I had come to the conclusion that natural selection drove the evolution of complexity in the physical world. I asked myself if it also applied to the world of ideas. This was before internet search engines so I relied on books. I hypothesized that discrete ideas could act like genes and be worked on by natural selection within and between cultures.
I live in Pittsburgh and we have the wonderful Carnegie Library system. I could look up a book in my local branch and if it wasn’t there, I could request a book from any of the other branches or the main library and it would be delivered to my branch in a few days. I got so familiar to the librarians that I could occasionally get non-circulating or even rare books.
Looking into genetics, I came across Richard Dawkins and his theory of memes. He had postulated that ideas acted like genes in the 1970’s and called these idea genes “memes”. There is now a whole field of study called “Memetics”.
Like you gentlemen, I wondered how “good” could exist in the world, not only without God, but with God too. Is “good” objectively good, or is it simply relatively good by chance or fiat? In other words, if God or nature told us bad was good would we see bad as good?
This takes me back to the Golden Rule. Although Jesus refined it to its positive form, others had expressed it in the negative earlier. The negative form I will call the “Silver Rule” for discussion purposes. A famous Jewish Scholar who died shortly before Jesus was born has a story associated with the Silver Rule: A young fool approached the Rabbi and said:
“I will convert to Judaism if you can teach me the law while standing on one foot”
The master raised one foot and said, “Do not do to others that which you despise! The rest is just commentary. Go and study it”
I am paraphrasing from memory, so it may be that it was the fool who raised his foot :).
Socrates in Greece, Mencius in China, Buddha in India, Hillel and Jesus in Judea, all came up with the same idea within about 500 years of each other. At first I thought that Alexander’s conquests might account for the spread of this meme, but studying the teachers’ other writings, it was obvious that they had arrived at it independently from very different intellectual starting points. This process is called convergent evolution by biologists.
Natural Selection is a sloppy term. It works well enough generally, but natural selection in the particular, is simply an event, or series of events acting on a subject,. Why would the Silver Rule be a major part of the philosophy of great civilizations? Why wouldn’t there be just as many “Black Rule” (f*** everybody) civilizations? In fact, the golden rule seems to fly in the face of Richard Dawkin’s selfish gene theory and the basic premise of evolution that we are all in a competition to spread our genes.
I looked for civilizations that worshipped the “black Rule”. I took human sacrifice to be a marker for the Black Rule. There were empires in America, Africa, and the Middle East, that I studied. I was getting into their very interesting history when the one salient fact hit me. They were all gone, extinct in other words. This was more evidence for natural selection acting on memes.
I have to wrap this up, but consider:
5 men acting together can usually defeat one man. 100 men can crush 5. In a world filled with challenges, it has been proven that the more people acting together the better are their chances for survival. This coming together though requires some glue to keep it together in the face of our personal needs, wants, and desires. To keep a group together the cohesive force of the glue has to be greater than the pressure of individual needs. Physical force has been used to hold kingdoms together, but kingdoms, too are becoming extinct. Democracy is on the rise and democracies are dependent (loosely!) on the will of the people. People stay in democracies voluntarily.
All of this coming together and creation of group institutions is a progression from a simple every-man-for-himself paradigm to a highly complex religio-cultural one. In common usage, this is a case of entropy in reverse or anti-entropy. Complex systems are supposed to break down into simpler ones, not the other way around.
If you look at almost every thing you consider “good” you will see that it tends toward bringing people together. The things you consider “bad” like stealing, murder, adultery, lying, cheating, hate etc. will destroy cultures, that’s why cultures create laws against them.
In other words, good is ant-entropic and bad is entropic.
Try thinking about naturally bad things like poison. Why are they bad? A poison simply interrupts a function required for life. Death is entropic. You break down to your component parts.
The Golden Rule exists because cultures that subscribe to it as a goal thrive and grow and spread the meme. Those that do not wither and die. Islam will adopt it or die, for example.
“Good” you see, fights entropy. Good is cosmos, bad is chaos.