blue trane's Journal: Greg Bear's Slant

I was reminded of this book by a story about toilets with microchips in them.

While looking up the book, I came across this excerpt, which describes memetics as sex with ideas:

We'll begin with words, words only. Imagine you're in a library walking through stacks of books. Let's say you're in the Library of Congress, walking in a pressure suit through the helium-filled chambers, between miles of shelves, just staring at the millions upon billions of publications, periodicals, books, cubes...every single one of those books begins, of course, with an act of sex. Are you offended by the old sexual words? Then use the euphemisms. Men and women, getting together - and exchanging ideas.

Sex is often confused with reproduction. But bacteria engage in sex for the sheer desperate necessary joy of it - sex is their visit to the community library, the communal cookbook. They wriggle themselves through seas of recipes, little circular bits of DNA called plasmids. When they absorb a plasmid they don't necessarily reproduce, buy they still swap genetic material, and that's what bacteriologists call sex. Unlike us, however, bacterial sex - this kind of swap - can even occur between totally different kinds, what we once regarded as different species. But there are no true species in bacteria. We know now that bacteria are not grouped into species, as such, but evanescent communities we call microgens or even, more currently, ecobacters.

The plasmids contain helpful hints on how to survive, how to make this or that new defense against an antibiotic, how to rise up as a community against tailored phages flooding in to eradicate.

In the very beginning, for bacteria, this was sex. This was how sex began, as a visit to the great extended library. I call this data sex. No bacterium can exist for long without touching base with its colleagues, its peers. So how do we differ from bacteria?

Not much. You come to this group, you exchange greetings, arrange meetings, sometimes you exchange recipes. Sometimes we - and here I don't mean the members of this club, necessarily - get together, conjugate, to exchange genetic material, either in a pleasant social jest or joust with biology, or sometimes in earnest, because it's really time to reproduce.

[...]

In the Library of Congress, every single book, every item, began with an act of reproductive sex, allowing the author to get born and eventually to write a book. That book now acts as a kind of plasmid, reaching into your mind to alter your memory, which is the con-template -- my word: the template, through cognition , of behavior. The medium of course is language. Sex is language, and language is sex, whatever form it takes. Changes in anatomy and behavior are the ultimate results -and sometimes, coincidentally, reproduction.

[...]

The shape of our society relies on spoken and written language, the language of signs, the next level of language above the molecular. Some insert another level between these two, that of instinctual behavior, but I believe that's really just another kind of language of signs.

Culture from very early times was as much a factor in human survival as biology, and today, culture has subsumed biology. The language of signs inherent in science and mathematics has co-opted the power of molecular language. We begin with molecules and molecular instructions, but now the instructions feed back upon themselves, and we govern the molecules.