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 behavior patterns to survive and flourish. They are never the only combinations of concepts or behavior patterns that could work in that environment. People of other cultures could use their own concepts and morés to survive there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

                                             

   

                    Stilts fishermen, Sri Lanka (credit: Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                               

   

  

                                                          Fishermen with traditonal fish traps, Vietnam                                                             (credit: Petr Ruzicka from Prague, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                       

   

                              Ice fishing, Canada (credit: mattcatpurple, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                             

   

                   Bow fishing, Philippines (credit: James David Givens, via Wikimedia Commons)  

But whichever society or tribe settles in a given ecosystem, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that enable the people to survive. For example, 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 the 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 all over 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 set up markets. They get stronger and out-multiply less vigorous neighboring tribes. 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, even surplus goods working as barter capital if the people have no currency yet, to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good. Fresh fish are a healthy source of protein. Rotten fish benefit no one. Hence, marketplaces.