Dawkins put forward a concept that belongs to human beings and goes hand in hand with genes: meme.
The first principle of genes is reproduction. However, in human society, there are some people who can choose celibacy, abstinence or even sacrifice themselves for the sake of art and belief. As a result of this choice, such people have no offspring, which is obviously different from the driving force of gene reproduction. It can be seen that there is another force that promotes the development of human beings and records some information of human beings. This is the meme.
Dawkins defines meme as the basic unit of social culture and civilization spread through non-genetic means.
Genes exist in the nucleus of biological cells. Memes exist in our brains in the form of stories, art designs, music, beliefs, scientific theorems and recipes.
When we have a new idea, we create a new meme. When we told others the idea, we spread the meme. Good memes spread everywhere and eventually survive, while invalid memes disappear quickly, so the fittest survive.
Learning this concept has given me another dimension to human behavior, which I think may be the uniqueness of human beings. Liu Jia, the chief scientific consultant of Super Brain, believes that because of memes, some people give up gene transmission and reproduction for the sake of faith, which proves that human beings have got rid of the control of genes and firmly grasped the control of nature on evolution in their own hands.
I'm skeptical about Mr Liu Jia's point of view. Can humans really escape from the control of nature? Even a little.
Although art, belief and culture are not spread by reproduction, the carrier of meme is still the human brain. Although we have written and video records, memes can only be displayed through the human brain, transformed into thoughts, and then transformed into behaviors, just as genes need to show different forms through organisms.
Since memes need to be displayed through the human brain, in fact, memes must also be displayed by genes. In other words, memes are actually derivatives of genes, and genes develop memes to better convey themselves. Because it is precisely because of memes that human beings can overcome other species, thus gaining more resources and better reproduction. From this perspective, in fact, human beings still can't get rid of the initial setting of genes.
Some people have sacrificed their gene transmission for art, belief and science, but these arts, beliefs and science have promoted the development of the whole mankind, including gene transmission. From this perspective, memes still serve genes. Whether genes can continue to be passed down is still determined by the initial setting of the universe. After all, our human genes have only appeared for more than 3 million years, but the extinct dinosaur genes have survived for 1 100 million years. If the scale is larger, the concept of meme should be developed from genes to explain the driving force of human behavior.