Cultural Memes as an External Evolution

For many years now I have been struggling with the question “Why does humans evolved culturally and technologically so fast? “ What is so special about us? Why does everything happened so fast and one could even observe this evolution within a lifetime even within decades? I just can’t feed my curiosity enough to stop asking questions. Which probably is one of the reasons we advance with such a pace? We never stop asking questions, questions about fictional things that do not exist in the real world. We can comprehend our own history and meaning; we can think of the future and believe in non-existing reality, we can create that reality out of fiction. These are just some of the prerequisites needed for cultural and technological advancements. Of course back in the time when we didn’t have sufficient information about our reality people invented probably the first fiction that turned into reality, or namely Religion! Our brain needs to have answers in order to keep on functioning normally and not deal with these questions anymore. So what we did is just invent a story that explain everything so that we don’t have to worry about such stuff, and focus our attention on growing or hunting food, mating, surviving and so on. This was the first complex Idea that settled in our brains, the first step into our incredible journey of cooperation with purely informational structures that have no real world representation. Of course there were earlier informational structures, but religion open our minds , gave us tools to foster other more complex more sophisticated fiction ideas, and use them as tools to develop our world in a way which have never been observed before in nature.

Now as an introduction I would like to say first, that I do not claim to be an expert in this field, I merely just try to assemble some structure of understanding from what I’ve learned through my own experience and brainstorming throughout the years and what I’ve gathered as a knowledge throughout my little research. I do not try to really answer any questions, exactly the opposite, I want to provoke myself and the readers to find more questions, not to be afraid to ask them and criticize this theory, because the truth could only be obtained in collision between different opinions. I am going to discuss the topic “ Cultural memes as an external evolution” by discussing where the idea originally came from, the people who developed it and criticized , in other words a little historic background and later examining it from a Normative approach, Critical approach and Positivist approach.

The History of Cultural Memes Idea.

Now natural selection evolution of course has been controversial since Darwin first published `The Origin of Species' in 1859, not least