What a Simple Origami Paper Boat Can Reveal About The Science of Memes
Have you ever made a paper boat? Where you fold a standard size paper, and draw out the edges to assemble a boat without touching any scissor or glue or tape.
I used to make that boat as a kid. And sail it around in the monsoon after which I used to feel like an origami master. But a simple paper boat is just a drop in the vast and amazing world of origami art. Origami, in Japanese, simply means the art of folding paper. In 1680 the poet, Ihara Saikaku wrote a short verse on origami butterflies. Even though his verse is considered one of the oldest reference to origami in writing, we know that origami is a centuries-old technique of turning paper into beautiful and stunning folds of boats, and airplanes, and flowers, and swans. There is even an origami infinity cube.
And while we may be curious about how and why the origami originated. The actual mindgasmic thing is that the only way origami has survived till now through history is through imitation. At least till we did not have books or YouTube tutorials. And so, origami can be thought of as a classic example of a meme. Something that you learn from others, and others learned it from other others. Just like yo-mama jokes. Or story of The Ugly Duckling. Or perhaps Kermit the frog photos, or the Kiki Challenge.
But origami is a meme in the sense of Dawkins’ term.
You know Dawkins described memes as things that propagate through imitation. Memes, just like genes have a property of making copies of themselves so that they could be passed on. The way genes pass on packets of heredity information, memes pass on packets of cultural information from person to person or from brain to brain. One of Dawkins’ cool thought experiments is that if you placed a few dozen people in a line and showed the first person how to make an origami flower, then that person would be able to show it to the next person in the line, and then the next person can show the next person till we reach the last person.
Things like cooking recipes, or basket weaving, or boat making which are all things that have been learned and passed on through imitation across generations. Kite making is another example something which is considered as old as the origins of Christianity. Or take the preparation of wine for example. The technique used to ferment to make table wine is at least eight-thousand years old and have undergone little change for the most part of human history until modern technology adapted and improved the techniques and made industrial wine the standard of all consumption.
Or take jeans for example. It’s common to wear jeans in the west, but you would be surprised that jeans have become quite popular in most non-western countries as well. Even in countries with tropical climates or with strict cultural norms against western clothing. The 2012 BBC article, How Jeans Conquered the World, notes that in every country that the anthropologist Danny Miller visited — from Philippines to Turkey, India and Brazil, he could stop and count a 100 people to walk by, and in each he found that almost half the population wore jeans on any given day. I mean you would not expect that part of the American cow-boy costume would become so common in the world even in countries that have got nothing to do with America.
And just like jeans, memes like language, and stories, and fashions are passed on from person to person. Take the Happy Birthday song. Not only millions of people know the tune, but the song with exact same tune has variants in Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Arabic.
And I think it is also important to note that memes like the oral traditions which were used to pass scriptures in Hindu and Islamic tradition were not merely ‘Chinese whispers’ as most people think, they were systemized rote-learnings. More like an archer teaching his archer children how to make an arch.
And we know that oral traditions of great epics and stories existed long before writing even came into being. When Homer wrote Odyssey for instance, Odyssey was already a known epic among the Greeks even before Homer wrote it. Just like Mahabharata did not come into being when Vyasa wrote it.
In the classic novel, Fahrenheit 451, when ‘firemen’ begin to burn all the books in the world, Granger and other professors try to preserve the books by memorizing them. Granger suggests that they simple read the book to learn whatever they can from it, but they soon realize that the method does not work. So they resort to the ancient method of memorizing every word, every sentence, one by one. So that they could reconstruct the whole book from memory. You know just like reconstructing an origami boat, or recreating a food recipe.
Susan Blackmore writes in her book, The Meme Machine, that a meme has a ‘Copy Me!’ property. That is the meme wants to get copied to as many brains as possible. And a good question to ask would be what makes a meme more copy-able than others? Why did origami get copied? Or why did Odyssey get copied?
Susan thinks that what makes a meme more copy-able than others actually depends on the human brain, not the meme. Take cute babies for example. It is a mistake to think that the baby faces are somehow cute. To borrow from Daniel Dennett, ‘We don’t love babies and puppies because they’re cute. It’s the other way around: We see them as cute because evolution has designed us to love things that look like that.’
It’s important because it tells that the memes that get copied do so not because there is something special about the meme, but because there is something special about our brain. Because evolution has designed our brain to get ticked, or fascinated with, or prone to obsession with certain kinds of memes. The fact that Disney begun making its characters’ eyes look bigger and bigger over the years in an attempt to make its characters look more baby-like. That goes to show that Disney had been using our brain’s penchant for cute baby-like stuff to sell its movies.
Or when it comes to wildlife preservation, more funds are given to Pandas often because they are considered cute even though there are much more useful and important species that we could be saving right now with our money.
Memes don’t care whether they are good, or bad, or neutral. They just spread. Good things like table manners can spread, and so can neutral things like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But bad things can spread too. Remember Regina George from Mean Girls. The scene where even though Regina George loses and gets out the picture, her ‘Plastic’ philosophy still gets carried on to Cady who also becomes a Plastic herself even though she has always opposed the Plastics.
Or take the David Fincher’s classic movie, the Fight Club. When Tyler forms the fight club and recruits its members to the organization, Project Mayhem, the network spreads like a meme. Soon everyone is talking about it. And becoming a part of it. So much so that the club soon overgrows Tyler, such that the club does not need any leader, or guider, or director to carry itself on.
Just like a boat builder no more need to understand why their boats are the way they are, or your mother no more needs to understand why grandma recipes are the way they are, similarly the members of Project Mayhem don’t need to understand what Project Mayhem was initially about or who started it. This is evident in their meme phrase, ‘The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you do not ask questions.’
The phrase that everyone repeats like a zombie during their operation. Dennett might argue that the ‘do not ask questions’ part is vital to the spreading of a meme because it makes sure you only focus on the spreading part and forget about the why and what of whatever it is that you are spreading. I mean if you received a chain message that read ‘Forward this to 10 people and you will be blessed’ and you started thinking about the message rather than forwarding it then the meme is dead basically.
But note here that we are not interested in ‘spreading’ of a meme, spreading is easy, what we are actually interested in is the ‘survival’ of memes. In their ‘persistence’. Why do some memes persist and others perish?
I mean I can bet that Who-let-the-dogs-out song would not be here in another decade, but Beethoven’s Symphony might still be here. Why is that? Take the example of tart frozen yogurt that a few years ago became quite popular in South Korea but it did not survive long. It had spread like fire, but it did not survive. Tart frozen yogurt is gone, but Yakgwa is still here. And it might still be here for the foreseeable time to come. For the same reason that Twilight might perish but Romeo and Juliet might survive as it already has for hundreds of years. Or that Atenism might perish, but Christianity might survive.
Dennett answers these questions and he would argue that it’s for the same reason that other species of humans haven’t survived but we have.
The ‘copying’ mechanism that the memes follow is not like ‘photo copying’. Just like genes are not photo-copies. The differential replication which makes sure that copies are made with variation, and some variations are in some tiny way ‘better’ which leads to the design improvement which Darwin described as evolution by natural selection. We are replicators of memes, but we are also selectors. Just like we selected and improved cow breeds, or plant varieties, we also selected and improved cultural artefacts — like God and art and music — and the better ones tend to stick. And by stick I mean that they tend to stand the test of time.
Just like good food recipes don’t evolve by simply replicating, they require experimentation and perfection of techniques over years to make a recipe stand out and stick. I mean Gordon Ramsey might have learned cooking through imitation in his early days but he would not have become a great chef if he did not experiment and perfect his techniques and recipes.
And people would not want to replicate his recipes if they did not find them good. The origami boat can be thought of in a similar manner. The technique of the origami that survived is the one that had gone through some variation and in some way produced a better iteration of the flower. Or take wine preparation for example. We not only have better industrial techniques but we have bred and improved the variety of grapes over thousands of years to make the fruitiest wines. So the next time you ‘try the wine’, to borrow Clockwork’s meme, you are not just trying the wine but you are trying the idea of wine that have been fine-tuned and perfected over the centuries.
As Dennett puts it: A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.
