I’ve seen many people commenting on your articles (which I’ve been following for the past year) misunderstanding the “teme” concept in this same way.

As someone with an academic background in both Linguistics and Computer Science and with an insatiable appetite for evolutionary science, it didn’t take me long to extrapolate from the meme into the teme, and understand that, somewhat like what happens with computer viruses once they’re unleashed, there’s no need for the human brain in any transaction that takes place.

As you’ve admitted, I don’t think you’ve characterized the difference between 2nd and 3rd replicators very well. That’s understandable, because the problem is very difficult for people who are not used to thinking of evolution as abstract algorithms.

Here is the way I understand it — and please correct me if I’m wrong, because I would hate to misattribute my own nonsense to you:

MEMES

For memes, the “venue” is the human brain, as well as artifacts in the world (like books and other media) that serve as “batteries” for meme information.

The fitness function for memes involves selection by humans (usefulness, beauty, parasitism/symbiosis with existing memes, etc).

Variation arises by virtue of messy transmission and by human-directed invention (avoiding getting into “free will” here). Memes may not copy with perfect fidelity, but our brains often “fill in the gaps” using predictions and expectations — or simply get them wrong, and then they either change or fail.

TEMES:

The “venue” of the teme is the computer/machine and its attendant storage and transmission vectors.

The fitness function for temes involves selection by computers/machines (criteria: usefulness, parasitism/symbiosis, others?)

Temes will almost always copy with perfect fidelity, so the dominant mechanism by which they vary is an unknown — a computer program with errors will simply not run. But if we stopped there we’d be truly lacking in imagination; it’s not hard to envision machines, self-improved by their own temes, coming up with viable mutations both by choice and by virtue of error-correction mechanisms.

The take-home message from the above that many seem to have totally missed: Temes exist on a plane of evolution that totally obviates the involvement of human brains or any other sort of organic matter.

Perhaps it would help to make a chart that makes plain the venues and mechanisms of each replicator.

As I explained in my reply to Speel, I have long been pondering whether all digital information is just more memes (i.e. the same replicator taking new and varied forms) or should be considered as something new. My intuition suggested something new but logic found no reason why. Eventually I tried going back to first principles (as Dawkins advocated when he coined the term meme). The key principle here is that evolutionary processes require variation, selection and heredity. So a new kind of evolution requires not just a new kind of information but a new means of copying that information with variation and selection. i.e. all three of the critical processes need to be in place.

In the context of modern technology, this can happen only when computers are capable of carrying out variation and selection as well as storing and copying digital information. Is this happening? I suggest we see the beginnings of this in search engines, auto-generated spam websites, some anti-spam processes, free-roaming bots, some worms and viruses that are abandoned by their creators, and maybe more. We might not even know how much of the vast reserves of storage space are occupied by information that has never been seen by a human, never will be, and yet is available for selection by machines.

This explains why I responded to Winfield’s challenge by coming up with the following possible definitions.

Teme: information copied, varied and selected by machine.

Teme: the replicator involved when machines copy, vary and select digital information.

I might need to point out that I am excluding human beings from counting as machines in these definitions, or I might need to specify the kind of machine (computer? interlinked set of computers?) but I don’t want to limit it too much. I think the essential point is contained in both.

Once this principle seemed clear to me I wondered whether the transition from memes to temes would resemble the earlier transition from genes to memes. It does. In the first case early humans, constructed as a product (vehicle or interactor) for genes, became capable of copying, varying and selecting a new kind of information – memes. Now computers constructed as products for us (vehicles carrying, storing and copying memes) have become capable of copying, varying and selecting a new kind of information. The crucial step is indeed of the same kind. The vehicle of one replicator becomes the replication machinery for the next. The way this became obvious to me suggested that going back to first principles was the right way to go and that this justified me in giving a new name to the new process and the new replicator. The machine is a teme machine and the replicator the teme. I do hope this makes clearer what I have been trying to do.

I want to respond more briefly to some other points. William Benzon and Ilya Nosyrev both have problems with attempts to divide aspects of culture into replicators and vehicles, and the related question of whether memes should be considered to exist inside human heads, out in the world, or both, or neither. Benzon provides links to his work outlining why he has recently changed his mind.

This is a debate that has gone round and round for thirty years. Dawkins too changed his mind from what is sometimes called “Dawkins A” (memes as skills, habits, technologies etc) to “Dawkins B” (memes as representations in heads). Others have changed their minds too, but going back to the origin of the term “meme” as meaning “that which his imitated” suggests that anything that is copied should count as a meme. Naturally this varies with the kind of behaviours, technologies or ideas that we are dealing with and there is no fixed answer that applies to all.

My own view is that this whole muddle comes about because most memes (including Benzon’s examples from jazz music) are not organised into any equivalent of a germ line/phenotype or replicator/vehicle distinction. I have explained this in The Meme Machine and elsewhere in terms of the benefit of copy-the-instructions for making something compared with copy-the-product itself. I suggest that new replicators start out with the latter and evolve towards the former, as appears to have happened with the transition from RNA to DNA based life forms.

Some relatively recent memes (e.g. factory produced goods and some computer programs) do use copy-the-instruction systems. Only in these circumstances can we meaningfully ask whether the car, book, word processor or whatever is the meme or the meme product (for an answer we can ask which is copied, which is visible for memetic selection). For many other kinds of memes the question simply makes no sense. So this is not a debate worth prolonging.

In a similar vein Andrew Atkinson asks “Aren’t then temes just the phenotypes of memes?” The above should make it clear why I say “no”. You could say that the computers we have built are vehicles for our memes (in the sense that they carry, protect and store them) or even phenotypes of the instructions for building them, but temes (as I have defined them) exist only when those computers themselves begin to carry out all the three processes of variation, selection and heredity.

Many people, both here and in responses to the same piece at The Stone (New York Times) posit a role for consciousness. William Mullins presumes “that some form of self-awareness is integral to the third order”, Robert Faught thinks that memes and temes form a “kind of collective unconscious”, and Jim argues for a “conscious goal of development”. I think consciousness is just a distraction here, not because I don’t think it interesting (I have devoted much of my working life to its tantalising mysteries) but because one of the joys of memetics is that you have to concentrate on who copies what to whom and why; it is entirely irrelevant whether they do this consciously or not. Teme machines or complexes of temes may, like us, become deluded into thinking they are a conscious self, but this would be a consequence of their own self-modelling rather than a driving force in the evolutionary process.

I have much enjoyed being given this chance to try out a new idea and see what people think of it. The real test will come when we see whether the idea provides any useful testable predictions or helps us better understand what is going on. For now I hope we can continue debating whether the concept of a third replicator makes any sense or not.

As concerns computer programs, there is indeed a lot of examples of their selection. For instance, when you enter a query into a search engine (Google, etc.), it shows all found documents ranked according to relevance. The first items in this rank have much more chances to be load to the computers of millions of users. And some documents can “deceive” a search engine and reach the first places without being relevant – because search engines actually take for relevant the documents, that have a special structure, a successful disposition of key words in the text, etc. What is still more interesting, in this rank can be even a “trash text” – a fragment of code, accidentally generated by a program. The percentage of computer generated code in the Web even now is about 90% of all the data transferred through Internet, and some part of this “trash” really lives on the laws of Universal Darwinism. But such documents and computer viruses need a human-made operational system to be copied – they are rather passive (as biological viruses and artificial objects, produced by humanity – that was what I meant in my previous commentary).

By the way, there is one more kind of temes, that can emerge in the near future. These are nanomolecular machines, able to reproduce themselves. They were described in Eric Drexler’s “Engines of Creation”, and, as some scientists predict, they may be created in 20-30 years. Such machines will have its own “genetic code”, according to which they’ll make new copies of themselves. An interesting fact – as physicists predict, from time to time the “genetic code” of some of these machines will be damaged because of solar radiation, magnetic fields, etc. For the most part, it will lead to a breakdown, but sometimes it may become a useful mutation that will give the mutated machine the advantages over others. It’ll be a real evolution of artificial objects.

Problem of temes is very important, because the number of new replicators that will emerge due to technological progress in the near future, can be huge, and the humanity doesn’t realize how selfish they can be – even without being “living creatures” in the common sense of this term. I think that computer programs are only precursors of future powerful technological replicators.