In
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology,
Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, (2010)
Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72
(Version
submitted January 2008. This may have been edited
prior to publication)
Imagine a planet on which a self-replicating
molecule appears, is copied with variation and selection, and
evolves to build itself living creatures that protect and propagate
it; those creatures eventually spread all over the planet, changing
its atmosphere and environment as they do so. Now imagine that one
of those creatures begins to copy behaviours
from one individual to another, and this information gets copied
with variation and selection. In other words, a second kind of
replicator emerges. This transforms the original creatures to make
them better at protecting and propagating it, and goes on to build
cultural objects that eventually spread all over the planet,
changing its atmosphere and environment all over again.
This is the vision that memetics provides – that
human beings alone on earth are the product of two replicators, not
one. In consequence they are meme machines as well as gene machines,
and culture uses them as its replication machinery. Language, music
and technology are all parasites, often turned symbiotic, that
evolved for their own sake, not for the sake of individual humans or
their genes.
This vision is different from most theories of
cultural evolution or gene-culture co-evolution which generally
treat genes as the final arbiter and culture as an adaptation or an
aspect of the human phenotype. Whether this new vision of human and
cultural evolution is valuable or not is the question for this
debate.
Origins of the meme
meme
The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in
his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. His intention was not to create an
analogy with genes but rather to illustrate the principle of
universal Darwinism and his contention that “Darwinism is too big a
theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.” (get pp
from 1976 ed). Universal Darwinism is the general principle that
whenever you have information that is copied with variation and
selection, then you must get evolution. Darwin (1887) applied this
process to languages as well as evolving organisms, and universal
Darwinism has a long history (Plotkin 1993). The process has also
been described as “blind variation with selective retention”, a
phrase used by Campbell (1960) to describe the evolution of
knowledge or “evolutionary epistemology” and now used mainly in
cybernetics. The three steps, that is variation, selection and
heredity, can be understood as a simple algorithmic process, the
evolutionary algorithm; or "a scheme for creating Design out
of Chaos without the aid of Mind." (Dennett 1995, 50).
Dawkins called the information that is copied in such a process the
“replicator” and contrasted this with “vehicles” (such as living
organisms) that carry the replicators around, protecting and
propagating them. In a slightly different scheme, Hull (1988) refers
to replicators, interactors and lineages. Dawkins wanted “to claim
almost limitless power for slightly inaccurate self-replicating
entities, once they arise anywhere in the universe” (Dawkins 1989 p
322). His point was that genes are just one example of a replicator,
and the general principle is more important than the specifics of
the way genes have evolved on earth. This is why, at the end of the
book, he asked his now famous question “do we have to go to distant
worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent,
kinds of evolution?” (1989 p 192). His answer was, of course, no.
Staring us in the face, drifting about in its “primeval soup” of
culture, is a new replicator: tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, fashions,
and ways of making things. These show heredity (they are copied from
person to person), variation (for example through errors in
transmission or memory, and through recombination), and they are
selected (people choose what to copy and from whom). So they must be
replicators. He wanted a name that would sound a bit like gene while
conveying the central meaning of “that which is imitated” so, from
the Greek mimeme he took the abbreviation “meme”.
The term “meme” has been a successful meme, spreading widely, and
being accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1997. The
science of memetics, however, has not grown correspondingly. The
reasons for this are not clear. Memetics has some potential
advantages over other theories, for example in how it deals with
informational viruses such as email viruses, cults and religions;
and in its novel approach to the evolution of language, the big
brain, and the coevolution of genes and culture. Nevertheless, there
is no thriving science of memetics, and no specialist journals or
conferences. Perhaps memetics is just plain wrong; perhaps it is
currently too difficult to test its predictions; or perhaps its
implications are too scary or unappealing for people to accept.
Certainly part of the problem is that memetics is frequently
misunderstood. I shall therefore begin by discussing some of the
most common confusions before turning to the value of memetics
itself.
Do memes exist?
This question, although often asked, reveals a
misunderstanding of the concept of memes. McGrath complains that
“There is no direct evidence for the existence of “memes”
themselves” (2005, p 121) and Aunger “their existence has yet
to be proven.” (2000 p 7). Wimsatt claims they are “both misnamed
and mischaracterized, and perhaps even that they do not exist.” (Wimsatt
1999, p 280). Yet, as Laland and Odling-Smee point out, “the
pertinent question is not whether memes exist, as suggested by
Aunger … but whether they are a useful theoretical expedient.” (2000
p 121).
To see why the existence question is misplaced it is only necessary
to remember how the idea was first conceived, that is, to think of
skills, habits, words or stories as replicators. There is nothing
hypothetical about teenagers listening to i-PODs, wearing pre-torn
jeans, or piercing their eyebrows after seeing others do the same.
There is no question about the existence of money, railways,
bicycles, telephones, furniture, skyscrapers, holiday brochures,
football, or the days of the week. They are all information encoded
in some kind of matter and energy, and they can all be copied or
not. The core definition of memes is “that which is imitated” or
that which is copied. It may be difficult to pin down just what has
been copied, but whatever it is, that “something” is, by definition,
a meme.
Accepting that memes exist does not, of course, mean that memetics
is a good idea. To give a fanciful equivalent, imagine that I
decided to take the class of all city streets that have plane trees
in them and call them “plemes”. I could then go around counting the
number of plemes in Bristol, or London, or the whole world. I could
investigate whether there are more houses, or more cats, or more
deaths in plemes as opposed to other streets. I doubt I would find
out anything interesting, that is unless there is truly something
peculiar about that beautiful bark, or a poison in the leaves. My
guess is that the science of plemetics would be a complete waste of
time – not because plemes don’t exist, they do, but because dividing
the world up this way reveals no general principles, gives rise to
no new insights, and is completely pointless.
Memetics might be like this, completely pointless, or it might not.
So the existence question is a distraction. Memes exist. The
interesting questions concern just what we should and should not
count as memes, whether they really behave as replicators, whether
they are inside or outside brains or both, how close the analogy
with genes proves to be, and whether memetics gives rise to any
useful theoretical or practical progress. Those are the questions I
shall briefly consider here.
Trouble with
analogies and units
It should be clear
from the origin of the term ‘meme’ that it was not primarily
conceived as a gene analog. Yet that is often how it is described.
For example, Gould called memes “a useless analogy”, and Midgley “a
meaningless metaphor” (Blackmore 1999). McGrath goes further and
claims that “The case for the existence of the “meme” rests on the
questionable assumption of a direct analogy with the gene, which
proves incapable of bearing the theoretical weight that is placed
upon it.” (McGrath 2005, p 121) and Richerson and Boyd argue against
memetics on the grounds that “the best evidence suggests that
cultural variants are only loosely analogous to genes” (2005 p 60).
Such criticisms are
common, the argument often going something like this: - memes were
invented by analogy with genes, genes are real physical entities
made of DNA, no equivalent physical entity can be found for memes,
therefore the notion of memes is false (or is useless, or memes
don’t exist). But this misses the point of Dawkins’s reason for
inventing the term, which was to apply universal Darwinism and treat
cultural information as a replicator. Once you take it this way it
becomes clear that analogies between genes and memes are secondary,
and must be treated with care.
So I prefer to see it this way: genes are replicators and we know a
great deal about how they work. Memes are replicators and we know
rather little about how they work. This means that some analogies
will be fruitful because memes and genes are both replicators and
will therefore show some profound similarities, but other analogies
will be false because in many ways the two replicators are so
different. For example they use entirely different copying
mechanisms, their sources of variation are quite different, and they
differ in fidelity, storage, and in many other ways. Also one
replicator has been evolving along with its replication machinery
for approximately four billion years and has settled down to a very
high fidelity system with separated germ line and phenotypes; the
other has been around for at most a few million years and is, as
Dawkins put it “still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about
in its primeval soup” (1989 p 192).
I therefore agree with McGrath that “analogies can be dangerously
misleading.” (2005 p 132) and with Wimsatt (1999) who points out
many dissimilarities between genes and memes, and their relevance
for attempts to model cultural evolution. These differences mean
that we must treat gene-meme analogies with great care, using them
where appropriate to build new hypotheses or explore possibilities,
but not relying on them as a guide to how memes work.
Another source of confusion is the problem of units. Memes are often
described as “units of culture” or “units of imitation” (although
some definitions avoid the word by talking about “elements of
culture”, “contagious ideas” or “cultural instructions”). Some
critics have made the problem of units into a major objection to the
whole of memetics. For example Midgley complains that
culture cannot be neatly divided up into units,
and nothing is to be gained by “atomising thought” for
“Thought is not granular” (Midgley 2000 p 67).
Similarly Jablonka and Lamb argue that in cultural evolution “There
are no discrete unchanging units with unchanging boundaries that can
be followed from one generation to the next.” (Jablonka and Lamb
2005 p 212) as though that disqualified the concept of memes.
Even stronger are the objections made by
Richerson and Boyd to the idea that “culture must be divisible into
tiny, independent genelike bits that are faithfully replicated” or
“tiny snippets of information” (2005 p 60), but in defining memes as
“discrete, faithfully replicating, genelike bits of information”
(Richerson and Boyd 2005 p 6) they are departing far from the
original definition. Some memes are discrete and some are not; some
replicate with very high fidelity (e.g. printed text) and some do
not (e.g. dance steps); some memes are like genes in some ways and
not in others. Going back to the original idea of memes as
information that is copied, or “that which is imitated” helps to
avoid these unrealistic claims.
To some extent it is true that proponents
of memes describe them as units, but this is at least partly because
it’s so much easier to talk about entities than to talk about “that
which is imitated” in the abstract. Just try rewording some simple
sentences about memes without inadvertently implying units: “Memes
are more accurately copied by fax than by phone”, “Soduko spread
rapidly across Northern Europe” or “The meme for texting is doing
better in Britain than in the USA”. All these make sense, and may
seem to imply units, but in no case need there be precise units, let
alone “discrete unchanging units with unchanging
boundaries” or “independent genelike bits”.
Dennett (1995) tackles the problem by
defining the units of memes as “the smallest elements that
replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity” (p 344) or as a
cultural item “with enough Design to be worth saving – or stealing
or replicating.” (1995 p 143). In art, for example, a whole gallery
of works is too large a unit for selection pressures to work on; but
a blob of pink paint is too small to be selected, enjoyed, disliked,
photographed or thrown away. The single painting is the natural
unit, as when we remember Picasso’s Guernica or buy posters of
Monet’s Water Lilies. Styles of painting, such as cubism or
impressionism, can also be copied and can therefore count as memes,
but they can hardly be divided up into units and would be much
harder to track than an individual painting – but this does not mean
the concept is useless. Similarly with written text a single word is
too short to copyright and an entire library too long, but we can
and do copyright 3 word advertising jingles and 300,000 word books.
Either can count as memes because either can be copied with
sufficient reliability and fecundity for selection to operate.
The same applies to music. Everyone’s favourite example is the first
four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, which have spread as
though they have an independent existence all across the globe in
cultures where the whole symphony is scarcely heard. Wilson (1999)
asks “What do we gain by thinking of the first four notes of
Beethoven’s fifth symphony as a powerful meme? … The ability to
define fitness independently of what evolves saves the concept of
natural selection from being a tautology. For the meme concept to
escape the same problem, we must define cultural fitness
independently of what evolves. If the first four notes of
Beethoven’s fifth is a powerful meme only because it is common, we
have achieved no insight.” (1999, p 206).
I agree. So what is fitness for a short melody? It is the ability to
survive and reproduce, which in terms of music means being copied,
stored and reproduced more frequently than other melodies. This
ability certainly ought to be measurable independently of how common
the melody is. Inspired by Wilson’s criticism, Larry Bull, Nick Rose
and I tried to find out. We chose the first four notes of three
other well-known symphonies as comparison, and tested children aged
between 4 and 8 hoping to catch them before they were familiar with
this music. They could press four keys to play any of the tunes in
any order and as often as they liked until they got bored, and we
asked them which they liked best and which they had heard before. We
predicted that they would play the Beethoven more often than any
other (thus giving it more chances of being copied) even if they did
not like it best. The experiment entirely failed because we could
not find children old enough to do the task but naïve to the music.
Indeed one five year old said he knew all of the tunes because he’d
heard them in Peter and the Wolf.
Nevertheless, the principle remains that, as happens in biology, it
should be possible to measure the ability of memes to survive and
reproduce independently of how common they are, to understand their
behaviour, and to predict how they will perform in new environments.
Studies of this kind have been done, for example, in such widely
different areas as the competition between different chemical terms
in Western science and in China (Wright 2000), the survival of
replicating text in the Internet (Pocklington and Best 1997) and the
competition between different kinds of notation in music (Gersh
2007). Although not using the concept of memes, Wimsatt (?) has
explored the evolution of Punnett squares as a technique for
visualising problems in genetics. He treats the squares as model
organisms for studying cultural evolution, and shows how the way
they exploit human cognitive capacities helps them to attain high
scientific fitness and rapid evolution. Such studies show that the
problems of defining units and drawing analogies do not prevent
effective research.
What is a meme?
The literature is full of arguments about what counts as a meme, as
well as lists of examples, including ideas, behaviours, objects and
brain states. Dawkins mentions habits, skills and stories, and
Dennett lists “arch, wheel, wearing clothes, vendetta, right
triangle, alphabet, calendar, the Odyssey, calculus, chess,
perspective drawing, evolution by natural selection, impressionism,
“Greensleeves”, and deconstructionism” (Dennett 1995 p 344).
Can a useful theory really be built out of such a curious
assemblage? I agree with Dennett that it can. The way to see what
unites them is to return to the origin of the term meme as “that
which is imitated” or more generally “that which is copied”. An easy
way to decide whether something is a meme or not is to ask yourself
whether you copied it from or to someone else or invented it for
yourself. If it was copied from person to person, or person to book
or computer or artefact, then it’s a meme: otherwise not. In this
light Dennett’s examples make sense. All of them (with the possible
exception of wearing clothes) are words, concepts, technologies,
skills or stories that are copied from person to person. They have
all evolved over varying lengths of time and are survivors in the
competition to be copied and stored.
I mention wearing clothes as a possible exception because different
people might independently discover this useful ability rather than
copying it from each other. In that case it would not count as a
meme because no information has been copied from person to person.
Alternatively they might pick up the general idea but then use
totally different things as clothing. Culture is full of examples of
this kind, such as the famous case of Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian
who reputedly invented the Cherokee syllabary after seeing Europeans
reading and writing. In this case trying to pin down the meme (or
what exactly was copied) is probably impossible, but the principle
remains clear that Sequoyah created his writing system because he
had seen a previous one, and so writing spread through many more
people than it otherwise would, having effects on a whole society as
it did so.
To give more modern examples, many learned skills entail a complex
mixture of individual learning and memetic transmission. Riding a
bike means watching someone else do it but then one has to learn the
physical skills of balance, steering and braking for oneself through
operant conditioning. The same can be said of driving a car,
gardening, cooking, surfing, using a word processor or painting a
portrait. None of these things can be done without the evolved
scaffolding provided by the complex society we live in (Wimsatt
1999). The bike itself is a meme, copied by complex processes
involving raw materials, technology, other people, and factory
processes; riding a bike is a meme, copied by one person seeing
another doing it and wanting to do the same, but the physical skill
is acquired by individual practice and is not a meme.
Does this differ from other theories of cultural evolution, and is
there any point in thinking memetically here? The difference is that
memetics treats all of the copied information and its products as
selfish replicators, spreading for their own sake. The bikes, cars,
gardens, kitchens, surf boards, computers and paint brushes are all
there because they have won in the competition to get humans to copy
them. They, in turn, provide the selective environment in which more
memes evolve.
This relates to an interesting debate in memetics over the extent to
which memes are really copied as opposed to being reconstructed by
the imitator. Jablonka (1999) points to the distinction between
reproduction and replication of behaviours, and Sperber (2000 p 164)
argues that a “fundamental objection to the meme model” is that most
cultural items are “re-produced” in the sense of being produced many
times, but are not “reproduced” in the sense of being copied from
one another. He gives the example of two drawings, one a more or
less random scribble, the other a slightly wonky five pointed star.
What happens when people copy them? The first is hard to copy and
results in a chain of copies in which each one differs slightly from
the previous one. The second is easy to copy because people
recognise it as a familiar shape and can re-produce (i.e. produce
again) a shape they have seen and drawn many times before. As
Dawkins (1999) points out, you could ask an independent observer to
try to put the copies into the order in which they were made. In the
first case they would be likely to succeed, in the second case they
would not. The second case is “self-normalising”. Sperber sees this
as a serious objection to memetics because the drawing is not
actually copied but is “re-produced”, whereas Dawkins sees it as an
example of the increasing fidelity of transmission as people learn
to draw and to think about familiar shapes.
A new replicator or
culture on a leash?
Questions about reproduction and copying are important because of
the central claim of memetics that imitation creates a new
replicator (i.e. information copied with variation and selection).
It may help to think in terms of a continuum. At one extreme are
events that are pure re-production. Sperber gives the example of
laughter which is not a meme. Laughing when someone else laughs,
like other examples of contagion (e.g. yawning or smiling), involves
no copying. The second person’s laugh is triggered by hearing the
first, and is their own laugh, not a copy of the way the first
person laughed (that is, unless he is deliberately mimicking him for
fun). Contagion occurs in other species too and can be useful, as
when one individual picks up a warning cry from another, or flees
because another does. This is entirely triggered re-production not
meme replication. Then there are examples in which a combination of
individual learning and social learning (but not true imitation) end
up in cultural transmission that is not memetic. The classic example
here is the pecking of milk bottle tops by tits in England. This
novel behaviour was tracked from its beginnings, in several
independent locations, in the 1940s (Fisher and Hinde 1949).
Although the behaviour clearly spread from one bird to another, this
is thought to have been by stimulus enhancement and not true
imitation (Sherry and Galef 1984): that is, one bird discovers, by
luck or accident, that there is cream underneath the foil bottle
top. This bird then leaves a jagged, shiny foil top which is highly
visible to other birds, so they come to investigate, thus learning
that foil tops are associated with cream. They then land on unbroken
foil tops and do what they always do – peck, and find more cream.
And so the behaviour spreads. Is this a meme? No because there is no
copying with variation and selection, and so no replicator and no
cultural ratchet effect (Tomasello 1999). The tits do only what they
always do, peck for food: all they have learned is to associate foil
tops with food.
At the other extreme consider learning to dance. At first everything
is unfamiliar; the steps, the rhythms, the precise sequence of
movements all have to be watched carefully and then reproduced.
Trial, error, self-assessment and hard work all result in the
student being able to dance the same steps as the teacher. By the
time the student is an accomplished dancer, new dances can be
learned easily. This becomes more like the five-pointed star than
the random scribble. The student has learned all sorts of routines
that can be mixed and matched to make new dances. By this stage the
process may look quite different, but if anything it more clearly
reveals the principle of replicators at work.
Richerson and Boyd (2005) disagree, stating emphatically that
“Cultural variants are not replicators” (p 82), thus effectively
rejecting memetics. Part of their argument is that the peculiarities
of biased transmission, behavioural attractors and error prone
imitation are reasons to reject the idea of memes as replicators,
but I suggest these only show how complex memetic transmission must
be. Their other contention is that copying must be perfect for a
replicator to count as such, and imitation does not produce perfect
copies. But this makes no sense. If copying were perfect there would
be no variation and no evolution. More interesting is to ask how
high the fidelity has to be for an evolutionary process to get off
the ground. If human imitation is good enough to support cumulative
evolution then we should be justified in treating memes as
replicators. And clearly, whatever its shortcomings, it is.
This question of whether memes are replicators or not is crucial.
Although Richerson and Boyd’s theory is very close to memetics in
some respects, for example they occasionally use the term “selfish
meme”, and describe us and our culture as like obligate mutualists,
they still maintain that “Culture is an adaptation” and that
“Culture is on a leash, all right” even if the dog on the end is big
and clever. This refers to Wilson’s famous claim that “genetic
natural selection operates in such a way as to keep culture on a
leash.” (Lumsden and Wilson 1981 p 13). Here we see the fundamental
difference between memetics and other theories of gene culture
coevolution. For most theories, culture is an adaptation of benefit
to human genes, and ultimately kept under control by them (i.e. on a
leash). For memetics, memes are not (and never were) an adaptation;
they are a new replicator that was accidentally let loose by the
human capacity for imitation. In 1976 Dawkins complained of his
colleagues that “In the last analysis they wish always to go back to
‘biological advantage’.” (Dawkins 1976, p 193). This is what
Richerson and Boyd wish to do, and why their theory, although close,
is fundamentally different from memetics.
Do memes have
memotypes?
In asking “what
counts as a meme” I listed many widely differing examples, and these
raise another important question; are memes inside brains, outside
of brains, or both? For example is the meme for “Cinderella”
supposed to be the story itself, the spoken words, the written
words, or their representation inside people’s heads. Should we take
an analogy from genes and count the representation inside someone’s
head as the actual meme and the written story as something like a
meme phenotype, or vehicle or interactor? Wimsatt asks
“How would we know
when a meme corresponded to a gene? a chromosome? a gamete? a
genotype? or the gene pool or pools of a family? Or even of a whole
ecosystem?” (Wimsatt, 1999 p 284). Or are these all false analogies?
Proponents and critics have argued each way on this one and no
consensus has been reached. For example, in his original formulation
Dawkins made no distinction between memes and their vehicles. Later,
in The Extended Phenotype he revised this to make “the distinction
between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its
‘phenotypic effects’ or ‘meme products’ on the other. A meme should
be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain.” (1982, p
109). These two views are sometimes known as “Dawkins A” and
“Dawkins B” (Gatherer 1998).
Among followers of “Dawkins B” are those who distinguish between the
actual meme and its products or vehicle or, using Speel’s (1997)
terminology, they distinguish between the memotype and the
phemotype. The first to do this, even before Dawkins’ coining of the
term ‘meme’, was Cloak (1975) who distinguished the i-culture
(cultural instructions inside people’s heads) from the m-culture
(the products of those instructions); the ultimate function of both
being to maintain the i-culture. Delius (1989) and Aunger (2002)
both propose that memes are some form of neural pattern inside the
brain, and that their products or vehicles are outside of the brain.
By contrast Benzon (1996) argues precisely the opposite, that the
replicators are outside brains and their vehicles inside.
This contentious issue has been used by some critics to explore the
difficulties and limitations of memetics (e.g. Wimsatt 1999) and by
others to reject memetics altogether (e.g. Jablonka and Lamb 2005)|.
Calling them “the dreaded memes”, Jablonka and Lamb argue that “The
flaw stems from the distinction that is made between replicators
(memes) and their vehicles (human brains, human artefacts, and
humans themselves are all given this role).’ (2005, p 208). However,
not everyone makes this distinction. Blackmore (1999) and Dennett
(1995) do not. And Speel (1997) argues that “ideas, songs and norms
reside in the brain somehow, as they are copied as units from human
to human, but also from brains to books, or to physical air-waves…
under the definition which makes physical memes replicators,
brain-memes are also replicators.” (1997).
Closely related to this issue are two other common objections: that
memetic inheritance is Lamarckian (depending on the inheritance of
acquired characteristics) and that cultural variation is directed
(Aunger 2000, Richerson and Boyd 2005). For some critics these two
points seem to rule out memetics as a valid enterprise, while others
are more concerned with whether culture can evolve if these two
claims are true (Kronfeldner 2007). I think the concern over
Lamarckism is misplaced because the whole idea of calling memetic
evolution “Lamarckian” rests on drawing an inappropriate
memotype/phemotype distinction.
Hull (2000) argues that since memes are replicators, not
interactors, they are analogous to genes and not to phenotypic
traits. So how you view such things as words, stories, or clothes
fashions depends where you look from. From the perspective of genes,
they are part of the phenotype, but from the memes’ eye view, they
are memes. I think the whole problem stems from drawing too close an
analogy between genes and memes. In fact these two replicators are
different in important ways. Genes are neatly packaged inside bodies
and passed on accurately down the germ line while their vehicles or
interactors are not copied at all. For such a system Weisman’s law
applies and there are good reasons why characteristics acquired by
the phenotype are not passed on to the next generation (that is,
leaving aside some forms of epigenetic effects). But most memes are
not part of such a system and so the concept of Lamarckian
inheritance simply does not apply (Blackmore 1999).
I think that, as with so much of memetics, it helps to take a step
back and look at the processes in a very general way. Genes have
ended up with a system of genotypes and phenotypes because it is
more effective to copy the instructions for making something than it
is to copy the product itself. This is not only because you can make
multiple copies from the same instructions (so increasing fecundity)
but because any accidents that befall the product, for example in
its construction or during its lifetime, are not passed on (so
increasing fidelity). Dennett (1995) describes this as a system for
retaining any “good tricks” that the evolutionary process stumbles
upon. By contrast most memes have not yet evolved such a system (but
see below). Similarly genes have evolved a system of blind variation
which is more efficient than the varied sources of variation
occurring among memes.
Old genes: New memes
All of the objections and confusions I have discussed here can be
clarified by remembering that genes are old and memes are relatively
new. Genes are part of an ancient system that has evolved over about
four billion years into the amazingly complex and high-fidelity
system that we see today in which a phenomenal number of different
kinds of creatures are all built from the recombination and mutation
of information that is stored (almost entirely) in one single kind
of molecule. Although we do not know precisely what were the
predecessor chemicals, it is clear that DNA evolved from simpler
systems into the modern system of genotypes and phenotypes, meiosis
and mitosis, blind variation and natural selection (Maynard Smith
and Szathmáry 1995). The whole process can be seen as a long and
successful coevolution between a replicator and its copying
machinery.
By contrast memes have been around for only a few million years. So
perhaps it is not surprising that much of the copying is of low
fidelity, much of it entails copying-the-product rather than
copying-the-instructions (Blackmore 2001), generations are not
clearly distinct, transmission is piecemeal, and new copying
machinery is appearing all the time. Yet we might expect memetic
evolution to be improving and indeed it appears to be doing so.
For example, memetic equivalents of a germ line and phenotypes have
appeared in several domains. Take music as an example. Originally
people would have listened to others singing or playing and then
copied the sounds as best they could. Some people still do that, and
in this case there is no replicator/vehicle distinction. But most
music is now produced in recording studios and then copied in
factories onto various media, ending up listened to in people’s
homes or on mobile phones, MP3 players and other personal music
systems. The information on a CD or music file is instructions for
making sounds. When someone hears music they like, they don’t copy
the sounds directly but go and buy or download the instructions from
somewhere else. So this is all copy-the-instructions.
The same applies to cars, clothes, fridges, furniture and almost all
the household goods we take for granted. Few people make their own;
instead they see ones they like and then go and buy similar, or even
identical, ones. If lots of people buy a particular model of car
then the factory makes more from the production line it already had.
It does not copy the cars already out on the streets.
Another change is the increase in fidelity and longevity created by
the switch from analog to digital storage. DNA is a digital system
of very high fidelity. Human brains use both digital and analog
systems (e.g. information is carried by neurons either firing or
not, but also as rates of firing, and the spatial summation of
electrical potentials across membranes). Early memes were mostly
analog but technological memes are far more often digitised, and
increasingly so. Similarly we may guess that culture is evolving
towards systems that depend on blind variation rather than directed
variation. We can already see this happening in some computer
software and on the Web, where software randomly recombines
different memes to make new ones and then subjects them to
selection. At the moment most selection is still done by human
beings, although processes of data mining and search engines are
rapidly taking over some of this process. Eventually we may suppose
that all three processes, copying, variation and selection, will be
taken over by machinery outside of human brains. At this point a
third level replicator will have emerged from the first two. These
“technological memes” and their machinery may even deserve names of
their own, such as “temes” and “teme machines” (Blackmore in press).
Religions, cults and
viral information
Memetics is best known in popular culture for its treatment of viral
information. As Dawkins originally pointed out, chain letters,
pyramid schemes and email viruses are all information that
replicates for its own sake rather than for the benefit of the
people who do the copying. The structure of all of these viruses is
the same: a copy-me instruction backed up with threats and promises.
This, he argued, is precisely the structure of the major religions
as well (Dawkins 1993). Christianity and Islam, for example, have
effective mechanisms for ensuring they keep infecting new hosts,
many of which are familiar from biology (though again we must be
careful with analogies). Many religions have mechanisms for ensuring
that their central beliefs are passed on together in a package (e.g.
confirmation classes or learning the catechism), and that the
package is not picked apart. Threats and promises are used to ensure
compliance (e.g. heaven, hell, or excommunication), and to prevent
people from throwing off the infection (e.g. death sentences for
apostates), and many other tricks are used such as piggy-backing
beliefs on beautiful art and music, and persuading followers that
they are superior, more altruistic or more spiritual (Blackmore
1999).
Cults, religions, and alternative belief systems may be thought of
as lying on a continuum from the purely viral, such as the most
dangerous cults, to the symbiotic, and even beneficial. Where any
particular example lies must depend on the effects it has on the
people who carry and propagate it, and on the groups who espouse it
(Wilson 2002). There is now increasing evidence of the harm that
religions do to both individuals and societies (Harris 2006, Paul
2005), although also of some benefits such as providing social
cohesion and benefits to the group (Wilson 2002).
If memetics is to be useful in the analysis of belief systems it
should be able to make predictions dependent on treating cults and
religions as evolving systems parasitic on human carriers. For
example, it should be able to predict which meme tricks religions
need to use to survive in different circumstances, such as the
difference between vertical transmission (as in Judaism and
Catholicism for example) and horizontal transmission (as in
evangelical sects). Dawkins (1976) discusses the power of celibacy
in ensuring that priests spend their time and energy promoting their
memes rather than their genes, and the effectiveness of martyrdom as
a gene-destroying meme-spreader. Lynch (1996) considers rules
against masturbation as a way of promoting more offspring in
vertically transmitted religions. An effective memetics should be
able to understand these processes and predict the kinds of culture
in which different systems will thrive.
Human evolution
Memetics provides a completely different way of thinking about human
evolution from other theories. The fundamental difference is that
culture is seen, not as an adaptation of benefit to early hominids
and their genes, but as a parasitic second-level replicator that
appeared when our ancestors became capable of imitation. From then
on the two replicators evolved together, the memes restructuring
human bodies and brains to become better at propagating the very
memes they copied. In this view the turning point in human evolution
is not seen to be the advent of tool use, or language, or symbolism
(see e.g. Deacon 1997, Dunbar 1996, Jablonka and Lamb 2005), but the
advent of imitation of sufficiently high fidelity that it
inadvertently let loose memes: intelligence and language are seen as
consequences of this transition rather than its causes.
I have used the term ‘memetic drive’ to describe the way this might
have operated (Blackmore 1999, 2001), and this process is different
from those proposed in gene-culture co-evolution theories, in
evolutionary psychology, or in theories based on sexual selection
(Miller 2000). The idea is that once imitation became good enough,
memes started spreading, possibly including ways of using fire,
cooking food, wearing clothes or making artefacts. These memes
competed to be copied, with the winners affecting the selective
environment such that people incapable of copying them would be at a
biological disadvantage. This alone provides pressure for imitation
ability to increase and, assuming that imitation requires brain
space, pressure for increasing brain size.
However, the difference from other theories is that in the memetic
view the direction taken by the evolution of the memes affects
biological evolution too, and this is true not only for useful memes
such as lighting fires, but ones that are useless for survival such
as wearing feathers in your hair. So, for example, if a fashion for
performing ineffective rituals, wearing particular animal skins, or
humming tunes took off then people who could not copy these skills
would lose out. Many of the assumptions here are similar to those in
other theories (e.g. Lumsden and Wilson 1981, Richerson and Boyd
2005) but the main difference is that memes are seen a replicators
that evolve for their own sake and the direction they happen to take
then drags genetic evolution along. A common example used in
gene-culture coevolution is the effect of dairying practices on
genes for lactose tolerance (Durham 1991) but this, like many such
examples, is confined to a one-dimensional change. The equivalent
for memetic drive would be if the evolution of cheeses and yogurts,
and eventually TV dinners, microwaved chips, greasy hamburgers or
hot curries, drove complex changes in human digestive systems such
that those systems showed traces of the history of the memetic
evolution that caused them.
This is what I suggest happened with language, as well as the
evolution of music, religious behaviours, and many other aspects of
human nature. That is, over the past two or three million years,
memes evolved by competing with each other, and the winners sculpted
the direction of biological evolution to create brains that were not
only larger but were better adapted to copying the very memes which
drove these changes. In the case of language, people began copying
sounds, sounds of higher copying fidelity increased in the meme pool
(for example by processes of digitising sound streams into discrete
words, or linking sounds with seen objects) and then people who were
good at copying those sounds thrived and passed on any genes
conducive to that ability. In this way brains gradually became
better and better at copying the particular kinds of sounds that won
in the memetic competition. In this view language itself is seen as
a parasite turned symbiont using human brains and vocal apparatus as
its copying machinery. The same can be said of music, religion and
art; that all these memetic systems have evolved in their own ways
and so helped design human brains that are fond of music, ritual and
art.
One implication of this approach is that any system capable of
imitating sounds and following gaze should give rise to its own
language (Blackmore 1999). Perhaps surprisingly this has turned out
to be true for both simple imitating robots and autonomous agents
(e.g. Steels 2000, 2006). That is, language and reference can evolve
without its being of any benefit to its carrier. In other research,
simulations and computer modelling have explored the proposed
interactions between the two replicators and the possible effects on
brain size (Bull, Holland and Blackmore 2000, Higgs 2000). Another
prediction is that the parts of the human brain that maximally
increased in size should also be those involved in imitation, and
this has been confirmed by brain scanning studies (Iacoboni et al
1999).
The human brain was the first meme machine but now other, far more
effective, meme machines are being created. Initial small steps
towards increasing the longevity, fecundity and fidelity of memes
included the invention of writing, printing, roads and railways,
telephones and fax machines. All these developments can be seen as
memes co-evolving with their copying machinery. Now the step to a
third-level replicator can be discerned. We can look at it this way;
the first-level replicator (genes) constructed vehicles (Dawkins
1976) or interactors (Hull 1988) that protected and propagated them.
One of these vehicles became capable of imitation and so let loose a
second-level replicator (memes). That is, the vehicle from the
previous level became the copying machinery for the next. A similar
step may be evident in the way that computer systems that began as
vehicles for storing and manipulating memes are fast becoming
capable of carrying out all three processes of copying, varying and
selecting information. This would make them true teme machines, and
we should not expect them to be subservient to the old meme machines
(Blackmore in press).
Consciousness,
creativity and the nature of self
A common objection to memetics is that it undermines human autonomy
and the creative power of consciousness, and treats the human self
as a complex of memes without free will. These ideas follow
naturally from the universal Darwinism on which memetics is based.
That is, the idea that all design in the universe comes about
through the evolutionary algorithm and is driven by replicator
power. This means that human creativity emerges from the human
capacity to store, vary and select memes, rather than from some
special creative spark, or power of consciousness (Blackmore 2007).
The human self may also be a construct of memetic competition,
surviving because it protects and propagates memes, including the
many memes that make up a person (Dennett 1995). In this view the
self is not a continuously existing entity with consciousness and
free will but is a persistent illusion. This memetic view of human
beings as the evolved creation of two replicators may be unsettling
but it has the advantage of uniting biological and human creativity
into one, and providing new ways of understanding human nature, self
and consciousness.
Conclusion
These are just a few examples of a meme’s eye view on human and
cultural evolution. I have outlined most of the major objections to
memetics and shown why none of them effectively prevents memetics
from being a viable scientific theory. In terms of the wider view of
human nature and evolution, memetics clearly provides a novel way of
looking at the world. But is it truer than existing models? The real
test for memetics is whether its novel hypotheses and predictions
can be tested and how they will fare in those tests. For that it is
still too early to say.
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