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Behind this enthusiasm lies an ancient batch of neural weapons
which the meme has found lingering in the musty basement of the
brain. To see how these bits of pre-human instinct come in handy, let's
pay a visit to a man of principle, a champion of ideals, a hero of piety
and faith--in short, a total puppet of the meme. His name: Oliver
Cromwell. But to understand Oliver, let's make a brief return to the
sub-cerebral layers Paul D. MacLean called the reptilian and
mammalian brain.
In the late 1940's, the German researcher F. Steiniger put fifteen
brown rats who had never met each other into a cage. At first the
creatures cowered in the corners, frightened and apprehensive. If they
accidentally bumped into each other, they bared their teeth and
snapped. Gradually, however, it dawned on some of the males that
among this batch of strangers were attractive young females. The
gentleman rodents became budding Don Juans and went a-courting.
The first male and female to win each others' hearts now had
something all the others lacked--an ally. The pair took full advantage
of the situation: they terrorized their cagemates. At first, the lovers
simply chased their fellow rodents away from food, sending them
scurrying to the safety of the far end of the enclosure. Later, the
romantic duo hunted down their neighbors one by one. The female
was a particularly quick killer. She would sneak up on a victim as it
was quietly chewing a bit of chow, spring with a sudden speed, and
bite the unfortunate in the side of the neck, often opening a wound in
the carotid artery. Some of the attacked died of infection. Others,
mauled and worn down by frantic efforts to escape, succumbed to
exhaustion. When the happy couple had finished, they were the only
survivors.
The rats had cleared the new territory of competitors,
transforming the cage into a spacious land of milk and honey for
themselves. A new promised land. Now, they could found a tribe that
might--if left to its own devices--thrive for generations to come.50 A
tribe that would carry the parental line of genes.
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