I. General

• What Information Wants is a story of how information has flowed throughout the history of biology and humanity.
• How the information in genetic replicators evolves to be fit for its environment. (e.g. How plants and animals only showed up as the world filled with oxygen.)
• And how the information in memetic replicators (language) evolves to fit its environment. How the message "learns" to fit the medium. (e.g. How religion was memetically fit for a pre-science epistemology.)
• The rough thesis of my book is this:

(Reminder: I mean meme in the Dawkins sense, not the internet meme sense! A meme is just any information that can replicate. Knowledge is a meme, religious myths are a meme, and modern internet memes are a meme. I'm thinking of other words to use besides "meme" because it's been overloaded by its modern internet meme usage.)

Genes code organisms. Memes code humans. (And bits code computers.)

Just like The Selfish Gene reframed biological evolution towards the gene, What Information Wants will reframe the focus of modern life away from humans as agent and towards information as the agent.

II. What Does Information Want?

• So what does information want? Both genes and memes want to replicate, like a virus. They want to be acquired by a new host, retained, and then transmitted to the next host.

To achieve these three parts in the image above (acquisition, retention, and transmission):

• Information wants to reproduce. Only the replicators that reproduce sustain through time.
• Information wants to be free. In order to replicate, information wants to spread itself as widely as possible. It wants to be easily transmitted and acquired. Genes want to make many babies. Memes want to spread from mind-to-mind.
• Information wants to access more energy. Information needs energy to replicate. e.g. Genes developed photosynthesis. And memes developed ways to sustain themselves, like religions developing bequests to get inherited land and money.
• Information wants to be retained. Genes are not retained very well and need to constantly reproduce or else their organic matter will decay. Memes can be retained explicitly in stone tablets, or implicitly as tool use passed down as knowledge.
• Information wants to upgrade the medium it evolves on. Genes developed multicellularity and sexual reproduction to exploit more ecological niches. Memes developed writing, printing, and the internet to exploit more memetic niches. They also turned our brain into a mind fit for memes.
• Information wants to fit its environment. Genes are the answer to the question "what can survive here?" (In the physical world.) Memes are the answer to the question "what can survive here?" (In the cultural world.)

III. Research Update