Some people have suggested to me that it is altruistic to leave the UK and come to work in a remote rural setting but in my view this could not be further from the truth. Altruism is when you behave towards someone in a way that is harmful to yourself while being beneficial to the other person. Being run over by a car in the act of saving a complete strangers life would be an extreme example. Such acts are pretty rare and when it comes to choosing a job or a way of life they are completely unsustainable. If the people who came to work here were true altrusits they wouldn't last more than a few months, the only way to stay for a long time is to enjoy it.
It has occured to me that if I wanted to be altrustic I would move back to the UK, live in a tent, work 120 hours a week probably in some private hospital somewhere and send all the money out her to be spent for the benefit of the community by someone I trust. Maybe I am overerestimating what that money could do or underestimating what I am actually doing here but it is possible that this choice would be of more benefit to the community.
Just because I'm not an altruists doesn't mean that I think this is any old job. Nobody's perfect and I don't mind admitting that I can feel a little pleased with myself when people ask me what I'm up to. I wish it wasn't so but I can't help it. Nor does it mean that I haven't made sacrifices, a clean hot shower would be real luxury at the moment for example, but hasn't everyone had to make sacrifices along the way.
It also doesn't mean that I think this is the most important thing in the world either. I honestly beleive that a group of motivated teachers, businessmen or water engineers could have a huge impact on this community that would probably far outstrip the benefits that can be acheived by improving healthcare. All I'm saying is that when it comes to leaving the world in a better place than you found it it certainly beats marketing cigarettes to children or writing computer viruses for a living.
Wednesday 26 March 2008
Saturday 8 March 2008
The meme pool
Something that has struck me about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Transkei is the effect it must be having on the meme pool. A meme is a unit of cultural information such as an idea of practice that is transmitted from one generation to the next either verbally of by repeated action. An example might be a child noticing that her father always unplugs the television before he goes to bed, she copies this behaviour when she gets older, not because her father's genes have influenced her or because she has learnt that unplugging the television is important but because she is copying her father. This is a form of non-genetic inheritance which has some important differences to genetic inheritance. Firstly memes can be passed between individuals or group that are not genetically related such as between groups of friends and unlike genes, memes do not necessarily have to be beneficially to the individual to be propagated, like computer viruses they just need to be good at replicating.
In the Transkei approximately 20% of adults are infected with HIV and without treatment the majority will have died in 10 years. Assuming they are infected around age 20 and become sick some time before they die that means that many of the years that they could potentially spend propagating their memes will be lost. Remember that you don't have to be in your reproductive years to propagate a meme, you just have to be someone that people copy.
With our current level of knowledge about HIV there is only one way to avoid this once you are infected. You must possess the memes 'willing to accept HIV status', 'willing to join an HIV support group' and 'diligent pill taker for the rest of my life'. Although I wouldn't exclude genetic influences on these behaviours they might well be described as memes.
At the moment it seems clear that these memes are more likely to be present in the female popultion who often thrive on the support group environment and seem much more organised about taking medicines than men. Although this is of course a generlisation it seems likely to me that unless there are radical changes to the way we treat and prevent HIV, the popultion meme pool will shift towards acceptance of HIV status and disciplined pill taking as anyone not possessing these meme will die and have less opportunity to pass on their own memes to people around them.
Similar arguements could be made about the way people are infected with HIV in the first place. The meme 'only have unprotected sex with someone who you know (or are very confident) is HIV negative' would spread very successfully if it was readily copied by the group. The meme 'always use condoms when having sex' would also pass to the next generation, interestingly this would be at the expense of the genes as anyone who always used a condom would not be passing their own genes to the next generation.
There are of course many generalisations and simplifications to my arguement, including the interaction of memes with genes, although I would expect the gene pool to be altered in a similar way to the meme pool. Also as I said earlier these memes won't propagate simply because they are beneficial to the individual but given that not possessing them results in your early, death deleterious memes would have little time to propagate. Presumably there are experts in memetics out there studying these effects but if not I think it would make a fascinating study of non-genetic natural selection at work.
In the Transkei approximately 20% of adults are infected with HIV and without treatment the majority will have died in 10 years. Assuming they are infected around age 20 and become sick some time before they die that means that many of the years that they could potentially spend propagating their memes will be lost. Remember that you don't have to be in your reproductive years to propagate a meme, you just have to be someone that people copy.
With our current level of knowledge about HIV there is only one way to avoid this once you are infected. You must possess the memes 'willing to accept HIV status', 'willing to join an HIV support group' and 'diligent pill taker for the rest of my life'. Although I wouldn't exclude genetic influences on these behaviours they might well be described as memes.
At the moment it seems clear that these memes are more likely to be present in the female popultion who often thrive on the support group environment and seem much more organised about taking medicines than men. Although this is of course a generlisation it seems likely to me that unless there are radical changes to the way we treat and prevent HIV, the popultion meme pool will shift towards acceptance of HIV status and disciplined pill taking as anyone not possessing these meme will die and have less opportunity to pass on their own memes to people around them.
Similar arguements could be made about the way people are infected with HIV in the first place. The meme 'only have unprotected sex with someone who you know (or are very confident) is HIV negative' would spread very successfully if it was readily copied by the group. The meme 'always use condoms when having sex' would also pass to the next generation, interestingly this would be at the expense of the genes as anyone who always used a condom would not be passing their own genes to the next generation.
There are of course many generalisations and simplifications to my arguement, including the interaction of memes with genes, although I would expect the gene pool to be altered in a similar way to the meme pool. Also as I said earlier these memes won't propagate simply because they are beneficial to the individual but given that not possessing them results in your early, death deleterious memes would have little time to propagate. Presumably there are experts in memetics out there studying these effects but if not I think it would make a fascinating study of non-genetic natural selection at work.
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