Aaron Lynch - Outline of Lynch's Theory

Outline of Lynch's Theory

Lynch first developed the themes of Thought Contagion in his 1979 undergraduate senior thesis entitled "Abstract Evolution." The thesis explored the notion that an idea which can influence human behavior may blindly evolve the capacity to influence its own prevalence in the human population by motivating its human hosts to engage in behavior that spreads the idea. Just as a virus which elicits sneezes from its human host is more likely to survive by passing from host to host than a similar but non-sneeze-provoking virus, Lynch hypothesized that an idea which stimulated its host to proselytize e.g., "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Gospel of Matthew 28:19) would be more likely to survive and become popular than an idea which did not elicit such activity. He identified other mechanisms which might also increase an idea's market share and longevity, such as influencing the human host to produce more children than one otherwise would, to instruct one's children in the belief earlier and more rigorously than one otherwise might, to isolate or effectively immunize oneself or one's children from exposure to competing ideas, to actively impede the communications of nonbelievers, or to utilize mass communications media to spread the idea to people that the host would never personally meet.

Cultural anthropology had long held that cultural beliefs and information—i.e., socially propagated ideas—survive and propagate because of the survival value they provide to the human groups that adopt them. Lynch embraced this notion of host-benefiting idea propagation, but his analysis added to this the notion that ideas could also propagate at the expense of their human hosts. He noted, for example, that beliefs which induced their hosts into self-sacrifice before sufficiently large audiences (e.g. earlier Christians refusing to worship the Emperor and dying serenely in Roman arenas or Islamist suicide bombers' taping farewell videos for posthumous broadcast to worldwide audiences) could survive or even multiply just by capturing one or more hosts to replace the one it sacrificed.

We may see ourselves as intellectual free agents shopping in a marketplace of ideas, but Lynch asks us to consider the disturbing question: could ideas also be shopping for us? Do we own our most cherished beliefs or do they own us? However, Lynch in no way meant to suggest that ideas have consciousness, will or planning abilities. To Lynch, ideas are information encoded in human neurons or other media. Like computer viruses, they are the products of human thinking and are in no way aware of or deliberating controlling their self-replicating abilities. However, unlike computer viruses, ideas often evolve new or improved contagious properties without intentional human design, through copying infidelity mutations or recombination into powerful new belief sets. According to Lynch, Natural selection determines which ideas survive and propagate successfully through human populations and which lose market share to the point of extinction.

Lynch's thesis provided a cogent explanation for how not only true and useful ideas, but also unprovable or even false notions with sufficiently "contagious" properties could over generations become the predominant beliefs of whole societies. While he insisted that the contagiousness of ideas was largely independent of its truth value, as he immersed himself in this analysis, his frequently uttered motto became, "People don't learn from each other's mistakes. They learn each other's mistakes."