*“A Meme to End All Memes” Blog Series – Part I: Evolutionary Transcendence*

**II.II From Genes to Memes: Transcendence in Evolution Summary: ”**Transcendence”, despite its association with escapist fantasies, also describes real events when evolution moves from one level to the next (transitions between evolutionary mediums). The most recent instance of transcendence allowed humans to leave behind the struggles and competition of genetic evolution, giving rise to the proliferation of desires.

In Part I of the series, we reasoned about desires, and the evolutionary selection pressures that keep them in ecological balance. However, we never discussed the process by which desires evolved in the first place. Now, we are ready to revisit the significance of human intelligence in enabling the proliferation of desires - a transition which we call evolutionary transcendence.

We aim to establish a few core ideas in this post:

• Evolution is a multi-level process that happens in any suitable medium – not just genetics.
• Transcendence is when evolution gives rise to a new, higher level medium.
• Humans have transcended genetic evolution, as pictured below:

• Wait – Isn’t Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” about spiritual transcendence as evolution?

Evolution is the foundation of this entire series – and it’s crucial that we understand it as a general logic that is relevant in many situations.

• Why evolution such a great theory? It’s not even precise, like physics…

Any system which supports certain dynamics is an evolutionary medium:

• Units of selection which survive and reproduce with some degree of independence from each other, and variation.
• Selection pressures of environment/competition which create differences in survival and reproductive success (i.e. fitness)
• Passing on of characteristics over generations, with some changes

Genetics is the most well-known evolutionary medium, because it’s responsible for the biological diversity we see around us. However, genetics as we know it today emerged from several lower-level mediums, with different units of selection:

• ^Evolution’s multi-level history (Book Sources)

Instead of just being a gradual process within one medium, evolution spans across levels of increasing complexity. For each level transition, the unit of selection changed – the rules of evolution began to apply to something more complex than it did before.

Transcendence as Leveling Up