General

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book for my birthday called Thought Contagion. I had not heard of the book or its subject matter, the science of memetics, but I was fascinated by what I read. Author Aaron Lynch explained, concisely and convincingly, how some of the most significant beliefs in society came to be as popular as they are. By the end of the book I felt I understood, for the first time, a great many things that should have been obvious all along. I was even more surprised to discover that the things Lynch was saying were considered novel, and even somewhat controversial. What he described, simply and elegantly, is a compelling theory about the way beliefs spread.

What Memes May Come

The fundamental term in memetics is meme, which means a self-propagating idea. The term was borrowed from sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, who coined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Roughly speaking, memetics applies the principles of evolution by natural selection to beliefs. In conventional evolution, genes that improve an organism’s ability to survive endure in future generations and spread throughout a population; those that hinder survival eventually disappear. By analogy, memetics says that ideas are subject to natural selection as well; those that most effectively promote their own survival multiply and spread, while those that don’t, don’t.

In memetics, it is misleading to think of a person as having a belief; instead, it is more accurate to think of beliefs as acquiring people. Memes propagate from person to person in a manner analogous to the way viruses spread. A meme is passed from one person to another through one form of contact or another, and in some cases must mutate in order to continue surviving and spreading. Thus memetics is sometimes described as an epidemiology of ideas, investigating them in much the same way as a researcher might study the way a disease spreads throughout a community. This is not to say, of course, that all ideas that spread are negative ones, as the analogy to disease might suggest. Memetics itself is neutral with regard to the value of beliefs, and the principles apply equally to positive, useful beliefs as to destructive ones.

Being Fruitful and Multiplying

Just as a virus can spread by floating through the air, by skin contact, or through exchange of bodily fluids, there are a number of different mechanisms whereby beliefs spread. One of the most common and effective means of spreading a meme is simply having children, because children more often than not serve as hosts for the same memes as their parents. Thus memes that encourage procreation directly (“your biological clock is ticking”) or indirectly (“abortion is murder”) serve to propagate themselves to the children of the meme’s host. Similarly, memes that make it more likely that parents will pass a belief on to children (such as “children should respect their parents”) encourage their own propagation.

Another common mechanism of meme propagation is proselytism. Consider the meme “those who do not believe in Religion X will spend eternity in hell.” This meme aids its own propagation, because holding the belief increases the likelihood that it will be transferred to other hosts. A person who considers belief in Religion X crucial to eternal happiness will be motivated to influence its adoption by friends and even strangers (not to mention offspring). This meme also illustrates other methods of propagation, such as discouraging hosts from dropping the belief (persistence of the belief, especially at the time of death, is regarded as crucial to its effectiveness) and resisting efforts of competing memes (such as “all religions are equally good”) to displace it.

Gimme Some Truth (or Not)

Of the other methods of meme propagation, surprisingly, one of the least effective is for a meme simply to seem true. The sheer force of logic can and does cause memes to spread (as in “Earth revolves around the Sun”). But more often than not, competing memes with other methods of propagation win out over those that depend solely on truth or plausibility. In particular, political and moral beliefs (which typically spread by offspring production, proselytism, and dropout prevention) usually displace beliefs whose only mechanism of reinforcement is objective fact. This could help to explain, for example, how a nation might muster public support for a war in the absence of objective evidence of danger from an enemy.

As I look around at the many printed items within arm’s reach—books, magazines, a calendar, posters, checks, labels, boxes, and so on—I am vaguely aware that nearly all of them made their way through a printing press at some point. And, since I’ve used rubber stamps and stencils, I have an equally vague awareness that any printing process is based on putting ink or other coloring onto some parts of paper while keeping it off other parts. But despite having worked in the prepress field for a while, I never thought very deeply about the methods for transferring ink to paper; terms like “offset” and “lithography” had no specific meaning to me. Even after I finally grasped how laser printers work, ink-based printing methods remained a mystery.

Every time I realize that I’ve been living in blissful ignorance about something so common, I feel sort of guilty—it’s the same feeling I had when I was in high school and knew that I’d studied just enough to get through my exams, but not enough to actually understand or remember anything. So I began some remedial self-instruction in printing techniques, determined to fill in those embarrassing gaps in my knowledge. Along the way, I learned all sorts of interesting things, but one printing method particularly struck my fancy: intaglio (in-TAL-yo) printing.

Making an Impression

There are several major large-scale printing methods. The original printing press and its descendants (including rubber stamps) use raised letters to ensure that ink is applied only to the desired portions of the page; although an entire block of type may be covered with ink, only the raised parts make contact with the paper. In lithography, a printing plate (or stone) is moistened with water and then coated with ink; the greasy ink adheres only to the portions of the plate with the right texture (achieved in a variety of ways), while the water on the blank portions of the plate repels the ink. Although paper is brought into contact with the entire plate (directly, or, in offset lithography, via an intermediate rubber roller), only the inked portions transfer marks to the paper.

Intaglio printing (from an Italian word meaning “carve”) predates lithography by more than three centuries. Like lithography, it employs full-plate contact—but instead of relying on water to keep ink where it belongs, it uses recesses cut, engraved, or etched into a metal plate (or cylinder) to hold the ink. After the ink is spread, the plate is wiped down to remove excess ink from the top surface. The paper is then applied under tremendous pressure to push it into the grooves, transferring the ink where it has made contact. One of the side effects of intaglio printing is that the inked surfaces are very slightly raised on the front and indented on the back; depending on the type of paper and ink used, this can give intaglio prints a unique texture. A variant of intaglio printing called gravure varies the depth of the recesses in order to produce a range of tones; deeper grooves hold more ink and therefore create darker colors.

I recently went to a toy store with my son, and found myself marveling at how little had changed since I was a kid. Alongside all the miracles of modern toy science were dozens of items that I remembered seeing on toy store shelves 25 years or more ago, and they looked exactly the same—except for the price. Slinkies. Magic Rocks. Ant Farms. Silly Putty. Nerf balls. And, of course, Sea Monkeys. I vividly remember the ads in comic books and magazines promising “Instant Life—Just Add Water!” The ads pictured anthropomorphic sea creatures with tails, smiling faces, and crown-like protuberances on their heads. These intelligent and fun-loving creatures could be your new pets for just a few dollars.

I never managed to prevail upon my parents to spring for the Sea Monkeys, but I always wondered just how close the real thing would be to the hype. A couple of years ago, when Morgen bought a Sea Monkeys set as a present for a friend, I got to see them in action. The little critters were, unsurprisingly, not terribly impressive as pets. However, in terms of both biology and marketing they are a marvel every bit as interesting as those ads implied.

Brine Shrimp Deluxe

Sea Monkeys are a variety of brine shrimp. Unlike the common species Artemia salina, Sea Monkeys were engineered as a larger and longer-lived hybrid variety the manufacturer calls Artemia nyos (NYOS stands for New York Ocean Science Laboratories, where the breed was developed). But like all brine shrimp, Sea Monkeys lay eggs encapsulated in a cyst shell. These cysts have the unusual capability of remaining viable over long periods of time when completely dehydrated—effectively maintaining a state of suspended animation. This state, known as cryptobiosis, is also seen in some plant seeds, insect larvae, and crustacean eggs. When the eggs are re-hydrated in a saline solution, they continue with their development and hatch soon thereafter.

Sea Monkeys have other interesting characteristics, such as the fact that they have one eye when they hatch but later grow two more. According to the official Sea Monkeys literature, the animals also breathe through their feet—I’ll have to take their word for it—and the females can reproduce either sexually or asexually.

Just Add Hype

But when you get right down to it, these creatures, which rarely grow longer than half an inch (about 15mm), are not that interesting as pets go. Brine shrimp are often sold as food for other fish, and their low status on the food chain says something about not only their size but their neural capacity. Compared to even the most ordinary tropical fish, the translucent Sea Monkeys are rather tedious to watch—if you can spot them at all—as they swim around in their little tanks.