Darwin’s basic insight was so simple and yet so
powerful that it has been called “the best idea anybody ever had” –
and I agree. Most people are familiar with the idea of evolution by
natural selection as applied in biology, but part of the power of
Darwin’s wonderful idea is that it applies to anything that is
copied with variation and selection. This is the concept of
universal Darwinism, and one of its most controversial applications
is to the world of human culture. Songs, stories, ideas and
theories, technologies and works of art are all copied with
variation and selection, and so they too must evolve. Dawkins calls
them memes.
Once you look at the world from a meme’s eye
view everything looks different. We humans are the evolved creatures
of two replicators, not one; of memes as well as genes. The memes
our ancestors copied have sculpted our brains to become ever better
meme machines, giving us a love of art and music, as well as a
peculiar propensity to religious belief. Now these primitive meme
machines have created more meme machines in the form of printing
presses, computers and the world wide web, and our future is
increasingly inseparable from the memetic explosion we have
unwittingly let loose.
