Two assumptions are often made about the
human capacity for creative imagination: first, that it evolved
because it serves
a biological function; second, that consciousness
is necessary for or is the driving force behind it. I
suggest
that both of these assumptions are false.
I shall argue, instead, that human creativity,
like biological creativity, is
the result of
an evolutionary process,
but one
based on memes rather than genes.
Once our hominid ancestors were capable of
imitation, a new replicator was let loose and evolved, driving
human brains to become ever better at copying, storing and
recombining memes. This coevolution between the memes and their
copying machinery led to modern imaginative minds which have
evolved, not primarily because they were biologically adaptive,
but because they were advantageous for the memes.
The driving force behind human creativity is not
therefore
consciousness, but the power of
the evolutionary algorithm.
Its function is not biological but memetic.
Introduction
The human imagination is a fount of creativity. We can imagine
things that we have never seen or heard, imagine multiple
possible outcomes of events that have not yet happened, and even
imagine things that are impossible in the real world. Sometimes
we put these imaginings into action and change the world we live
in. Humans appear to be unique in this
capacity for creativity and imagination. This is not to say that
these abilities came out of nowhere. Clearly they did not. Most
animals are capable of learning, and arguably both classical and
operant conditioning involve some capacity for imagination. For
example, my cat deciding whether to go out has learned what lies
outside, the blackbird on the lawn has learned that the cats
lurk behind the hedge, and even the
pestilential
snail has a simple mental map of the garden. Whether they
can all be said to “imagine” the garden is a moot point, but
they certainly
store information about it for making decisions.
In a big step up from ordinary learning,
some species
display insight in
their capacity for
solving novel
problems.
For example, New Caledonian crows use and make tools in the
wild, and in captivity have been shown to solve problems
requiring invention. One crow, provided with straight wire,
spontaneously bent it into a hook to retrieve food from a narrow
container (Weir, Chappell and Kacelnik 2002 ). Whether this
counts as imagination or not is a tricky question, but
apparently she was able to consider the consequences of using
different shaped wires for the task
and act accordingly. Although most primates are
probably incapable of such feats, some apes use tools, and
chimpanzees not only use and make tools but also have simple
cultures, passing on ways of getting food or water, or using
tools (Whiten et al 1999).
All these skills may have been available to
our hominid ancestors, but modern humans are different. Turner
(this symposium) calls this the “grand difference”.
Jacob Bronowski referred to the
“specifically human gift”
for
“calling
to mind the recollection of absent things”.
Our minds are constantly busy with ideas,
suppositions, and plans. We use language with its infinite
capacity for creative recombination. And we have created vast
cultures that have not only spread around the whole planet but
are so powerful that they are changing that planet itself and
interfering with every ecosystem. As Mithen points out (this
volume), this development has had deleterious as well as
beneficial effects for humankind. Essential to this
extraordinary development is not only the capacity for learning,
but the ability to play with ideas in the mind – to try out new
combinations and imagine their consequences. This is the sense
in which I shall use the term “imagination”.
Human culture, and its continuing evolution,
depend
on this capacity for recombination. For culture to evolve
two abilities are critical: its
carriers must be able
to
accurately
copy
the inventions
or discoveries
of others, otherwise existing design features will
be lost; and they must be able to
combine
them in novel
ways, otherwise culture remains static. We humans
are remarkably good at both, and we now sustain extraordinarily
complex cultural evolution. But why?
Why do we have
imaginative
minds? Why are we so creative? Indeed
why
do
we have culture at all?
The answer is usually taken to be obvious – that culture,
creativity
and imagination
have evolved because they
are biologically adaptive. I suggest
that
this
answer is wrong and that there is a better
alternative.
The function of imagination and culture
Most theories start with a simple assumption;
that imagination must have served
a
biological function.
In this view,
early hominids with a better
capacity for imagination would have had a reproductive advantage
and so passed on genes for that ability. In this way genes
underlying imaginative capacity would have spread, leading
ultimately to the human imaginative mind.
For example,
Wilson claims that “innovation is a
concrete biological process” (Wilson, 1998 p 236), and such
arguments are common in evolutionary psychology (Pinker 1997).
Mithen (1996 and this symposium) presents a more complex
account. His seven steps involve several different processes,
and he emphasises the importance of culture and the extended
mind, but his underlying assumption is that the human
imagination evolved because it was biologically adaptive.
Similar arguments can be applied to the
products of imagination. Theories of gene-culture co-evolution
treat human artefacts as aspects of their phenotype, and
consider their adaptive value in terms of their effect on gene
frequencies. For example, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman treat
“cultural activity as an extension of Darwinian fitness” (1981,
p 362) and on Wilson’s famous “leash principle”, “genetic
natural selection operates in such a way as to keep culture on a
leash.” (Lumsden and Wilson 1981 p 13). More recently, Miller
(2000) argues that the human mind was shaped by sexual
selection, with cultural products such as art, music or science
acting as sexual displays; for him these cultural products are
also aspects of the human phenotype, and are more like peacocks’
tails than independently evolving systems. In this symposium,
Boyer asks whether cultural products are themselves adaptations.
The only alternative he offers is that they are mere by-products
constrained only by relevance.
There is, however, another possibility – that
all these cultural products are part of a new evolving system
that is piggy-backing on the old: the “grand difference” is not
explicable entirely in biological terms because we humans are
the products of two replicators not one
– of memes as well as genes.
In this alternative view,
culture
is seen to have evolved for its own sake,
rather than
for the benefit of us
or our genes.
Memes as replicators
A replicator is defined as information that is
copied with variation and selection (Dawkins 1976).
The
concept arises from the
principles
of universal Darwinism,
according to which
evolution must occur whenever
there is variation, selection and heredity. In other words,
evolution happens whenever something is
copied,
multiple copies are made with variations, and only some of the
variants survive to be copied again (Dawkins 1976,
Dennett 1995).
This iterative process produces design
whose function is the replication of that information. This is
what is meant by the concept of
“selfish replicators”.
Our most familiar replicator is the gene, but in
1976 Dawkins speculated about the possibility of other
replicators and pointed out that, in culture, information is
copied between people by imitation and teaching, and is subject
to variation and selection. He called this new replicator the
meme (to rhyme with gene);
examples include stories, songs, games, financial
systems, scientific theories, music and the arts.
The root definition
of a meme is “that which is imitated”
(
from the Greek “mimeme”,
but see Aunger 2001, Blackmore 1998). In other words,
a meme is not some independently existing ethereal
entity: it is
whatever it is that
people
copy between
each other,
or to and from artefacts such as books, images or
computers.
There has been
much disagreement over whether memes fit the
requirements for being a replicator. For example, Sperber (2000)
queries the nature of the copying process, and Gil-White (2005)
argues that memes are not replicated at all (see also Aunger
2000,
Blackmore, 2005).
Richerson and Boyd
(2005)
argue that cultural variants are not replicators on
the
grounds that they are not faithfully reproduced, and are not
particulate,
independent “bits”. However,
neither of these is a requirement for being
a replicator. For example, perfect copying may be
desirable, and replicators are more effective the higher the
copying fidelity, but poor quality replicators may still count
as replicators, and it is an empirical question just how high
the copying fidelity must be for an evolutionary process to take
off. Similarly, digital copying and recombination makes for a
more effective evolving system, and arguably all such systems
evolve towards digital versions as genes have done, but this
does not mean that crude analogue copying cannot sustain any
evolution, nor that continuously varying memes, such as gestures
or dances cannot count as replicators; they may be just rather
poor quality ones. Following Dawkins (1976) and Dennett (1995),
I conclude that memes are replicators because they are
information that is
copied with variation and
selection.
As an example, consider urban legends.
Countless
stories are told by people all
over the world every day. Most of these are
boring or
relevant only to a few people; they are
forgotten
and die out quickly. Some are repeated
among groups of friends
or in families and so have a longer life,
while others
are copied all over the world and achieve the status of legends.
These stories clearly
fit the definition of a replicator.
First there is heredity. These stories are not
created anew by each person who tells them, but spread like
infections from person to person across the globe, originally by
word of mouth, but now by radio, television, telephone and
email. Each person must be able to recall and store the story
accurately enough to be able to retell it to the next.
Second, there is variation. This occurs through
misremembering
or imprecise copying,
and by elaboration of the
story or recombining it with elements from other stories.
In this way many variants
appear and
may be at large in the population of stories
being
passed around.
Such legends
as the phantom hitchhiker,
the Kentucky fried rat, or the poodle in the microwave, all have
variants
(Brunvand 1999).
For example, there
are
tales of
microwaved cats, dogs, hamsters and even
tortoises,
and some of these creatures
die an agonising death
while others
explode
all over the
ignorant owner who thought she could dry its fur in her new oven.
In British versions the owner is nearly always an American; in
American versions she is from South Africa, or from another,
often Southern, state.
Finally, selection occurs because some
variants
are more frequently copied than others.
This may be because they are
emotionally more powerful,
funnier,
easier to recall, or for any
other
reason have
the edge in the competition to be stored and
passed on.
The result of all this competition is that some variants
end up being
far
more
common than others.
This is memetic selection.
The same principles of copying with variation and selection
apply to all the written material in the world – think of the
competition between newspapers to be sold, or between books to
be published, displayed in bookshops,
bought, read, and recommended to others. It applies to
behaviours such as eating with a knife and fork
rather than with
chopsticks, to driving on the right rather than
on
the left, or to
drinking tea with milk
rather than
with
lemon. It
applies to the competition between paintings to be displayed,
plays to be performed, scientific theories to be tested and
published, and political systems to prevail. In all these cases,
and many more, multiple variants are created and then subjected
to the
ruthless competition to thrive in human culture.
The underlying principle of memetics is that,
as true replicators, memes compete to be copied
for their own sake. The results of that competition
shape human minds and culture,
but that is not their
function – the function of memes is nothing other than their own
replication. Memes may be copied for any reason at
all, including biological value, ease of copying, ease of
remembering, emotional appeal or many other factors
but, as Dennett puts it “The first rule of memes,
as it is for genes, is that replication is not necessarily for
the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at ...
replicating!” (Dennett, 1991, p 203).
Memes
which harm their carriers or their
carrier’s
genes may be likened to viruses
or parasites; email viruses and chain letters are
simple
examples
that waste resources for no gain to the person who
copies them, but
there are many more virulent ones. Suicide bombers and martyrs
may be infected with memes which thrive even when, or indeed
because, their carriers kill
themselves.
Dawkins calls religions “viruses of the mind” because of the way
in which these stable and long-lived memeplexes
use tricks, such as promising heaven and threatening eternal
punishment, to induce their hosts to
protect
and propagate
them at the hosts’ expense.
Viral memes
may be especially interesting
as
examples of selfish replicators,
but it is important to remember that
most memes are not
viruses in this narrow sense.
Viral memes
are a small subset of the meme pool
which includes
neutral memes and useful or life enhancing ones, as well as some
that are viral in some circumstances and helpful in others. All
these compete to be stored in human brains or artefacts, and
then to be
recombined, varied and copied again.
Humans as meme machines
Memetics provides an explanation of human
evolution that is quite different from
that of
purely gene based theories
or conventional theories of gene-culture coevolution.
In this view,
what makes us uniquely human
– what makes the
“grand difference” –
is not
intelligence
per se,
nor symbolic capacities,
nor tool use, but our capacity for imitation.
Imitation is often thought to be a simple or
childish process, whereas creativity is thought to be difficult.
After all, kids find imitation so easy that they even have a
game, “Simon Says”, in which the whole point is not to
imitate unless you hear the words “Simon says”. The fun of the
game is in laughing at those poor players who just cannot
control themselves and end up imitating when they should not. In
fact, I shall argue, imitation is the hard part and creativity
its consequence. Imitation is cognitively very demanding which
is why so very few species are capable of it. Human children
only find it easy – and we adults take it for granted – because
we humans are so good at it. The advent of imitation was, I
suggest, the turning point in hominid evolution; the new ability
that turned us from gene machines into meme machines. All
evolutionary processes depend on an accurate copying mechanism,
and that mechanism tends to evolve towards higher and higher
fidelity. Imitation may not have started as very accurate at
all, but it was still the essential copying process without
which cultural evolution could never have taken off. Only once
human imitation was sufficiently accurate (and we do not yet
know exactly how accurate that is) could memetic evolution
begin. Once it began, increasing creativity was inevitable.
Imitation, as a new
form
of
social learning, may
have originally
evolved because it was biologically
adaptive (see
e.g. Richerson and Boyd 2005),
but I suggest that
once it did so
the world was changed forever and
there was no going back. The possibility of imitation, and hence
copying with variation and selection, let loose a
second replicator; memes. And once memes appeared the
environment for human genes was irrevocably changed.
These early memes may have been new ways of
hunting or carrying food, new sounds or gestures, ways of
lighting fire or making clothes or ornaments. We cannot know for
sure, but we can assume that once such behaviours could be
copied, some of them would be accurately and frequently copied
and would spread in the newly emerging meme pool, while others
would fail and die out. In this way
the new replicator would begin evolving in its
own right and for no purpose other than itself. As Dawkins put
it “Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary
sense be subservient to the old.” (Dawkins, 1976, p 193-4).
Whether the evolving memes helped or harmed their carriers would
not be the ultimate arbiter, but just one of many factors
influencing memetic success.
In this view, the function of imagination
cannot be understood without reference to memes; cultural
products are not seen as by-products or as adaptive to genes,
but as replicators in their own right. They can be thought of as
a parasite or symbiont living and evolving along with the human
brains that copy them and forcing those brains to adapt to their
presence. This transforms our view of human nature and, I
believe, makes far more sense of why we are so different from
other species.
Dennett (1995) describes the importance of
different replicators in his image of the Tower of
Generate-and-Test. On the ground floor are Darwinian creatures,
selected by death; on the second floor are Skinnerian creatures
whose behaviour is selected by learning; on the third floor are
Popperian creatures whose ideas can be selected in their
imagination; and on the top floor are Gregorian creatures whose
memes are selected in culture. In each case there is a
replicator and a selective process going on, and evolution
occurs as a result, but the last step is a dramatic one because
the replicator escapes from the individual out into the social
world. Humans are the only species to have truly made the leap
to being Gregorian creatures. They are the product of two
interacting replicators, genes and memes.
This coevolution of memes and genes is a
two-way process. Genes influence the selection of memes because
they build the copying machinery of the human body and brain.
But memes influence genes too, in a process I have referred to
as memetic drive. Once a species is capable of imitation, memes
start evolving; those of high fidelity, fecundity and longevity
outperform the rest, leading to increasing numbers and varieties
of memes, and changes in the dominant memes. This memetic
evolution, with all its various products, changes the
environment in which genetic selection takes place. Depending on
the direction the memetic evolution happens to take, genes may
be forced to follow, and in this sense they are driven by the
memes (Blackmore 1999, 2001).
This theory differs from most theories of
gene-culture co-evolution because of the final step. The process
works like this. Before there were many memes, the major
pressures on hominid genes came from the physical environment
and from other individuals. But once memetic evolution took off,
status, survival and reproductive chances were affected by the
memes a person acquired. This would create a need for new
strategies concerning whom to copy and whom to mate with. For
example, it might pay to mate with those who were capable of
imitating the currently most popular memes. So, if wearing skins
as clothes was frequently copied (i.e. it was a successful meme)
then people who were poor at copying clothes-wearing would be at
a disadvantage. If there were genetic differences between people
in how good they were at acquiring this skill then these genes
would spread in the gene pool, gradually increasing people’s
ability.
Note that wearing clothes has a biological
advantage in terms of warmth and protection, so the spread of
clothing and the ability to copy clothing could be explained
biologically. However, the interesting point is this. Once the
ability to imitate increases in the population, then more
behaviours and artefacts can be copied. So memetic evolution
increases. Inevitably people will copy all sorts of memes, not
just clothes, including those that are biologically useful and
those that are not. Unless certain memes are positively lethal
to their carriers (and even then, under some circumstances),
they may thrive along with the useful ones. In most theories of
gene-culture coevolution this is as far as the argument goes,
but memetics takes a further step.
If acquiring the latest memes provides a
genetic advantage, then genes for acquiring those memes will
increase. This means an inherited improvement in the ability to
copy whichever memes have been successful in the memetic
competition. In other words, the direction of memetic evolution
drives the direction taken by the genes. Genes are forced to
build brains that can copy the most successful memes. Since
memes thrive for memetic, not just biological, reasons this
means we can only understand the design of the human brain by
considering memes as well as genes.
In this way we can see culture not as a
biological adaptation, but as a new parasite made possible by
the advent of imitation.
I have argued that language itself began as a memetic parasite
that then coevolved to become a symbiont with its human carriers
(Blackmore 1999).
Indeed we can see all of culture as a new organism
parasitic on the old. Like other parasites it may initially have
been dangerous but then evolved to become less so; it might even
be like the bacteria that originally invaded other organisms and
then evolved to become indispensable organelles, so that now we
are dependent upon being infected with culture.
It may be that the memetic parasite is
initially so dangerous that it can kill any species that
acquires it before it has time to adapt. This may have happened
to other species in the past, in which case we humans were lucky
to have survived the danger phase long enough to co-evolve with
our culture.
This may be an extreme hypothesis and
it
may be false, but
it follows directly from taking memetics seriously
–
that is, from seeing
memes
as
spreading
because they can and not necessarily because they are adaptive
for their carriers. In this view, having survived
the advent of the new replicator, human brains evolved to become
ever better meme machines, copying, storing and recombining
memes with increasing fidelity. Examples of this process may
include not only the evolution of the big brain and language
(Blackmore 1999) but our enjoyment of art, science and religion,
and our capacity for imagination.
The origins of art and music
There are many theories of the origins of
art and almost all rely on biological functions of some kind.
For example, Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) propose eight laws
of aesthetic experience, and these derive directly from the
structure of perceptual systems that evolved for biological
purposes. Zeki describes one of the functions of art as “an
extension of the major function of the visual brain”, that is, a
search for the enduring features of objects and situations (Zeki
1999 p 79), and Solso (2003) attributes artistic appreciation to
a consciousness that evolved for other purposes.
Music provides an especially interesting
example. Pinker declares that “As far as biological cause and
effect are concerned, music is useless.” (Pinker 1997 p 528),
and Dennett (1999) says we “cannot avoid the obligation to
explain how such an expensive, time-consuming activity came to
flourish in this cruel world”. Miller (2000) provides an
explanation, citing music as an example of a sexual display, but
this, in common with other biologically based theories,
treats the music as part of a person’s
phenotype, rather than
as
a new system evolving in its own right.
Mithen
(this volume) suggests that music began as part of a holistic
communication system that remained when language evolved
separately into a system with words and grammar. The important
difference is that for Mithen the functions of language and
music are communication, the expression of emotions and the
facilitation of group bonding. In other words they have
biological functions and are advantageous for the organisms and
their genes. On a memetic theory the primary function of memes
is the survival and proliferation of the musical memes
themselves.
Dennett (1999)
imagines how music might have begun – a just-so story about the
first ever infectious sounds.
One day one of our distant hominid ancestors
sitting on a fallen log happened to start banging on with a
stick—boom boom boom. For no good reason
at all. This was just idle diddling, a by-product, perhaps,
of a slightly out-of-balance endocrine system. This was, you
might say, mere nervous fidgeting, but the repetitive sounds
striking his ears just happened to feel to him like a slight
improvement on silence…
Now introduce some other ancestors who happen
to see and hear this drummer. They might pay no attention, or be
irritated enough to make him stop or drive him away, or they
might, again for no reason, find their
imitator-circuits tickled into action; they might feel an urge
to drum along with musical Adam.
Dennett explains that it does not matter why
either the first person, or the imitators did what they did – it
might have been for good biological reasons or it might have
been because of some quirk in the design of their brains or the
weather that day. The important point is that the drumming was
copied, and so with a community of other imitators around, the
sounds began to spread. Among all the different drummings, some
proved more infectious than others. It didn’t matter why -
maybe because they were easier to remember, sounded nicer, or
were less harmful – the point is that once they could be copied
they were copied, and so the drumming virus was born.
Dennett supposes that soon some of the hominids
began humming, and humming memes spread in the meme pool.
At first the
copying
might have
been
inaccurate and new variants rare, but
even so
the number and variety of musical memes
gradually increased and the competition
hotted
up. Memes
now
had to be more catchy, easier to hum, or more
likely to gain attention, in order to find themselves
preserved in the meme pool. Individual brains
changed too because everyone now lived in a music filled culture
and they learnt to hum some of the tunes, with some learning
faster and learning more tunes than others, and
some being good at recombining tunes they heard
to make new variants.
As Dennett himself says, this is only a Just-So
story. We cannot know what really happened, but the point is
this: once there were creatures capable of imitation something
like this must have happened. Of all the many behaviours carried
out, some would have been copied more than others. If any proved
especially copyable, given the oddities of the hominid brain and
the specifics of the environment, then those would spread, and
so memetic evolution would be up and running.
The next step, which Dennett does not
consider, is memetic drive. If drumming and humming became
popular, and people who were good at it acquired status, then
the pressures on hominid genes would change. It would now pay to
have a brain that is good at copying drumming and humming, when
previously it did not. Any genes that contribute to that ability
are now favoured and so, gradually, hominid brains are
redesigned. The co-evolutionary process then continues
indefinitely. Improvements to the copying machinery mean that
more sounds can be created, copied,
and imaginatively recombined, and that in turn
means further redesign and so on.
If this is how music evolved then we can
easily understand why we modern humans have the sort of brains
(and ears and hands) that help us enjoy making and listening to
music.
Once we know a few songs or melodies, we can easily elaborate
them into new ones,
or combine motifs from different ones in our imagination.
We are like that, not because music serves any biological
function, but simply because, at some point in the past, musical
memes infected our ancestors and helped to redesign their
brains. Those brains are now designed to remember, hum, sing,
play, and pass on music; they are skilled at mixing up all the
fragments they hear to make new ones and at using the schemes
and musical tricks they come across to develop them further.
This is what it means to have a musical imagination. If quite
different memes had happened to thrive at that time, our brains
would have ended being designed quite differently. We are
musical creatures
not because of
music’s
survival value for our genes but because of the
replicator power of musical memes.
Another example of memetic drive in action
could be the power of religious belief. It is a curious fact
that humans seem to be naturally religious creatures (Boyer
2001, Newberg and D’Aquili 2001). Even today most people in the
world believe in God. This is true even in highly educated and
technologically advanced societies such as the USA,
where a 2003 Harris poll found
that
79% believed in God.
By contrast, Britain has one of the lowest levels
of religious belief and observance, with
a
2004
BBC poll
showing
just under half of people claiming to
believe in God. Even so, this is a large proportion, and
enormous amounts of money and effort are devoted to religious
observance. The resources consumed are even larger if one
includes cults, New Age groups and non-theistic religions as
well. All this demands explanation.
Most theories of the origins of religious
belief treat it as a natural consequence of having a brain
designed for other purposes. For example, Pinker (1997)
describes how religious concepts arise from our evolved
perceptual capacities and from limitations in our understanding
of the world. Boyer (2001
and this volume) argues that religion consists of
by-products of normal mental functioning evolved for other
purposes. In contrast, Ehrlich argues that “Organized religion
thus seems to have evolved to help stabilize hierarchical social
structure.” (Ehrlich 2000, p 256). There may indeed be
biological value in being religious; for example, membership of
certain religious groups confers social advantages and reduces
fear of death. On the other hand levels of violent crime are
much higher in the religious USA than in less religious Britain,
so religious belief is no panacea for social ills. On a memetic
theory of the evolution of religiosity this is not surprising.
Indeed we might expect religions to flourish even if they cause
severe hardship and suffering.
Religions provide one of the most powerful
examples of infectious memeplexes. In his analysis of “viruses
of the mind” Dawkins (1993) uses Roman Catholicism as an
example, pointing out all the tricks that this highly successful
and long-lived memeplex uses to get itself copied and safely
stored. Hidden within the complex of stories and dogmas are
powerful instructions to pass on the whole package, both to
one’s children and to others. This instruction is backed up by
untestable threats and promises, including heaven, hell, and
eternal damnation. Doubt is to be fought against and belief
admired, which helps prevent intelligent children from
questioning the whole idea. Giving money to the poor is
encouraged, and so is giving money to the church itself. This
makes possible the fabulous buildings, wonderful music,
extravagant paintings, and other glories which instil awe and
delight in church-goers – so encouraging them to spend time in
church, to encourage others to come too, and to spread the memes
still further.
As with the origins of musical
ability,
I have argued that
memetic drive is responsible for our deep-seated religious
tendencies: the
long
history
of co-evolution between religious memes and human brains has
resulted in brains that are designed to be good at copying,
storing and
manipulating the kinds of religious memes that happened to
survive. If this is so it is not
surprising
that religions
persist in the face of
contemporary education and
scientific understanding
which make most religious
claims seem ridiculous.
Incidentally, music plays a significant
role here. Having evolved a delight in music we enjoy singing
and listening to others sing.
A
religious
memeplex can then use this evolved capacity to
spread itself by using the music to carry the viral words. We
sing “Praise my soul the King of heaven” “Now thank we all our
God” “All things bright and beautiful …” “Jesus Christ is risen
today ….”. Curiously I have no trouble thinking up countless
examples of hymns I learnt in my childhood. They are certainly
long-lived memes.
Note that phrases like “the religion uses
x” or “religions want x” are shorthand. They do not imply that
the memes have plans or intentions – obviously they do not
because memes are only the behaviours, words and sounds that are
copied. These phrases can be unpacked as “religions that have x
are copied more often than those that do not”. In this way
memetics explains how and why the great religions of the world
are structured the way they are, and have survived so long and
irrevocably infected so many people. It can also explain how
their power shifts with changing cultures, and why other newer
religions are taking over in some places, including secular
“religions” such as Transcendental Meditation, Landmark
Education, and New Age beliefs.
Our early ancestors would not have had such
complex and highly evolved religious memeplexes to deal with,
but the same principles apply. If some people adopted rituals to
help hunting or relieve the pain of famine or death, and others
copied them, then variations of these rituals would compete to
be copied. The same would apply to any other aspect of religious
behaviour or tradition. Some of these religious memes would
thrive at the expense of less fit memes, and those successful
ones would very slowly drive genes to provide machinery good at
copying them. In other words the human brain would gradually be
redesigned for religious behaviour just as it was for language
and musical ability. There need have been no biological
advantage to religious behaviour at all. Whether there was or
not is beside the point
– so long as the memes did not actually kill off too many of
their carriers. The point is that the religious
memes themselves could have forced our brains to end up the way
they are.
The co-evolution of replicators and their copying machines
I have suggested that human brains were
redesigned by the second replicator, memes, which drove them to
become better and better meme machines. This process can be seen
as an example of a more general process in which replicators
evolve along with the machinery that copies them. For example,
genes did not arise on this planet fully designed along with
nuclear RNA, messenger RNA, ribosomes and all the other complex
paraphernalia of their replication. All of this slowly evolved
into the exquisitely high-fidelity system we see today (Maynard
Smith and Szathmáry 1999).
This is not surprising. If there was
variation in copying systems as well as in the replicators
themselves, those copying systems producing higher quality
replicators would outperform the others and take more of the
available resources. In this way the whole system would evolve
into a more effective evolutionary system, with stable and safe
storage, high fidelity copying, and variation produced by the
controlled recombination of elements rather than by degradation
and errors.
The equivalent in human evolution was the
co-evolution of memes along with the brains, voices, hands and
bodies that copied them. But this process has not stopped there.
The same process can be seen in the evolution of printing
presses along with the books and papers they copy, cameras along
with the images they produce, and computers along with the
documents, images, spreadsheets and other products they
manipulate. In the world wide web we see a system comparable
with (though no where near as fine as) the biological system;
enormous amounts of information are safely stored, copied with
almost one hundred percent fidelity, and available for
recombining with other bits of information in the system. This
process is still going on and is sustaining increasingly fast
evolution of both the information and the system itself. The web
itself is now a fount of creativity.
We can now return to the question of why
humans have such imaginative and creative minds. All these
examples of co-evolution produced systems that were increasingly
creative, and had ever better methods for recombining old
designs to produce new ones; from the biological system to the
world wide web. In each case the copying machinery became ever
better at copying the kinds of information that had been
successfully copied in the past, from the copying of DNA
sequences to the copying of html texts. The human brain is just
one intermediate stage in this sequence of coevolutionary
processes; it is a machine designed by its coevolution with
memes to copy memes, store them, and mix them up to produce new
ones. The answer to the question why we have imaginative minds
is that meme-gene coevolution designed them.
Consciousness, creativity and evolution
Before Darwin, no one could understand how
living things could evolve unless someone designed them – hence
Paley’s famous argument for existence of God. Our intuitions
tell us that clever designs require a conscious designer and, as
Dennett
(1995)
points out,
our experience seems to confirm this.
We
always see fancy things making less fancy things. We don’t see a
pot making a potter, or a web making a spider,
but always the other way around. Then Darwin came along and
turned this
intuition
on its head.
His great insight was to
realise that
natural selection could
mindlessly
design all of the living world without a designer
and without a plan.
Simple, dumb, mindless processes can, given enough time and
materials, create the cleverest things in the world.
Some people
still find this shift hard to make today, as is seen
in the continuing
antagonism
to Darwinism in many parts of the world, and the
success of creationism and intelligent design as religious
alternatives to Darwinism. Then there are various theories that
try to sneak a role for intelligence or consciousness back into
evolution. For example, Teilhard de Chardin (1959) proposed that
all life is striving towards higher consciousness, and Julian
Huxley believed that evolution was pulled along by consciousness
as well as driven from behind by blind processes (Pickering and
Skinner 1990). More recently, Wilber (1997) describes the
inevitable progress from insentience to superconsciousness, and
Hubbard (1997) urges us to take conscious control of our future
in “conscious evolution”. However, with these exceptions, most
people have managed to make the Darwinian shift from thinking
that evolution needs a designer to realising that
biological creativity is a bottom-up process in which simple
things produce complex results with neither a
conscious designer nor a plan.
This
same
shift has not been made
in thinking about human creativity. In popular
discourse there is a common tendency to speak
of creative people as individual
conscious designers who
deliberately, and from the top down,
create something new using the power of their
imagination.
In this view creativity
and consciousness
are closely associated, as can be seen
in
the
numerous
popular
books, business plans,
and self-help tapes that
encourage
you to increase your consciousness and creativity, or learn to
be creative through enhanced creative awareness.
The same idea, that consciousness can exert
power or create design, can be found in philosophy and
psychology. For example, Searle (1992) claims that consciousness
is caused by brains and that it serves to increase creativity
and flexibility. Mithen (1996) argues that consciousness plays
an integrating role, bringing separate aspects of the mind
together and so allowing for greater creativity.
These
suggestions
fit with the common intuition that novel thinking is difficult
and that
difficult tasks require consciousness.
This emphasis on consciousness meets with
several problems, not least the fact that consciousness itself
is impossible to define and poorly understood. The term is
mostly used in contemporary science and philosophy to refer to
subjective experience, or “what it’s like to be” something
(Blackmore 2003). Taking this definition, it is hard to
understand how subjective experiences themselves could act as a
force or have any function at all – a serious problem for
theories of the evolution of consciousness, but also for any
theory that makes consciousness the power behind creativity.
Attempts to link creative imagination to
consciousness run into another problem if they imply that when
we imagine something it must be “displayed” in consciousness, or
be consciously visible to the mind’s eye, or in some other way
come “into consciousness”. These phrases all imply versions of
what Dennett (1991) calls the “Cartesian theatre” – the mythical
time or place in the mind or brain where things come together
and consciousness happens. This cannot exist, according to
Dennett, not only because there is no observer inside the brain
but because there is no centre of operations, nor indeed a
centre of any kind, and there is no finishing line beyond which
previously unconscious processes suddenly become conscious ones.
The brain is a massively parallel system with no special inner
sanctum where information comes to be turned into the contents
of consciousness.
The idea that consciousness is essential
for creativity conflicts with another odd and interesting fact.
This is that many creative writers, thinkers, scientists and
artists, claim that their best work just “comes” to them. They
have no idea how they do it, and indeed often feel that “they”
did not really do it at all. It is as though the poem, the
solution to the scientific problem, or the painting just shaped
itself without any conscious effort, or even any awareness on
the part of the creator. Some describe this feeling of total
immersion as a state of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi and
Csikszentmihalyi 1988) in which the self seems to disappear.
This kind of selfless creativity seems at odds with the idea
that consciousness is the force behind creativity. Yet these
artists may be right
and the common
intuition that consciousness causes
creativity
may be
wrong.
I suggest that it is time to
give up this old and false intuition, just as we (reluctantly)
gave up the need for a creator God.
The shift needed here is exactly the same shift that was made in
the mid nineteenth century when Darwin explained
how natural selection works.
Instead
of hanging onto the intuition that clever
design needs a conscious designer, we
should
apply
the principle of universal Darwinism
to ourselves as well.
Memetics does just this, and so provides a
new way of thinking about human creativity. In this new view,
the process of copying with variation and selection is the only
creative design force in the universe. This simple iterative
process, along with processes of self-organisation and random
change,
not only
designed all living things,
but all human inventions as well.
Neither
biological evolution nor human creative
imagination
is a top-down process in which a clever
conscious
mind thinks up new ideas and puts them into effect; both
are mindless
processes
in which new products
emerge
because old ones are copied
with variation and selection. All human creativity results from
memetic evolution; from the reiterative process of
recombination and selective imitation of behaviours and
artefacts.
It may not feel that way, but then our intuitions about the
way the
mind works have not proven a reliable guide to how they really
work, so this should not
unduly
surprise us.
In this
Darwinian
view we human beings are not creative
because we have specially powerful conscious minds,
or creative inner selves, but because we are
capable of selective imitation.
And those of us who are the most creative are those who are best
at accurately copying
and storing
the memes
we
come across,
recombining them
in novel ways, and selecting appropriately from
the myriad new combinations created.
Incidentally this makes the (so far untested)
prediction that creativity should be positively correlated with
the ability to imitate, rather than some people being creative
while others are just copiers. In this new view, we humans are
the copying machines
– the meme machines
–
that form part of a new evolutionary process: the
true creative power behind human imagination is memetic
evolution.
To some people, this view may seem depressing
or dehumanising, with its emphasis on selective imitation and
away from the power of consciousness. Yet it provides a unifying
view of creative design. As information explodes, the web
expands, and human life becomes ever more complex and full of
cultural creations, we can see the same process at work as that
which designed the living world. Everything was, and still is,
designed by the power of that familiar mindless process, the
evolutionary algorithm. This is a beautiful, if daunting, view
of our place in the world.
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