The Information - James Gleick [153]
“An unusual chain-letter reached Quincy during the latter part of 1933,”♦ wrote a local Illinois historian. “So rapidly did the chain-letter fad develop symptoms of mass hysteria and spread throughout the United States, that by 1935–1936 the Post Office Department, as well as agencies of public opinion, had to take a hand in suppressing the movement.” He provided a sample—a meme motivating its human carriers with promises and threats:
We trust in God. He supplies our needs.
Mrs. F. Streuzel........Mich.
Mrs. A. Ford............Chicago, Ill.
Mrs. K. Adkins..........Chicago, Ill.
etc.
Copy the above names, omitting the first. Add your name last. Mail it to five persons who you wish prosperity to. The chain was started by an American Colonel and must be mailed 24 hours after receiving it. This will bring prosperity within 9 days after mailing it.
Mrs. Sanford won $3,000. Mrs. Andres won $1,000.
Mrs. Howe who broke the chain lost everything she possessed.
The chain grows a definite power over the expected word.
DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN.
Two subsequent technologies, when their use became widespread, provided orders-of-magnitude boosts in chain-letter fecundity: photocopying (c. 1950) and e-mail (c. 1995). One team of information scientists—Charles H. Bennett from IBM in New York and Ming Li and Bin Ma from Ontario, Canada—inspired by a chance conversation on a hike in the Hong Kong mountains, began an analysis of a set of chain letters collected during the photocopier era. They had thirty-three, all variants of a single letter, with mutations in the form of misspellings, omissions, and transposed words and phrases. “These letters have passed from host to host, mutating and evolving,”♦ they reported.
Like a gene, their average length is about 2,000 characters. Like a potent virus, the letter threatens to kill you and induces you to pass it on to your “friends and associates”—some variation of this letter has probably reached millions of people. Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. Like genomes, chain letters undergo natural selection and sometimes parts even get transferred between coexisting “species.”
Reaching beyond these appealing metaphors, they set out to use the letters as a “test bed” for algorithms used in evolutionary biology. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees. If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures.
Still, most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators. They are rarely as neatly fixed as a sequence of DNA. Dawkins himself emphasized that he had never imagined founding anything like a new science of memetics. A peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics came to life in 1997—published online, naturally—and then faded away after eight years partly spent in self-conscious