The Meme Machine (4 page)

We must be absolutely clear about what ‘selfish’ means in this context. It does not mean genes
for
selfishness. Such genes would incline their carriers to act selfishly and that is something quite different. The term ‘selfish’ here means that the genes act only for themselves; their only interest is their own replication; all they want is to be passed on to the next generation. Of course, genes do not ‘want’ or have aims or intentions in the same way as people do; they are only chemical instructions that can be copied. So when I say they ‘want’, or are ‘selfish’ I am using a shorthand, but this shorthand is necessary to avoid lengthy explanations. It will not lead us astray if we remember that genes either
are
or
are not
successful at getting passed on into the next generation. So the shorthand ‘genes want
x’
can always be spelled out as ‘genes that do
x
are more likely to be passed on’. This is the only power they have – replicator power. And it is in this sense that they are selfish.

Dawkins also introduced the important distinction between ‘replicators’ and their ‘vehicles’. A replicator is anything of which copies are made, including ‘active replicators’ whose nature affects the chances of their being copied again. A vehicle is the entity that interacts with the environment, which is why Hull (1988a) prefers the term ‘interactors’ for a similar idea. Vehicles or interactors carry the replicators around inside them and protect them. The original replicator was presumably a simple self–copying molecule in the primeval soup, but our most familiar replicator now is DNA. Its vehicles are organisms and groups of organisms that interact with each other as they live out their lives in the seas or the air, the forests or fields. Genes are the selfish replicators that drive the evolution of the biological world here on earth but Dawkins believes there is a more fundamental principle at work. He suggested that wherever it arises, anywhere in the universe, ‘all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities’ (1976, p. 192). This is the foundation for the idea of Universal Darwinism; the application of Darwinian thinking way beyond the confines of biological evolution.

At the very end of the book he asked an obvious, if provocative, question. Are there any other replicators on our planet? The answer, he claimed, is ‘Yes’. Staring us in the face, although still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator – a unit of imitation.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
imitation
. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to
meme
.

As examples, he suggested ‘tunes, ideas, catch–phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’. He mentioned scientific ideas that catch on and propagate themselves around the world by jumping from brain to brain. He wrote about religions as groups of memes with a high survival value, infecting whole societies with belief in a God or an afterlife. He talked about fashions in dress or diet, and about ceremonies, customs and technologies – all of which are spread by one person copying another. Memes are stored in human brains (or books or inventions) and passed on by imitation.

In a few pages, Dawkins laid the foundations for understanding the evolution of memes. He discussed their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realised living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do. Most importantly, he treated the meme as a replicator in its own right. He complained that many of his colleagues seemed unable to accept the idea that memes would spread for their own benefit, independently of any benefit to the genes. ‘In the last analysis they wish always to go back to “biological advantage” ’ to answer questions about human behaviour. Yes, he agreed, we got our brains for biological (genetic) reasons but now we have them a new replicator has been unleashed. ‘Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old’ (Dawkins 1976, pp. 193-4). In other words, memetic evolution can now take off without regard to its effects on the genes.

If Dawkins is right then human life is permeated through and through with memes and their consequences. Everything you have learned by imitation from someone else is a meme. But we must be clear what is meant by the word ‘imitation’, because our whole understanding of memetics depends on it. Dawkins said that memes jump from ‘brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation’ (1976, p. 192). I will also use the term ‘imitation’ in the broad sense. So if, for example, a friend tells you a story and you remember the gist and pass it on to someone else then that counts as imitation. You have not precisely imitated your friend’s every action and word, but something (the gist of the story) has been copied from her to you and then on to
someone else. This is the ‘broad sense’ in which we must understand the term ‘imitation’. If in doubt, remember that something must have been copied.

Everything that is passed from person to person in this way is a meme. This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza and coke, whistle the theme tune from
Neighbours
or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behaviour to get itself copied.

Take the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Millions of people – probably thousands of millions of people the world over – know this tune. Indeed, I only have to write down those four words to have a pretty good idea that you may soon start humming it to yourself. Those words affect you, probably quite without any conscious intention on your part, by stirring up a memory you already possess. And where did that come from? Like millions of other people you have acquired it by imitation. Something, some kind of information, some kind of instruction, has become lodged in all those brains so that now we all do the same thing at birthday parties. That something is what we call the meme.

Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us. A brilliant new scientific idea, or a technological invention, may spread because of its usefulness. A song like Jingle Bells may spread because it sounds OK, though it is not seriously useful and can definitely get on your nerves. But some memes are positively harmful – like chain letters and pyramid selling, new methods of fraud and false doctrines, ineffective slimming diets and dangerous medical ‘cures’. Of course, the memes do not care; they are selfish like genes and will simply spread if they can.

Remember that the same shorthand applies to memes as to genes. We can say that memes are ‘selfish’, that they ‘do not care’, that they ‘want’ to propagate themselves, and so on, when all we mean is that successful memes are the ones that get copied and spread, while unsuccessful ones do not. This is the sense in which memes ‘want’ to get copied, ‘want’ you to pass them on and ‘do not care’ what that means to you or your genes.

This is the power behind the idea of memes. To start to think memetically we have to make a giant flip in our minds just as biologists had to do when taking on the idea of the selfish gene. Instead of thinking
of our ideas as our own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied. We humans, because of our powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‘hosts’ needed for the memes to get around. This is how the world looks from a ‘meme’s eye view’.

Meme fear

This is a scary idea indeed. And perhaps that is why the word ‘meme’ is so often written with inverted commas around it, as though to apologise for using it. I have even seen eminent lecturers raise both hands and tweak them above their ears when forced to say ‘meme’ out loud. Gradually, the word has become more generally known, and has even been added to the
Oxford English Dictionary
. There are discussion groups and a
Journal of Memetics
on the Internet, and the idea almost seems to have acquired a cult following in cyberspace. But in academia it has not yet been so successful. A perusal of some of the best recent books on human origins, the evolution of language and evolutionary psychology shows that the word does not appear at all in most of them (‘meme’ is not in the indexes of Barkow
et al
. 1992; Diamond 1997; Dunbar 1996; Mithen 1996; Pinker 1994; Mark Ridley 1996; Tudge 1995; Wills 1993; Wright 1994). The idea of memes seems extremely relevant to these disciplines, and I want to argue that it is time for us to take on board the notion of a second replicator at work in human life and evolution.

One of the problems with the idea of memes is that it strikes at our deepest assumptions about who we are and why we are here. This is always happening in science. Before Copernicus and Galileo, people believed they lived at the centre of the universe in a world created especially for them by God. Gradually, we had to accept not only that the sun does not revolve around the earth, but that we live on some minor little planet in an ordinary galaxy in a vast universe of other galaxies.

A hundred and forty years ago Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided the first plausible mechanism for evolution without a designer. People’s view of their own origin changed from the biblical story of special creation in the image of God, to an animal descended from an apelike ancestor – a vast leap indeed, and one that led to much ridicule and fanatical opposition to Darwin. Still – we have all coped with that leap and come to accept that we are animals created by evolution. However, if memetics is valid, we will have to make another vast leap in
accepting a similar evolutionary mechanism for the origin of our minds and our selves.

••••

What will determine whether the theory of memes is worth having or not? Although philosophers of science argue over what makes a scientific theory valid, there are at least two commonly agreed criteria, and I will use these in judging memetics. First, a theory must be able to explain things better than its rival theories; more economically or more comprehensively. And second, it must lead to testable predictions that turn out to be correct. Ideally, those predictions should be unexpected ones – things that no one would have looked for if they were not starting from a theory of memetics.

My aim in this book is to show that many aspects of human nature are explained far better by a theory of memetics than by any rival theory yet available. The theory starts only with one simple mechanism – the competition between memes to get into human brains and be passed on again. From this, it gives rise to explanations for such diverse phenomena as the evolution of the enormous human brain, the origins of language, our tendency to talk and think too much, human altruism, and the evolution of the Internet. Looked at through the new lens of the memes, human beings look quite different.

Is the new way better? It seems obviously so to me, but I expect that many people will disagree. This is where the predictions come in. I shall try to be as clear as I can in deriving predictions and showing how they follow from memetic theory. I may speculate and even, at times, leap wildly beyond the evidence, but as long as the speculations can be tested then they can be helpful. In the end, the success or failure of these predictions will decide whether memes are just a meaningless metaphor or the grand new unifying theory we need to understand human nature.

CHAPTER 2

Universal Darwinism

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is, to my mind, the most beautiful in all of science. It is beautiful because it is so simple and yet its results are so complex. It is counter–intuitive and hard to grasp but once you have seen it the world is transformed before your eyes. There is no longer any need for a grand designer to explain all the complexity of the living world. There is just a stark and mindless procedure by which we have all come about – beautiful but scary.

I want to spend most of this chapter explaining the theory. The problem is that this beautifully simple idea is often misunderstood. Perhaps its very simplicity makes people think there must be something more to it, or that they have missed the point when they have actually grasped it. Evolution by natural selection is very, very simple and not at all obvious.

Darwin explained the basic principle in his great work
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
first published in 1859. Before that time many people had been impressed by the relationships between organisms, and by progressions in the fossil record, and had speculated about evolution. Among them were Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and Jean–Baptiste de Lamarck. However, no one had described a plausible mechanism by which evolution might work, and this was Darwin’s great contribution.

He reasoned that if living creatures vary (as they certainly do) and if, due to their geometric increase in numbers, there is at certain times a struggle for life (which cannot be disputed), then it would be most extraordinary if there were not some variation that was useful to a creature’s welfare. The individuals with these characteristics will then have the best chance of being ‘preserved in the struggle for life’ and will produce offspring with the same characteristics. This was the principle he called ‘natural selection’.

Darwin’s argument requires three main features: variation, selection and retention (or heredity). That is, first there must be variation so that not all creatures are identical. Second, there must be an environment in which not all the creatures can survive and some varieties do better than others. Third, there must be some process by which offspring inherit
characteristics from their parents. If all these three are in place then any characteristics that are positively useful for survival in that environment must tend to increase. Put into Richard Dawkins’s language, if there is a replicator that makes imperfect copies of itself only some of which survive, then evolution simply
must
occur. This
inevitability
of evolution is part of what makes Darwin’s insight so clever. All you need is the right starting conditions and evolution just has to happen.