Useful concepts—that is, meme combinations that correspond to peaks on the fitness landscape—are “found” by the people in a culture over generations of that culture’s evolution because through trial and error, the concepts prove effective. They enable people who are capable of thinking with them and using them to design behaviour patterns to survive and flourish. They are almost never the only combinations of ideas or behaviour patterns that could work in that environment. People of other cultures with similar but not identical morés could survive there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

   

                                           Stilts fishermen, Sri Lanka (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                                              Ice fishing, Canada (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                                             

                                         Bow fishing, Philippines (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Whichever culture/society/tribe settles in a given ecosystem, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that enable the people to survive. People can learn to fish with hooks or nets or spears or gaffs or baskets, depending on what materials are available in the region and what technologies are already familiar to its people. But the chances are very good that if there are lots of fish in a lake, then any tribe that settles next to it will learn to fish, by one method or another.

People in varied cultures in many parts of the world also establish markets in the middle of their towns for commercial activities like the selling of fish, and they hire police to patrol the market to stop thieves. Getting fish out of the water and into human stomachs is healthy for those humans who learn to catch fish and to set up markets. They outrun neighboring tribes who are not quite so resourceful and vigorous. Marketplaces, police officers, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies that invent them to maximize the usefulness of what their citizens produce; they allow capital to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good.

Some meme complexes we call values or principles steer us toward institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those subgroups that believe in the effective values most devoutly. The values survive because they foster behaviour patterns that work for the people who hold these values. The tribe members who hold these values most passionately then survive to pass the values on to their young.