But now that technology makes it easy for many people to see the same information, one could argue that memetic evolution has slowed down dramatically.
BTW, one could also argue that modern healthcare greatly slows down natural evolution in humans.
Back before printing it would take a minimum of weeks for an idea to work itself across, say, Europe. (And that would have to be a big idea, one worth hiring the Pony Express to promulgate.) Now it takes a minimum of milliseconds. Before the web you had to publish a paper or convene a major international meeting to place an issue in front of most of the world's experts on a subject; now you can do that in the morning and have everyone's first response on your desk by the afternoon. I work in near-real time with colleagues twelve times zones away.
Meanwhile, while we're engaged in potentially bogus extrapolation from biology, I'd note that human "mimetic" copying has vastly less fidelity than genetic copying, even in the age of web-based copy-and-paste. Yet that hasn't stopped the descendants of bacteria from turning into dolphins. Indeed, it probably helps: If you're going to tinker with the genetics to see if something better happens, it's best to tinker with one gene at a time, not start flipping every switch at once.
In light of multiple increases in the speed of memetic evolution as mechanical_fish outlines, where on Earth do you get the idea that idea formation has slowed down? I can't even fathom such a thing.
Your (general sense of "you", i.e., this is true for me too) view of the past is skewed by the fact that we see it all at once, and we are not living it. However, try this: Take your favorite "fast moving" time, perhaps the Enlightenment era. Plot the popular ideas on a timeline. Do the same thing with the last century, on the same scale. Now, put those two timelines next to each other, and you will achieve enlightenment.
By the way, no fair letting ignorance drive the timeline. No fair putting down all sorts of 18th century advances in, say, philosophy, then claiming the entire 20th century was a yawning, gaping void... because while your (again, general "you") knowledge of 20th century philosophy may be a gaping void, actual 20th century philosophy was not. In fact, the reason why we all know much more about the 18th century than the 20th century is that so damn much happened in the 20th century that you can only absorb small parts of it. And while the economy in the 21st has slowed down, idea formation sure hasn't.
On the whole, though, I had a similar response to the original question: technology has increased the rate of copying, and the reach of any given meme. I grew up in Podunk, Nebraska as the lone atheist in a town of 180 Lutherans and Methodists and I recall being frightened of holding beliefs that were so different that they didn't even appear on television at the time.
Today any belief is at your fingertips. I'm still shocked that we've come so far that Bill Maher's "Religulous" was in general release! The environment in which memes compete today is far more interesting. It's as if millions of little disconnected lakes have suddenly become one, connected ocean.
Edit: I honestly don't understand how amichail could think that creativity has slowed down. More people than ever are using technology right now to create & share videos, songs, podcasts, programs, essays, fiction, art, and conversation online. I'd love to see the color of the sky in your world. ;-)
While you're right that technology has increased the fidelity of replication, that leaves out the process of how a human accepts/rejects/morphs the information. Have you never encountered the word "meh" online?
However, its not just memetic evolution that dictates creativity, its also mental abstraction. Even if you copied the same memes to the head of every human, the ideas of the individuals would soon diverge as our mind mixes and matched these 'terminal' memes to propose brand new memes.
I think that the greatest risk to human creativity is much the opposite of widespread propagation. The greatest risk is that the new memes with the most utility can not be understood by enough people to be propagated widely enough, fast enough. The greatest risk is ending up with the mediocrity of new memes that propagate only because they are simple enough to be quickly understood.
"Modern life's pressures may be hastening evolution" http://www.physorg.com/news158839250.html
As to the healthcare statement, I wonder if that's an argument that the conservative right would try against Obama's reform... that would be quite funny to see, really.
We have libertarianism and individualist anarchism that will oppose any kind of statist control on healthcare for example. Since they are natural opponents of conservative and liberals anyway, you don't hear much of them.
Yes. But we have `unnatural' selection, now. Those genes than make on better placed to profit from modern healthcare have a better chance of staying in the gene pool.