Genes, Memes and Gods: The Three Replicators of Evolution

First published in DUVersity newsletter No. 20, 2007 [editor Anthony Blake]

In this brief and stimulating essay, Richard Heath takes the extension of the idea of genes into memes a step further, by introducing a third and cosmic ‘replicator’. Memes are the replicating ‘units’ of mind or culture, and Richard regards them as barriers to progress unless they are brought under the influence of cosmic replication, the patterns of the greater present moment. His argument draws on Gurdjieff’s definition of the ‘law of three’ or triamazikamno: “The higher blends with the lower to actualise the middle, this being higher than the preceding lower and lower than the succeeding higher.”

The more science looks at the human body, especially from the point of view of molecular science, the more it is seen to be an enormously complex set of information, relationships and systems, largely working below the level of consciousness. We are aware of an end product of all this evolutionary development: the subjective experience made possible by it. We can hold the complex picture of Science in our heads, but these heads are themselves merely part of an overall construction.

So, do we need to understand what we are, or is it our function just to get on with what is made possible through it? The answer appears to be both, for the very reason that self-awareness, informed action and understanding are all parts of the apparent destiny of our selves. However, we cannot avail ourselves of the implicit sophistication of our bodies without realising their function. In one sense, our ordinary conscious state is the “lower” and our potential to manifest is “higher”. Working to realise our potentials then creates a new “middle”. Here, we follow Gurdjieff, who said of the ‘law of three’: “The higher blends with the lower to actualise the middle.”

The genes appear to hold a store of human potential, full of variety based upon the survival successes of all of human experience. Since these genes are expressed in individuals, the genetic can be equated with the basic, ground state of our lives. These lives would be entirely instinctive if it were not for the development of imitative learning through a developing brain system, whose capabilities gave evolutionary advantage.

These imitative structures, now called memes, became another replicating structure; since all that has been learned by imitation can then be passed on, either through re-enactment or, most efficiently, through the development of language centres in the brain. This neatly defines the arising of the human world with its societies, rules, beliefs and norms. In simple terms, the ordinary life of man was created as another “middle” from the “lower”, animal form of existence. The higher in this case seems hypothetical but must be the total environment of the Earth, the conditions of local environments over time (causing selection) and any influences from the planetary world.

The dynamism and synchronicity of climate, volcanism, water movement, gas exchange, is ultimately a cosmic factor. But the determinism of our thinking has given us the concept that these forces are arbitrary, unintelligent and wasteful, partly because we feel personally threatened by changes beyond our control. However, it is largely the size of our present moment that leads us to these feelings as it is entirely possible that what we see as hazardous is in fact held together by a larger present moment in which factors are being kept in balance.

Such a cosmic present moment would need its own replicating mechanism, which could transmit influences from one moment to a later one, without loss of information. This differs from an existential gene or meme, where the whole pattern is replicated within a new host, because the cosmic is hypernomic. This term was used by Bennett to designate the realm beyond life, literally ‘beyond rules’; life being the autonomic or self-ruling and material existence hyponomic or determined by the rules (see The Dramatic Universe Vol 1). In the hypernomic realm, patterns within the whole scheme are being transmitted between one time and space and another. Thus it is possible for patterns to disappear and reappear in environments that are the lower relative to the higher of the cosmically replicating mechanism.

In myth, the replicating structures are the Fates and by implication, the lives of the Gods. In astronomy, the equivalent is the lossless, repeating, but ever varying system of the planets. It is a numerically stable system, whose variations can cause a conjunction of factors to reappear in a similar form over days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia and epochs.

The three fates were thought of as weavers; they were called:

Clotho (spinner of the thread of life)

Lachesis (Determiner of length)

Atropos (Cutter of Thread)

The Memetic Society

Modern society is largely ruled by the secondary replicator, the memes. As Susan Blackmore points out, a purely memetic society is highly unstable and may not last for very long. This is because the genes can easily be wiped out when the memes develop fantastic ideas about the world, which do not relate to the real world and even directly select against genetic survival. From a Gurdjieffian point of view, this has echoes of the organ kundabuffer and the “buffers” that prevent man from seeing the world as it is.

Kundabuffer was connected to the survival of the Moon, whose creation necessitated the arising of life to maintain it. This means the arising of genes are directly linked to the Moon. But then we know that the conceptual and linguistic brain is evolved by the genes, gaining better control and hence survivability within the animal to produce the modern human experience. We should therefore link the higher brain functions with the organ kundabuffer or at least its after effects, the buffers that prevent man from seeing reality as it is.

Image of Memes by Pat Linse, used by Susan Blackmore

The brain deals with imitation, using specialised brain functions evolved over time through selection events organised by the environmental challenges of the past. The need to survive finds the genes and the memes in a partnership, generating a human world of social relationship. But these human, social worlds are not descriptions of cosmic reality and in their essence they become fed with their own dream landscapes.
Gurdjieff’s prime question was “What is the sense and purpose of life on Earth?” The replicators cannot answer such a question because their purpose is to replicate their patterns! This is true of genes, memes and gods.

As a pattern of will, replication is not of the present moment but forms a linkage between two present moments. An act of will, on the other hand, relates to a single present moment, and goes beyond such patterns in Eternity. It speaks of the ability to be, now, combining Bennett’s determining conditions of time and eternity with hyparxis. In Bennett’s scheme, hyparxis is ableness-to-be and is associated with will, as eternity is with being and time with function.  Hyparxis determines the ‘strength’ of the present moment.

The Idea of Work

A prime motivation in the Work is to have all three centres working together, for only then “I Am”. The moving/instinctive centre has genetic, animal origins, whilst the hormonal feeling centre underlies the social life of humans. The intellectual centre of the memes is generally tied to the emotions through opinions, egoism and self-definition. The objective knowledge that Gurdjieff says can be developed in man is the relationship to reality that modern culture has little practical contact with, being itself obsessed with security, wealth, celebrity, entertainment, and so on.

The survival of objective systems of cosmic knowledge is heavily selected against in the world of memes. They cannot find “markets”, they are hard to transmit without turning into something useless, and they are perceived as a hobby, and avoidance of reality, and so on. It is necessary for new ideas to be combined with traditional esotericism for Work to take place, and for it to be relevant.

We propose that the genes, the memes and the gods are the three centres of real human evolution. Whilst forming in the “formatory apparatus” of our brains as a new meme, which is the “middle”, the “lower” is revealed as the memetic culture within this we live, a culture that possibly has not long to run. New ideas are a potential created by the three replicators that must be grasped now, in an original way. A “higher” will always be there in potential but the grasping of it must be a uniquely timely act, the “purpose of life” in this moment.

Whilst man is the “evolving tip” of life on Earth, the realising of the momentary potentials within the biosphere itself belongs to an “evolving tip” of humanity itself. It has to produce a necessary change of paradigm relative to which the existing order is a buffer maintaining our present views. Existing ideas are merely a buffer working against new ideas, a denying force for the cosmic affirmation of the emergent worldview.

The predilection against what were traditional forms of cosmic knowledge within our present society, is a natural development compatible with the needs of the lower two replicators. These needs are denying factors determining most of human behaviour and they would be perfect unto themselves were it not for the progressive nature of cosmic evolution.

Any system of ideas degenerates as it becomes a memetic system that can be imitated for the purpose of transmission. This is the progress of ideas or “influences” from a source beyond the vortex of ordinary life, namely cosmic reality. Their emergent quality means that they arise through life processes, and they are cosmic only in that they can be related back to a pattern that ‘guides’ them.

Working with the Replicators

Modern science has produced a simplifying concept called memes, integrated with the well developed scheme of the genes. However, it is only being developed and the scientific progress of such an idea will take further decades. However, the worldview of Gurdjieff and predicament of our memetic civilisation allows the memes to be integrated to psychological reality and systems of traditional knowledge to form a balanced view of life on Earth and see the necessary forms of action emerging from the present circumstances.

Ideas, it seems, are buffers except in their relationships to other ideas. It is a reasonable fact considering that all beings partake of denial in order to affirm their specific natures. Whilst tool use gave rise to survival of those with the brains to (a) make them and (b) learn from others how to use them, we have lost sight of ideas as tools, made of a certain substance, having a definite identity, and denying all that they are not.

The inability to see the “down side” or denying factor of systems of ideas has lead to fixation upon them as complete in themselves. This is of course “identification” which is one of the most powerful ways of presenting ideas, “I think that…” links idea with the false self who can then be imitated by another false sense of self.
The more it is considered, the more the memetic world appears to be the subject of Gurdjieff’s system. Through this we can discern the same primary cause of modern man’s incapacity to see reality as it really is.
The complexity of the human system is dealing with a relatively un-complex environment and therefore is another “higher” relative to it. Perhaps it is bored? Maybe it is turning in on itself, exactly because it is not able to manifest the role for which it is suited. The social world generates complexity but no cosmic role, and in a sense is a training facility yet also a prison.

The key technology, it would seem, is non-identified working with ideas in order to facilitate an ever invisible thread of emergence linked to the cosmic world. Thus it is that the tekkia (places of spiritual learning) must always be dismantled, as in the Sufi teaching stories, and all things have the limited relevance of their immediate use.

Whilst patterns go in and out of existence, effectively disappearing into the invisible world of determining conditions, the exact same effect is found in the human mentation, as ideas come and go and as the brain is capable of re-evoking any of a vast range of stored impressions under the right conditions. Thus, the inner and outer life of man correspond as processes, not surprisingly since the human is a response to both the cosmic and environmental.

The emerging theme here is intimacy hidden by fixity. Contrary to expectations, of course, it is the Objective that is intimate and the Subjective that so easily becomes a fixed obstruction to direct, human experience.
 

Megalithic Astronomy using Triangles

I discovered in 1994 that it is also possible to use N:N+1 triangles, with simple counts of planetary synodic periods, to derive a planet’s sidereal period. A planet’s sidereal period is the time it takes to orbit the Sun whilst its synodic period is the time it takes to repeat its behavior as seen from Earth, the mixture of it’s own orbit superimposed by the orbit of the Earth from which we observe it. The synodic periods seen from Earth can be counted whilst the sidereal, orbital periods were only thought to have become known after the advent of modern astronomical practices and our recent “discovery” of the solar system as being heliocentric, that is Sun centred.

The foregoing work on the Moon and Sun, using N:N+1 triangles, makes it fairly certain that the megalithic astronomers could have deduced the orbital periods of the planets from observation of time through long counts.

The Inner Planets, Mercury and Venus

The synodic and sidereal periods of the inner planets in days are,
                       Mercury    Venus
Sidereal             87.969    224.701
Synodic Period    115.88    583.92

In the case of the inner planets, they are seen to orbit the Sun and from this fact an important fact can be articulated: When observing the synodic frequency (per solar year) of an inner planet, the observation sees one less rotation than that planet’s sidereal frequency because the Earth has completed a full orbit in the same direction. This fact, similar to the difference between the frequencies of lunar orbit and month, makes it possible to apply N;N+1 triangles to deduce the sidereal frequency per year of an inner planet and hence its sidereal period.

Venus is the brightest planet and hence most likely to have been studied in depth. The first step is to note her synodic period as 584 days long and erect this day count as a hypotenuse above the solar year as before, in a right angled triangle. Also as before, these period lengths also represent the relative frequencies of the other body so that the synodic frequency of Venus, per year, is seen as the reciprocal of its period or 1/ 1.599 which equals 0.6255 years.

Adding one to this gives 1.6255 and this base length can then be erected from the opposite end to touch the same third side’s vertical. This is then sidereal frequency and it now stands over a base length of one, representing the frequency of the solar year. The same reciprocation as before means that the sidereal period of Venus is now in proportion to the year, the base beneath it. Indeed, the sidereal period is then 0.615, which is correct, and in days this is 224.69 days – effectively exact.

In our notation this would be,

Venus (sidereal) = 1 / (1 + solar year/ Venus synod) = 0.615 solar years

Where solar year = 365 ¼ days
     and the Venus synod is 584 days
 
The Venus “sailboat” triangle.
It enables the derivation of the Venus sidereal period
from the Venus synodic period.

This indicates how, without modern techniques of notation, algebra and calculation, metrological triangles could discover important information concerning the orbits of the planets. The approach is highly visual and revealing for it shows how Venus hovers about that numerical singularity where the number and its reciprocal have a similar fractional part – the Golden Mean. Venus has a period, relative to the solar year, of the Finonacci approximation to the golden mean of 8/5 or 0.625, where the common unit is 1/5th of a year which is 73 days. As a result, the sidereal period becomes the next higher Fibonacci ratio of 8/13 = 0.615 years and the whole matter is beautifully presented as two triangles representing these two ratios. The dotted line in the first triangle shown above can therefore be seen as length 8, which both ratios have in common, the first as the numerator of 8/5 and the second as the numerator of 8/13 = 0.615.

Using this procedure places the whole explanation before one’s eyes unlike our own mathematics in which a separate explanatory graphic would have to accompany the calculational details. In the Megalithic, the whole of a problem had to remain integral in its solution via geometry.

A different geometry is required to find Mercury’s sidereal period, which we will skip here so as to illustrate how to work with the outer planets

The Outer Planets: Mars, Jupiter and Saturn

Because outer planets orbit further away from the Sun, when the Earth passes closest to them their motion appears retrograde and, because of parallax, the path of the planet then describes a loop in the sky. The time between each loop allows the synodic period of an outer planet to be known, within half a day using a simple day-inch count or a little better, using a long count that covers many synods.

The outer planets again follow a similar rule: When observing the synodic frequency (per solar year) of an outer planet, the observation “sees” one less rotation than that planet’s sidereal frequency because the Earth planet has completed a full orbit in the same direction.

The synodic periods of outer planets are different because they orbit more slowly than the Earth does and this means the Sun has to catch up, after a solar year, with their new position. This catch-up time will divide into the solar year to give a synodic frequency to which needs to be incremented  by one to obtain the true sidereal period for that planet’s orbit.

A triangle is constructed in which the base is the solar year. The planet’s synodic period is then erected above this which, brought down to the base reveals the excess over the year. The base then represents the number of times the excess divides into the solar year, the synodic frequency so to speak. The hypotenuse divided by the excess reveals the true sidereal period in years.

In our notation,

Jupiter’s sidereal period = 1 + solar year / excess

where the solar year is 365 ¼ days

and the excess is 33 ¾ days

This is a really easy task using metrological triangles since the basic N: N+1 triangle already does what is required for an outer planet.
 

Prime Number Notation: The numbers we first thought of

(This article is part of a future book on megalithic science)

A basic thesis of my book Sacred Number was that,

The Stone Age peoples, through observing the celestial environment (the sky), and how it is time-structured numerically, came to understand the structure of number itself as a cosmic principle that was central to the Creation.

This was the path whereby the Stone Age became the megalithic culture that clearly used large stones in meaningful ways to capture celestial events and express numerical relationships important to this worldview.

Some of the effective techniques, including right angled triangles and counting techniques, developed in the megalithic, leave their own records in the organisation of the megaliths themselves -their alignments and the distances between them. This means that whilst we today take notes of our measurements with pen, paper and our number notation system, the megalithic specialists might have had less need for a system of notation apart from the objects of measurement themselves.

However, it is almost certain that they did develop notation systems, especially with regard to the recording and manipulation of the large numbers of feet, cubits, steps, yards, miles of whatever type required to, for instance, achieve angular measures and trigonometrical functions, without the type of equipment or analytical algebra we have today. We don’t have to re-invent modern systems of mathematics so that the megalith builders could have done what they did – and people who try strain credibility and their theories are roundly rejected. But there does have to be a way for ancient science to achieve what it did.

Even the way we write number down today, in decimal notation, is effectively a sophisticated piece of equipment and the way this evolved within the historical period is perhaps indicative of a prehistoric system of notation that, like so many other elements of our culture, was inherited but in a distorted form relative to the original version....

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