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The Power of the Meme Meme
The Power of the Meme Meme
Susan Blackmore
Originally published in The Skeptic (US), 1997, 5 No 2, 4349
Cover illustration by Pat Linse
Reprinted in 2002 as "Memes as good science". In M. Shermer (Ed) The
Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, Santa Barbara, CA., ABCClio, 652
663
Without the theory of evolution by natural selection nothing in the world of
biology makes much sense. Without Darwin and neoDarwinism, you cannot
answer questions like "Why do bats have wings? Why do cats have five
claws? or Why do our optic fibres cross in front of our retinas?" You can only
fall back on appeals to an imaginary creator.
I am going to make a bold claim.
Without the theory of evolution by memetic selection nothing in the world of
the mind makes much sense. Without memetics you cannot answer questions
like "Why can’t I get that thought out of my mind? Why did I decide to write
this article and not that one? Who am I?" Without memetics you can only fall
back on appeals to an imaginary conscious agent.
In this article I want to lay the groundwork for a theory of memetics and see
how far we can get. I shall outline the history and origins of the idea, explore
how it has been used, abused, and ignored, and how it has provided new
insight into the power of religions and cults. I shall then take on a meme’s eye
view of the world and use this to answer five previously unanswered
questions about human nature. Why can’t we stop thinking? Why do we talk
so much? Why are we so nice to each other? Why are our brains so big? And,
finally, what is a self?
I have tried to write the sections to stand alone. If you only want to read some
of them I suggest you read the section Taking the meme’s eye view, and pick
any others that take your fancy.
A History of the Meme Meme
In 1976 Dawkins published his bestselling The Selfish Gene. This book
popularised the growing view in biology that natural selection proceeds not in
the interest of the species or of the group, nor even of the individual, but in the
interest of the genes. Although selection takes place largely at the individual
level, the genes are the true replicators and it is their competition that drives
the evolution of biological design.
Dawkins, clear and daring as always, suggested that all life everywhere in the
universe must evolve by the differential survival of slightly inaccurate self
replicating entities; he called these "replicators". Furthermore, these
replicators automatically band together in to groups to create systems, or
machines, that carry them around and work to favour their continued
replication. These survival machines, or "vehicles" are our familiar bodies
and those of cats, ecoli and cabbages created to carry around and protect
the genes inside them.
Right at the end of the book he suggests that Darwinism is too big a theory to
be confined to the narrow context of the gene. So he asks an obvious, if
provocative, question. Are there any other replicators on our planet? Yes, he
claims. Staring us in the face, though still drifting clumsily about in its primeval
soup of culture, is another replicator a unit of imitation. He gave it the name
"meme" (to rhyme with "dream" or "seem") and as examples suggested
"tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of
building arches." Memes are stored in human brains and passed on by
imitation.
In just those few pages he 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 group
together just as genes do. He argued that once a new replicator arises it will
tend to take over and begin a new kind of evolution. Above all he treated
memes as replicators in their own right, chastising those of his colleagues
who tended 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 and it need not be subservient to the old. In other words, memetic
evolution can now proceed without regard to its effects on the genes.
A few years later Douglas Hofstadter wrote about viral sentences and self
replicating structures in his Scientific American column Metamagical Themas.
Readers replied, with examples of text using bait and hooks to ensure its own
replication. They suggested viral sentences from the simplest instruction, such
as "Copy me!", through those with added threats ("Say me or I’II. put a curse
on you") or promises ("I’II. grant you three wishes"), to examples of virulent
chain letters (Hofstadter, 1985, p 53). One reader suggested the term
memetics for the discipline studying memes. Yet memetics did not really take
off.
Why not? The basic idea is very simple. If Dawkins is right then everything
you have learned by imitation from someone else 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 right (and I on the left!), eat a hamburger or a pizza, whistle "Happy
Birthday to You" or "Mama I love you" or even shake hands, you are dealing
in memes. Memetics is all about why some memes spread and others do not.
The greatest proponent of memetics since Dawkins has been the philosopher
Dan Dennett. In his books Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea (1995) he expands on the idea of the meme as replicator.
In The Origin of Species, Darwin (1859) explained how natural selection must
happen if certain conditions are met. If there is heredity from parent to
offspring, variation among the offspring, and not all the offspring can survive
then selection must happen. Individuals who have some useful advantage
"have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life" (Darwin,
1859, p 127, and see Dennett, 1995, p 48) and will then pass on this
advantage to their offspring. Darwin clearly saw how obvious the process of
natural selection is once you have grasped it. It just must happen.
Dennett describes evolution as a simple algorithm that is, a mindless
procedure that when carried out must produce a result. For evolution you
need three things heredity, variation and selection then evolution is
inevitable. You need not get us, of course, or anything remotely like us; for
evolution has no plans and no foresight. Nevertheless, you must get
something more complex than what you started with. The evolutionary
algorithm is "a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of
Mind" (Dennett, 1995, p 50). This, says Dennett, is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
No wonder people have been terrified of it, and fought so hard against it. It is
outrageously simple and terrifyingly powerful.
If evolution is an algorithm then it should be able to run on different
substrates. We tend to think of evolution as depending on genes because that
is the way biology works on this planet, but the algorithm is neutral about this
and will run wherever there is heredity, variation and selection. Or as
Dawkins puts it a replicator. It doesn’t matter which replicator. If memes are
replicators then evolution will occur.
So are memes replicators?
There is enormous variety in the behaviours human beings emit, these
behaviours are copied, more or less accurately by other human beings, and
not all the copies survive. The meme therefore fits perfectly with the scheme
of heredity, variation and selection. Think of tunes, for example. Millions of
variants are sung by millions of people. Only a few get passed on and
repeated and even fewer make it into the pop charts or the collections of
classics. Scientific papers proliferate but only a few get long listings in the
citation indexes. Only a few of the disgusting concoctions made in woks
actually make it onto the TV shows that tell you how to Wok things and only a
few of my brilliant ideas have ever been appreciated by anyone! In other
words, competition to get copied is fierce.
Of course memes are not like genes in many ways and we must be very
careful in applying terms from genetics to memes. The copying of memes is
done by a kind of "reverse engineering" by one person copying another’s
behaviour, rather than by chemical transcription. Also we do not know just
how memes are stored in human brains and whether they will turn out to be
digitally stored, like genes, or not. However, the important point is that if
memes are true replicators, memetic evolution must occur.
Dennett is convinced they are and he explores how memes compete to get
into as many minds as possible. This competition is the selective force of the
memosphere and the successful memes create human minds as they go,
restructuring our brains to make them ever better havens for more memes.
Human consciousness, claims Dennett, is itself a huge memecomplex, and a
person is best understood as a certain sort of ape infested with memes. If he
is right then we cannot hope to understand the origins of the human mind
without memetics.
This makes it all the more fascinating that most people interested in the
human mind have ignored memetics or simply failed to understand it. Mary
Midgley (1994) calls memes "mythical entities" that cannot have interests of
their own; "an empty and misleading metaphor". In a recent radio debate,
Stephen Jay Gould called the idea of memes a "meaningless metaphor"
(though I am not sure one can actually have a meaningless metaphor!). He
wishes "that the term "cultural evolution" would drop from use." (Gould, 1996,
p 21920).
The word "Meme" does not even appear in the index of important books about
human origins and language (e.g. Donald, 1991; Dunbar, 1996; Mithen, 1996;
Pinker, 1994; Tudge,1995; Wills,1993), in an excellent collection on
evolutionary psychology (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, 1992), nor in books
about human morality (Ridley, 1996; Wright, 1994). Although there are many
theories of the evolution of culture, almost all make culture entirely
subservient to genetic fitness, as in Wilson’s (1978) metaphor of the genes
holding culture on a leash or Lumsden and Wilson’s claim that "the link
between genes and culture cannot be severed" (1981, p 344). CavalliSforza
and Feldman (1981) treat "cultural activity as an extension of Darwinian
fitness" (p 362) and even Durham (1991), the only one to use the word
"meme", sticks to examples of cultural features with obvious relevance to
genetic fitness, such as color naming, dietary habits and marriage customs.
Perhaps Boyd and Richerson (1990) come closest to treating the cultural unit
as a true replicator. However, they still view "genetic and cultural evolution as
a tightly coupled coevolutionary process in humans" (Richerson & Boyd,
1992, p 80).
As far as I can understand them, no one except Cloak (1975) and Dawkins
treats their unit of cultural exchange as a true replicator. If there is a
continuum from Gould’s outright rejection at one end, to Dawkins and Cloak at
the other, then most lie in between. They accept cultural evolution but not the
idea of a second replicator. When they say "adaptive" or "maladaptive" they
mean for the genes. When it comes to the crunch they always fall back on
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