基因进化是模因进化的前奏Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Memetic Evolution
Brett：波普尔有一本书叫"客观知识"，副标题是"一种进化论的方法"。这并非偶然。在我们所理解的范围内，认识论理论与进化论之间存在着一种对称性。
在我们理解所谓的达尔文进化论之前，人们唯一的想法是：这些生物必定是被创造出来的。你周围看到的所有植物和动物，都必定由某个造物主创造。除此之外，没有别的解释机制。
有人提出了随时间逐渐变化的观点。拉马克就是其中之一。他的想法是：长颈鹿之所以有长脖子，是因为它们的祖先脖子稍短一些，于是它们努力伸长脖子，去够那些原本够不到的树叶。
但同样，这背后没有任何机制，充其量只是说一个人去健身房练肱二头肌，练着练着肌肉就变大了一点。虽然你可以在健身房锻炼、让肱二头肌变大，但这并不意味着你的孩子会继承这些特征。
达尔文的发现与波普尔在知识上的观点如出一辙。这是一种纠错机制。其想法是：生物体会在特定环境中检验自身，如果它——用我们的话说——不适应那个环境，它就会消亡；而如果它适应那个环境，它就能生存下来。
于是，生物体与环境之间就构成了与现实的碰撞。正是环境在向你传递来自现实的反馈，并淘汰那些不够适应、无法生存的生物体。
新达尔文主义的观点告诉了我们选择的基本单位是什么。它不是群体或种群，甚至不是个体，而是基因。这就是自私的基因思想，它来自理查德·道金斯。道金斯说，如果这些基因中恰好有一个不适应特定环境，就可能导致该生物体的死亡。物种也许能存活下来，但随着环境的变化，它的整个 DNA 会随着时间的推移发生极其细微的改变。
现在我们把这一过程提升到了新高度。人类就是这一进化进程的下一步——我们能创造解释性知识，而它发挥着同样的作用。多伊奇喜欢说："基因进化不过是序曲。接下来登场的是模因进化。"
从今往后，宇宙的历史将变成思想的历史——思想将经历与当年的基因相同的进化过程。
Brett: Popper has a book called “Objective Knowledge,” and it’s subtitled “An Evolutionary Approach.” And that’s no accident, either. There’s a symmetry between the theory of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it.
Before we understood what is known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the only idea that people had was that these entities had to be created. All the plants and animals that you see around you had to be created by a creator. There was no other explanatory mechanism.
Some people came up with the idea of gradual change over time. Lamarck was one. His idea was the reason why giraffes have long necks is that their ancestors had slightly shorter necks, so they tried to stretch their necks to reach the leaves they couldn’t reach.
But again, there was no mechanism for this beyond the fact that an individual goes off to the gymnasium and works on their biceps and their biceps get a little bigger over time. Although you can work out in the gym and increase the size of your biceps, that doesn’t mean your children are going to inherit those characteristics.
What Darwin came up with is a similar idea to what Popper had in knowledge. It was an error correction. The idea is that an organism would trial itself out in a particular environment and if it wasn’t, as we say, fit for that environment, then it would die off. But if it was fit in that environment, then it would survive.
So you have this encounter with reality between living organisms and the environment. And it’s the environment that’s giving you feedback from reality and destroying those organisms that aren’t fit enough to survive.
The Neo-Darwinist view is to give us what the unit of selection is. It’s not the group or the herd; it’s not even the individual. It’s the gene. It’s the selfish gene idea, which comes to us from Richard Dawkins, who says if any one of those genes happens to be not fit for the particular environment, that could cause the death of that organism. The species might survive, but its entire DNA will ever so subtly change over time as the environment changes.
Now we have leveled that up. We human beings are the next step in that evolutionary process where we can create explanatory knowledge, which does the same thing. Deutsch likes to say, “Genetic evolution was merely a prelude. What’s coming next is memetic evolution.”
The history of the universe from here on out is going to be the history of ideas undergoing the same evolutionary process as the genes did previously.