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Abstract
Christiansen and Chater’s arguments share with
memetics the idea that language is an evolving organism, and that
brain capacities shape language by influencing the fitness of memes,
although memetics also claims that memes in turn shape brains. Their
rejection of meme theory is based on falsely claiming that memes
must be consciously selected by sighted watchmakers.
Christiansen and Chater argue that features of
the human brain have shaped language and that language itself is
akin to an organism. This view is remarkably similar to that which
emerges from memetics, and yet they summarily reject the views of
meme-theorists. I shall explore the similarities and differences
between memetics and their view, and argue that their rejection of
memetics is misplaced.
In what sense is language an organism?
Christiansen and Chater are slightly equivocal in answering this
question. Although, in the abstract, they claim to ‘view language
itself as a complex and interdependent “organism”’ the quotation
marks are a clue to their ambivalence, for later they claim that
‘Following Darwin (1900), we argue that it is useful metaphorically
to view languages as “organisms,”’ (p 2), and then repeat this
metaphorical claim.
Darwin (1874) himself does not use the word
“metaphor”. He discusses parallels, homologies, and analogies, and
writes of the struggle for life amongst words and grammatical forms,
claiming that “The survival and preservation of certain favoured
words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. (1874 p.
91 italics mine). My reading of Darwin is that he thought languages
and organisms were similar because they both evolve by the processes
of selection and modification with descent.
For memetics, too, the similarity is not
metaphorical. The foundation of memetics (Dawkins 1976) is to apply
universal Darwinism beyond biology. That is, memetics begins with
the idea that information in culture is copied from person to person
with variation and selection, and is therefore a replicator, just as
genes are replicators. The term meme was coined to make this claim
explicit; not primarily as an analogy with ‘gene’ but as an example
of another replicator operating on the same fundamental mechanisms.
Language is, on this view, a vast complex of
memes, interconnected and co-evolved, and hence like a biological
organism. This is not a metaphor; rather, biological organisms and
languages are both complexes of replicators that are copied,
protected, and work together for the same reason; their constituent
replicators thrive better within the complex than they could outside
it. In this sense, then, Christiansen and Chater propose a weaker
version of the claims made by both Darwin and memetics.
Is language a parasite? Christiansen and Chater
refer to it as a “beneficial parasite”. I have, similarly, called it
a parasite turned symbiont. Indeed I have argued the same for all of
culture (Blackmore 1999, 2001): once imitation attained high enough
fidelity memes were let loose, and then spread and evolved, using
human brains as their copying machinery. This happened, as Dennett
(1995) emphasises, not for our benefit but for the benefit of the
memes themselves. Christiansen and Chater point out that parasites
and their hosts often co-adapt, with the parasite becoming less
dangerous, but how dangerous was language when it began? I have
argued that memes might have killed us off because of the burden
they put on brain size, development, and energy use. If so then we
were lucky to pull through so that the brain and its parasite could
begin to adapt to each other. They are now so well adapted that we
cannot live without culture and language, and it is easy to make the
mistake of thinking that language evolved for our benefit, rather
than its own.
Christiansen and Chater’s main claim is that
language did not shape the brain, but the reverse. They may have
pushed this argument too far since much physical adaptation has
clearly occurred, e.g. in the restructuring of the larynx to improve
articulation. Memetics implies that the effects work both ways, as
memeplexes and biological organisms compete and co-evolve. Memes can
shape genes; for example, memes with higher fidelity are more
successful, and clearer articulation makes for higher fidelity, so
that the spread of machinery capable of that articulation is then
favoured (this is an example of ‘memetic drive’, or the co-evolution
of a replicator with its replicating machinery, Blackmore 1999,
2001). Also genes can shape memes, with memes that fit well to
existing human brains having an advantage – as Christiansen and
Chater describe.
Defending their view that biological adaptation
to language is negligible, Christiansen and Chater cite the fact
that when two species with different rates of adaptation enter a
symbiotic relationship, the faster evolving one adapts to the slower
one, but not the reverse. This may be so today, but we should not
assume, from the speed of language change we observe now, that
language memes always evolved much faster than genes. Indeed
evolutionary processes generally begin slowly and accelerate. Models
of meme-gene coevolution using increasing rates of memetic change
have shown that a transition occurs at a certain relative rate of
change, with gene evolution then effectively ceasing (Bull, Holland
and Blackmore, 2000). It is therefore possible that early language
memes did cause changes in human genes even though they no longer do
so.
From these comparisons, it seems that
Christiansen and Chater’s views are, in important respects, similar
to those of memetics. Why then do they so firmly reject the views
“described by meme-theorists”?
I think the reason they give is spurious, and
has prevented them from seeing the potential value of memetics in
explaining language evolution. They argue that memes are “created or
selected by deliberate choice” whereas the constraints operating on
linguistic structures are those “of which people have no conscious
awareness”. But this is not a defensible distinction. We humans may
think that we are conscious, creative, “sighted watchmakers” but
this arrogance is just part of the dualist illusion that we are not
mere living machines but are inner selves with consciousness and
free will (Blackmore 1999, Dennett 1991). One advantage of memetics
is that it rejects this illusion and even tries to explain how it
comes about. Humans are the product of two competing replicators:
biological creativity results from the evolutionary algorithm
operating on one of those replicators, and human creativity from the
same algorithm operating on the other (Blackmore 2007). Language is
just one of the products of this blindly creative combination.
References
Blackmore, S. 1999
The Meme Machine , Oxford and New York, Oxford University
Press, Hardback ISBN 0-19-850365-2. 2000 Paperback ISBN
0-19-286212-X
Blackmore,S. 2001 Evolution and memes: The human brain as a
selective imitation device. Cybernetics and Systems, 32,
225-255.
Blackmore, S. (2007) Memes, minds and imagination. In
Imaginative Minds (Proceedings of the British Acadamy). Ed.
Ilona Roth, Oxford University Press, pp 61-78
Bull,L., Holland,O. and Blackmore,S. 2000 On meme-gene
coevolution. Artificial Life, 6, 227-235
Darwin, C. 1874 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex. 2nd edition. London, John Murray.
Dawkins,R. (1976) The Selfish Gene Oxford, Oxford
University Press (new edition with additional material, 1989)
Dennett,D. (1991). Consciousness Explained.
Boston, Little, Brown
Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,
London, Penguin
