The problem is that it’s completely constrained to our current world view and doesn’t come anywhere near covering all the potential issues that are ahead of us (or even many existing issues like abortion, war, stem cells, euthanasia and so on).

Here’s my initial stab at a theory for discussion (read my meme post if you are unfamiliar with the term):

“Morality is the degree to which an expressed meme will affect the survival of the host’s memes and genes.”

I’ve played with lots of different variations and I suspect this one has holes in it too but I’m putting it out there for critique.

I’ve included the meme because non-living objects and organisms that are unable to share ideas are only really directly responding to their environment and so can really do no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. One could argue that we only ever respond to our environments but in a more complex way in which case you would probably have to throw out the concept of morality altogether (or perhaps introduce the meme of morality to further influence how we respond?).

I’ve treated the issue as a matter of survival of memes and genes in much the same way that Dawkins treated our bodies as if they were “lumbering robots” that exist to make more copies of genes.

Please, feel free to pick this apart or even come up with your own all-encompassing theory.

[edit:] I’m becoming less and less satisfied with this hypothesis; it doesn’t cover the ‘wrongness’ we feel when people torture animals (or perhaps it does if the actions that are tied to harming animals are also tied to harming people). Also, we can see that morality evolves (slavery, animal welfare, capital punishment, etc) so it may well be that any definition of morals has to evolve as well?

Living things are made of lots of cells and cells have DNA in them. DNA are long, double strands of molecules made from just four different kinds of molecule that provide a kind of a blueprint for the organism it belongs to. A gene is one of many small regions of DNA that is able to be read (or be ‘expressed’) and contain specific instructions on how to build living structures. If DNA were a blueprint, genes would be the details like “the door handle goes here” or “use concrete for the floor”.

When living things reproduce they are really just making duplicates of themselves. Asexual reproduction means making a direct copy of the DNA and sexual reproduction means mixing up two sets of DNA to come up with a slightly different version. Sexual reproduction has been very successful because each time you mix up the blueprints to make a new organism you have a chance at making a slightly better version than the original which can then go on to make more copies of itself when it reproduces. If, in the mixing process, one of the genes gets changed a tiny bit to say “make the legs bigger” and the creature is born into a world where bigger legs are an advantage the chances are that it’s going to have more offspring than others.

So, over many generations some genes survive the ride in tact while others mutate and provide an advantage to their hosts. Others are less fortunate due to bad mutations or just plain bad luck and their host dies without having children. Some genes are bad – like a gene for old age cancer – but survive the ride anyway because they haven’t got in the way of reproduction. This set of genetic behaviours is called evolution by natural selection.

We all have genes and are the product of genes. In fact, from our gene’s perspective, if we were to look for our true purpose in life it would be fair to say that it is to survive long enough to make as many copies of our genes as possible.

Memes

The concept of memes was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memes are ideas that spread from one creature to another. Like genes they inhabit the bodies of their hosts and can form large groups of ideas as well as mutate over time. Unlike genes they are able to spread sideways to other people instead of only to direct offspring, they can be spread individually instead of en mass and they can spread at much faster rates and therefore change very rapidly as well.

A meme can be an idea, a language, a ditty, a belief, a religion, a saying, a joke, a fishing technique or even wearing yo’ cap sideways. This blog entry is a meme. I’m spreading a meme from my body to yours.

Like genes, memes that are of benefit to the host organism are likely increase in numbers the longer the host remains alive to spread them around and like cancer-activating genes, some memes can be fatal to the host but are able to be spread before killing it.

Genes are like the hardware we come standard with and memes are like the software that gets installed. Some hardware components work perfectly, some can be faulty. Some software can boost our productivity and some come as email attachments entitled “funny_screensaver.exe”.

So what?

Over many millions of years we’ve adapted clever ways to detect whether someone has good genes or not and we’re quite picky about who would make a good partner to make copies of our genes with. But we’ve only been doing the meme thing for a relatively short amount of time and with the volatile mixture of poor meme-recognition and the sheer speed at which memes can mutate we have to be very careful not to allow bad memes to spread. A bad meme can do infinitely more damage than genetic heart defects and cancer. Just ask a victim of the crusades, the holocaust, jihad, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, Afghanistan, the KKK, the slave ships, the Inquisition or the Roman Empire.

One of the best ways to inoculate your body against a bad meme is the liberal application of rational thought. Most bad memes don’t stand up to reasoned scrutiny and most bad memes occur in environments that discourage free thought and criticism. If a meme doesn’t encourage scrutiny or open criticism then it’s possibly hiding something. Stay on your guard; life’s too short for bad memes.

And that, my fellow organisms, is genes and memes (and why they matter) in a nutshell.