The Power of Replication, from Human Ideas to Genes

In his book, Guns, Germs and Steel [1], Jared Diamond popularized the wisdom of Leo Tolstoy’s opening sentence in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”[2] Calling it “the Anna Karenina principle,” Diamond elevated this sentence to highlight that successful trials—analogously to happy families—are similar to one another because they all possess the same set of essential features. All flying birds are alike because they all have wings to fly, long toes to stand on branches, and beaks to collect food and feed their chicks. There are many ways to depart from one or more of the essential features, but these trials—analogously to unhappy families—are doomed to failure.

Businesspeople quote the Anna Karenina principle to emphasize that success requires all essential boxes to be ticked. Any significant departure from the steps of a proven process or recipe could lead to a failure. But how do we draw the line between essential and inessential steps?

We discuss essential and nonessential conditions for successful replication at different levels—from human ideas to genes—in Chapter 3 of Trial, Error, and Success. ?You can subscribe through Substack if you wish to receive the whole chapter as a PDF file (for free), or read first the following excerpt from that chapter.

Don’t disregard inessential customer needs.

To avoid waste of valuable resources, communist governments of the Eastern Bloc of countries implemented a system of planned economies. Based on data about peoples’ needs for food, clothing, and other essential items, the central governments of these countries established and followed strict plans for production, distribution, and pricing of all essential goods. Similar to the lean system of production and consumption, the idea was to avoid both oversupply and undersupply by providing exact quantities of goods at exactly the right time. Different from the lean system, the production was not according to customer demand but according to science-based models of peoples’ needs.

What really happened were chronic shortages and surpluses. Long lines of people were a common sight. People lined up day after day for popular goods, without even knowing when the goods would eventually arrive. The things customers wanted to buy were different from the science of what they needed.

Another example is books, in the context of education being an essential need of every person. Qualified teachers select textbooks according to the needs of their students, but these essential reading materials don’t dominate the number of published and sold books.

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and science popularizer, explains in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene,[3] why neither need nor purpose determine what dominates in nature. A simple example is how the notorious viruses impact our world through flu seasons, epidemics, and pandemics. This happens even though viruses are not proper living organisms, let alone able to infect us on purpose. What enables them to dominate us occasionally is the ability of their genes to self-replicate and to flood our human population with a colossal number of copies.

The idea that effective replication, rather than need or purpose, is crucial for numerical dominance extends beyond biology.

In analogy with the term gene for a unit of biological information, Dawkins coined the term meme for a unit of information that moves from one mind to another. His examples of memes stretch from the apparently purposeless wearing of a baseball cap backwards to the propagation of religious ideas. In general, a meme is any idea that passes from a person to person so easily that it appears as a self-replicating unit. Proverbs, witty quotes, and jokes are examples of memes that existed before the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, when Dawkins suggested the use of the term meme. With today’s electronic communication, we have emoji memes and memes combining an image with a witty text.

In analogy with the numerical dominance of self-replicated genes, an idea becomes a meme if it’s easy to pass it on. However, as distinct from genes, both need and purpose play a role in the case of memes. The natural selection in the process of gene replication is different from the cognitive selection in the case of memes. The genes of a biological virus spread simply because their purposeless self-replication trials are successful; in other words, they pile up in huge numbers simply because they can.? In the case of memes as “cognitive viruses,” the easiness of propagation is a helpful but not a sufficient criterion. Humans are able to pass many simple ideas to other people, but they select not to do it. A person usually decides to pass an idea to another person because of a perceived value of the idea. The value does not need to be as high as solving a pressing problem—it can be as simple as spreading a bit of fun—but the value has to be sufficient to justify the required effort.

Minimize versatility of the units you wish to replicate.

Having recognized that need and purpose play a role for propagation of human ideas, let’s go back to take a look at the spontaneous mechanism of self-replication in biological cells. We can learn something from the simple trick of nature that creates copies of an immense number of symbols.

The immense number of symbols is about three billion, lined up in sequences as a set of 46 DNA molecules that make the unique genome of each person. If these three billion symbols were the alphanumeric characters in books, we would have about 4,000 books. It is estimated that a human body may have as many as a hundred trillion cells, and almost each of them has the complete genome with three billion symbols. In the analogy with the information contained in 4,000 books, this corresponds to a hundred trillion copies of each of these books.

Starting from a single cell, self-replications of all 46 DNA molecules in the genome and concurrent cell divisions create all these copies. Information coded by the DNA symbols provides instructions for the synthesis of proteins and other molecules during cell divisions. However, the self-replication mechanism of DNA molecules themselves is at the level of individual symbols. The key here is that a DNA molecule consists of two strands and the symbols from each strand connect each other by two distinct types of pairing bonds. The symbols are A, C, G, and T, from the first letters of the names for four respective molecules. The two types of pairing links are the double bond between A and T and the triple bond between C and G.

The bonds between the two strands are the weakest inter-atomic bonds in the DNA molecule and they occasionally break. If this happens in a soup of roaming A, C, G, and T units, a wandering A may hit a G in an apparent trial to form a group. However, this will not be a stable group and will quickly fall apart. In terms of the Anna Karenina principle, this is not a happy family. Happy families are the double bonds between A and T and the triple bonds between C and G. The random trials of short-lived pairs don’t matter. What matters are the random encounters that form the stable double-bonded A=T and triple-bonded C≡G pairs. This is the self-replication trick that converts random trials into proper copies of the splitting DNA molecule.

What we are learning here is that versatility is not a good attribute for replication. If the unit A could adapt to form bonds with G and C, not just with T, the described self-replication mechanism wouldn’t work. In contrast, the inflexible matching of pairs turns the uncertainty of randomly moving units into the predictable self-replication. This is what creates order from chaos.

We can generalize this fundamental effect to say that adaptable recipes are not good for replication of products and adaptable messages don’t travel too far. For reliable replication of products, we need frozen and clearly specified recipes. Likewise, if we wish to spread a message by the word of mouth, we have to make it unambiguous. If people have to interpret the message, they are not likely to put the effort and, even if they do, their interpretation is likely to be different from the intended effect.? ??

Don’t create unhappy families by ignoring the arrow of evolution.

It’s possible that billions of years ago, before the first cell evolved, stand-alone A=T and C≡G pairs were floating in what is called primordial soup of organic molecules. However, the environment has changed and stand-alone pairs no longer exist. Yet, the numbers of A=T and C≡G pairs are larger than ever before, but as elements of the DNA molecules in most cells of all humans, animals, and plants.

This has happened only because the genes grouped spontaneously with other molecules to form cells; then varied cells grouped to form different organs, which make plants and animals. When the primordial soup disappeared, genes and DNA molecules can no longer replicate on their own without the needed molecules and energy. From the perspective of genes and DNA molecules, the complex functions of plants and animals supply food with the needed building blocks and energy so that they can replicate themselves. In return, the information coded by the DNA symbols guides the needed processes. This kind of teamwork enables our bodies to function, but the chain of growing complexity doesn’t stop at individual bodies. No single human can survive without the knowledge that our complex society provides.

Each one of us is more than the sum of molecules, genes, and organs—so much so that we can find a spiritual purpose for our existence. However, the molecules and genes did not put us together because of that purpose. What happened was spontaneous assembly of random structures, including complex units consisting of simpler units. Most of these molecular structures died off. When the primordial soup vanished, genes and DNA molecules could no longer survive on their own. Genes that exist today are those that grouped into cells and complex organisms, which enabled them to adapt and self-replicate through changing environment.

According to Richard Dawkins’s metaphor in The Selfish Gene, we exist because the genes needed us to survive and to continue their replication. To describe this effect in a straightforward and more general way, we can say that the arrow of evolution is from the simplest molecules toward the complex organisms and, finally, groups of organisms. Generalizing the metaphor of selfish units, we can say that we as individuals create teams for the sake of our own survival and prosperity.

Teams and large organizations function as more than the sum of individuals. These groups regard their holistic functions as the purpose of their existence. However, no group’s purpose can turn around the arrow of evolution and erase the deep-rooted evolutionary selfishness of individuals. People create unhappy families when they fail to recognize this reality.

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[1] J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

[2] L. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by C. Garnett (New York: Random House, 2000).

[3] R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).