6
the R
evolution of 1905, the tsar regained control over the country. But
in 1917, the less-than-brilliant Nicholas was losing once again. This
time the occasion was World War I. Millions of Russians died on the
eastern front. Soldiers struggled through the snow without
ammunition, winter clothing and food. Back home, the railway system
broke down. Grain and meat could not reach the towns. Men and
women of modest means starved in the boulevards of the Russian
Empire's most magnificent cities.
After a new revolution had spontaneously begun to heave
through the streets of Petrograd and Moscow, Lenin finally got his act
together. He took a train from Zurich to the Russian capital. The
minute he arrived at the Petrograd railroad station, the bearded book-
lover began haranguing the crowds with slogans. And the meme that
had first been born in the mind of Karl Marx finally fell like a scrap of
wandering bacteria into nutritive jelly and spread with explosive force.
By the mid '80s, the ideas brought together by one man's brain in
the corner of a lonely library, ideas that looked from year to year as if
their disappearance from the planet was all but inevitable, had gone
from controlling one 150-pound man to mastering millions of tons of
this planet's matter. These memes were alive in the minds and the
social mechanisms of over 1.8 billion human beings. They spread their
influence over the lands, the minerals, the machines and the
domesticated animals that those human beings controlled.10
The new replicator took up even less space and mass than the
tangle of atoms required for a strand of DNA. That replicator--like the
ones incubated by Jefferson and Madison and St. Paul-- had assembled
under its rule more of the planet earth than was ever brought together
by any gene. Any gene, that is, save one... the human gene.
The new replicator, the meme, is a vast upward step on the
ladder of creation. The old genetic system could take ten thousand
years to effect a product improvement in a large and complex beast.11
But memes can rearrange sprawling networks of outrageously intricate
creatures in only a few centuries...or less. The meme of Christianity
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