Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes Blackmore July 2009
<p>Aug 2, 2009 11:16 AM
 
Third replicator.
 
we are lumbering robots for carrying genes around per Richard Dawkins.
 
We imitate... culture was born.
 
Humans alone are meme machines.
 
 
There was also a cost to the rest of life on Earth. Wherever they went humans took memes with them, spreading agriculture and changing the landscape, obliterating some species, domesticating others and changing whole ecosystems. Then, much more recently, they began to build radically new kinds of technology, and the changes they effected dwarfed anything that had gone before. Was this just more of the same or something new?
 
 
Last year Google announced that the web had passed the <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html" target="nsarticle">trillion mark</a>, with more than 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. Many countries now have nearly as many computers as people, and if you count phones and other connected gadgets they far outnumber people.
 
Billions of years ago, free-living bacteria are thought to have become incorporated into living cells as energy-providing mitochondria. Both sides benefited from the deal. Perhaps the same is happening to us now. The growing web of machines we let loose needs us to run the power stations, build the factories that make the computers, and repair things when they go wrong - and will do for some time yet. In return we get entertainment, tedious tasks done for us, facts at the click of a mouse and as much communication as we can ask for. It's a deal we are not likely to turn down.
 
Gadgets like phones and PCs are already using 15 per cent of household power and rising <a href="/article/mg20227095.800-powerhungry-gadgets-must-learn-to-diet.html">(<i>New Scientist</i>, 23 May, p 17)</a>; the web is using over 5 per cent of the world's entire power and rising.
 
 
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