning the topic. For an outsider, this violent academic controversy looks very much like two memes in mortal combat fighting to the death. Strangely, I think that Richard Dawkins' concept of Replicators and memes, first expressed in The Selfish Gene, might be key to resolving this controversy and that some of the findings of softwarephysics might help to soothe some of these very troubled academic waters.

From the perspective of softwarephysics, the new multilevel selection model for the rise of eusocial species seems almost self-evident because we see it at work today with the rise of software, echoing James Hutton's "The present is key to the past". The multilevel selection of individual selection and group selection working together in a coevolutionary manner is just a recognition of the fact that there is more than one single form of self-replicating information on the planet and that all of these many forms of self-replicating information are coevolving together. In fact, we now have at least five major forms of self-replicating information on the planet all coevolving with each other. 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. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

From the above list of common characteristics, we see that a group of individuals could in effect become a form of self-replicating information that skips down through the generations, largely unscathed by time, as a self-sustaining network of altruistic and selfish genes coevolving together in a stable manner that balances both the survivability of the group and the individuals in the group. I know that group selection is frowned upon by many evolutionary biologists but think of a ripple on a still pond. The ripple is a wave of information that persists through time as a disturbance of the behaviors of countless numbers of individual water molecules. There are no genes for ripples, yet ripples do exist as each water molecule responds to the local forces of nature, and ripples could even be used to transfer information. That's how you hear someone speaking. In order to better understand the nature of self-replicating information, it helps to have some understanding of the nature of information in general with the understanding that the concept of information is still a bit fuzzy. Please see The Demon of Software, Is Information Real?, and Some More Information About Information.

The important thing to keep in mind is that all of the five major forms of self-replicating information now on the planet are also coevolving together in a parasitic/symbiotic manner. For example, standard DNA viruses and transposons are examples of parasitic DNA that are coevolving with all of the other carbon-based life forms on the Earth, from bacteria all the way up to the most complicated multicellular organisms. Retroviruses, like the AIDS virus, are examples of parasitic RNA that are also coevolving with all forms of carbon-based life. Prions are examples of geometrical configurations of certain organic molecules self-replicating and coevolving with all of the other forms of carbon-based life too. And now we have the memes and software coevolving too on many levels.

Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software
Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. 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 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 coevolving relationship with the memes. Currently, software is created by the programming memes to be found within the minds of programmers and is replicated by the minds of end-users in a parasitic/symbiotic manner that then allows many other memes to self-replicate. This will likely continue for the next 20 - 50 years until software is finally able to write itself. For more on that please see The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity. In the meantime, software currently evolves in a multilevel fashion that takes advantage of both individual and group selection processes. Programmers are now called developers so I will use that terminology going forward. Developers are broken up in IT departments into tribes of 5 – 30 developers working under a single chief, or IT application development manager. Each application development tribe of 5 – 30 developers is a semi-isolated population of developers, dedicated to supporting a number of applications, or possibly, a small segment of a very large application like Microsoft Word. But to fully understand how individual and group selection processes are run in these development tribes please see How Software Evolves.

The memes are still the most dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and have formed a very strong parasitic/symbiotic relationship with software. The memes foster the evolution of software by supporting and funding software development, and software is now responsible for replicating most memes. In the modern world, beyond personal word-of-mouth communications, memes can now only self-replicate with the aid of software, and the poor memes in our heads have become Facebook and Twitter addicts. Since all forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that 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 blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have never required a designer to take over a planet in the past and will not need one in the future either.

So we are now living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. For biologists, this presents an invaluable opportunity because software has been evolving about 100 million times faster than living things over the past 78 years, or 2.46 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941. The evolution of software over that period of time is the only history of a form of self-replicating information that has actually been recorded by human history. In fact, the evolutionary history of software has all occurred within a single human lifetime, and many of those humans are still alive today to testify as to what actually had happened, something that those working on the origin of life on the Earth and its early evolution can only try to imagine.

The Need to Revive Memetics in Sociobiology
In The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson goes on to apply the new multilevel selection theory for the rise of eusocial behavior to the rise of eusocial behavior in human societies using the same five steps that are proposed to bring forth eusocial behavior in social insects. I think that such an analysis could benefit greatly by reviving the recently discarded science of memetics. For more on that please see How to Use Softwarephysics to Revive Memetics in Academia and 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.

I think that memetics was discarded prematurely by sociobiologists because, deep down, humans simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but it is an impediment that has seriously affected many scientific disciplines. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines and that it was "memetic-drive" that was responsible for creating our extremely large brains, and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Similarly, it was the relentless demands of software over the years for more and more CPU-cycles and memory that provided the "software-drive" that was responsible for the rapid advance of computing hardware. For a brief history of the effects that "software-drive" had on the prodigious advances of computing hardware, see the last half of Did Carbon-Based Life on Earth Really Have a LUCA - a Last Universal Common Ancestor?. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore also goes on to point out that the memes at first coevolved with the genes during their early days, but have since outrun the genes because the genes could simply not keep pace when the memes began to evolve millions of times faster than the genes. The same thing is happening before our very eyes to the memes, with software now rapidly outpacing the memes. Software is now evolving thousands of times faster than the memes, and the memes can simply no longer keep up.

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