Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?

That's the title of a Susan Blackmore piece over at the New Scientist.  You've probably all had all of these ideas before, and frankly I'm not sure the article adds much, but I feel like I should do the third replicator a favor ...

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction.

The whole idea is actually still so vague as to be useless, but one might pause to wonder whether, instead of worrying about exactly what substrate was used for the copying, and dividing up history in that manner, you should just look at all of these as varying ways to copy information.  Maybe the fabled 'third replicator' stands in relation to memes the same way RNA stood in relation to DNA back in the day -- it's really just a more efficient replication of the same information?  In fact, maybe the whole thing is a trend towards faster and faster copying of information by whatever technology becomes available. 

If you start to look past the simplistic meme-gene division (which despite its pretense to dethrone humanity from its unique position as a thinking species, actually serves pretty well to reinforce it) you start to see that their our replicators everywhere.  Businesses replicate.  Capital replicates.  Governments replicate.  Are these all just memes, or are they something else?  Do we need 4th, 5th, and 6th replicators to describe them?  And how do they interact with the three that she proposes? 

As an aside, mostly what an article like this points out to me is how we really have no science of evolution.  We have nothing beyond what Darwin left us about replication, variation, and selection.  Of course, we have a lot more detail about how the little chemicals perform this and about how the lumbering robot phenotypes change as this happens, but that's not really a science of evolution per se.  Consider for instance whether the third replicator should even be considered evolutionary in that sense -- when was the last time competition for space forced you to delete a file?  If these digital replicators go like mad and vary like crazy but have plenty of space, is there any reason for them to compete for survival?  What does it mean to have survival of the fittest when everything is fit?  Given their mutability, are they even stable enough to be considered replicators?  And if nothing really dies off and nothing really stays the same, would it be better to say that the process has less to do with replication than with a form of growth (similar to thinking of development as an evolutionary process).  We don't even have a science of evolution that seems to recognize that replication is just a special, very scalable, case of growth. 

And finally, now that I'm on a roll, the article reminds me of another frustration I have with evolutionary theory -- it never explains anything.  It is either a tautology (there will be more of things that successfully make more of themselves, gee thanks) or it is silent (how did that mutation happen? why did that new replicator take off?).  It is a theory in the sense of being falsifiable -- if we crossed paths with the divinity on the B train tomorrow evening and he showed us a plan for the universe, we would be able to throw away a bunch of books -- but it's not a theory that actually explains why anything happens because it's not a theory that talks about any causes.  This is why it always puzzles me when people rhapsodize about the creative power of evolution and how it produced such amazing diversity.  Evolution is not creative and it does not produce diversity.  Look at the algorithm again.  Chance might be called creative, or cross-pollination or resonance between lines of lumbering robots -- maybe in-volution is creative, but certainly not e-volution.

Luckily, I'm sure Google is working on a better theory.

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