Survival of the fittest text

If "survival of the fittest" has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts.
-Hugh Pyper, "The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics".

More from his lecture:
..Western culture is the Bible's way of making more Bibles.
The intriguing questions then become how the bible alters its environment to increase the likelihood of its being replicated and why it has been so conspicuously successful in this... The bible must be read and must make itself read if there is to be reproduced. Its success in achieving this is what makes it an example of a highly adaptive active replicator.
In this view the biblical reader, then, acts as the site of transfer of the information contained in the text to the meme-pool in which he or she operates. The book itself encodes memes which once active in the mind lead the human agents of that meme-pool to produce more examples of the text. But like all memes, in Dennett's view, they encounter competition. People have a lot of other things to do with their time and energy besides copying bibles, indeed a lot of other texts to read. What has lead to the particular success of the bible in this competition for mental space?...
If the primary evolutionary drive is for survival, then a virus or a meme that 'persuades' its host that it is necessary to the host's own survival and therefore conveys a reproductive advantage will have an instant welcome into the replicatory machine....This has resonances with the account that Zygmunt Bauman offers of the whole enterprise of human culture. Culture, he claims, is a human construct designed to fend off the threat of death. It is a survival mechanism, which finds a way of promising a form of survival in the face of the inevitability of individual death. For Bauman, the Jewish tradition is the clearest case of the subsuming of individual death in communal survival. The individual may die, but his or her genes and memes will carry on. The duty of the individual then, in the sense of his or her best survival strategy becomes one of ensuring the survival of the group, not simply his or her own prolonged life. Christianity has adopted the alternative strategy of a promise of immortality, in that the believer's death is caught up in the context of the resurrection of Jesus. Both genetically and memetically, the afterlife of the believer is strictly irrelevant except in so far as belief in personal immortality act to sustain the continuity of the meme pool....

.....The propagation of the text, and the founding of new communities are also linked to the survival of the reader and his or her community, or meme-pool. The Hebrew bible is full of admonitions about the duty to hand down its teaching, and by implication the text, to the next generation. Secondly the text contains a strong message of evangelisation. The survival of the reader's community depends on the production of new texts and new communities. This complex of memes and of strategies forms a powerful ensemble to ensure the accurate transmission of the text....
The bible contains powerful instructions as to its own unique worth and the limits to be placed on the infiltration of foreign information or texts into the communities which propagate it. The whole process of canonisation, for instance, reveals a complex interaction between text and community which serves, for example, to oust the fledgling apocrypha and turn the community's attention to the ever-growing task of copying and commentating on the biblical text with an increased sense of its importance and of the need for its conservation....Even more amazing is the development of communities of those supposedly excluded by the text, the Gentiles, who find ways of identifying themselves as Israel and arrogating to themselves both the promises and the duties imposed by the text, chief among which is the duty to ensure the connivance and dispersal of the text. Here the 'gene-pool' of Judaism, with its claim of descent from Abraham, is replaced by a meme-pool, a claim of descent from Abraham's faith, a line of argument already presaged in the Old Testament itself....This is an astonishing success and one of crucial importance to the propagation of the text. The consequence of its incorporation into the canon of the Christian bible is an exponential leap in the number of copies produced. However, it may also be true that the text turns against the communities that have sustained it if that is to its advantage. The horrid record of Christian antisemitism shows the consequences of the reappropriation of the filter mechanisms for memetic purity being turned against the original host community as the bible takes on a new existence as Christian Scripture. A prime exemplar of the selfishness of the text might be seen in the reformation where the text operates to cause a major breach and disruption in the community which sustained it in order to take advantage of the new technology of printing through the propagation of a meme that removed the authority of interpretation from the institution to the individual and to the possibilities of reproduction within vernacular language communities. The peril of too close an association with the host community may be that the text will fall with the community that guards it. The success of the bible has been predicated on its ability to 'jump ship' when necessary.....
My own view.... is that the bible has so firmly entrenched a place in our culture that it is ineradicable. It is not a parasite but a constituent part of the great complex of meme complexes that can be designated 'western culture', part of the exosomatic genome of that culture's members. More than that, I see it ... as an indispensable source of what might be called 'memetic diversity.' In agricultural genetics, one of the most worrying trends has been the loss of diversity from the appellations of food plants and animals. .. Ease of marketing may well win out against nutrition. However, there is a potential disaster looming if the super variety is suddenly attacked by a pathogen or if there is a major climatic shift. A variety may be fit for the purpose and the conditions of the moment, but what if conditions change?

Here it becomes vitally important to maintain a 'gene pool' of wild relatives of the crop plants which may themselves have all sorts of drawbacks from the point of view of the technology of farming, but which have shown themselves able to fend for themselves in this competitive world over time. Such wild populations contain a huge diversity of genetic material maintained over time and a vast potential for diversity and for change. Can we view the Bible as a sort of cultural 'memetic reserve'? Parts of it may seem irrelevant, redundant, even detrimental to our survival, but it has kept going. As Medawar and Plotkin indicate, it may serve to maintain a memetic richness and complexity, a inexhaustible source of variety which may contain the unexpected counter to forces that threaten to impoverish our cultural lives.