memes and genes
tim
0-19-286092-5 (paperback)
The best short introduction to, and the text that kicked off, the new
science of MEMETICS, (and, also, the text where Dawkins coined the term
`meme').
The following, key, paragraph of this chapter may perhaps serve as an
abstract:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in
the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes
propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a
process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist
hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and
students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea
catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to
brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of
this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind
you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme
for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically,
millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over.'
The notes (1), (2), ... are from the 1989 edition.
Highlights ** and text in square brackets are not original.
Memes: the new replicators
So far, I have not talked much about man in particular, though I have not
deliberately excluded him either. Part of the reason I have used the term
`survival machine' is that `animal' would have left out plants and, in some
people's minds, humans. The arguments I have put forward should, prima
facie, apply to any evolved being. If a species is to be excepted, it must
be for good reasons. Are there any good reasons for supposing our own
species to be unique ? I believe the answer is yes.
Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: `culture'.
I use the word not in its snobbish sense, but as a scientist uses it.
Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although
basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey
Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though
they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty
generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate
neighbours in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to
`evolve' by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude
faster than genetic evolution.
Cultural transmission is not unique to man. The best non-human example that
I know has recently been described by P.F. Jenkins in the song of a bird
called the saddleback which lives on islands off New Zealand. On the island
where he worked there was a total repertoire of about nine distinct songs.
Any given male sang only one or a few of these songs. The males could be
classified into dialect groups. For example, one group of eight males with
neighbouring territories san a particular song called the CC song. Other
dialect groups sang different songs. Sometimes the members of a dialect
group shared more than one distinct song. By comparing the songs of fathers
and sons, Jenkins showed that song patterns were not inherited genetically.
Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours by
imitation, in an analogous way to human language. During most of the time
Jenkins was there, there was a fixed number of songs on the island, a kind
of `song pool' from which each young male drew his own small repertoire.
But occasionally Jenkins was privileged to witness the `invention' of a new
song, which occurred by a mistake in the imitation of an old one. He
writes: `New song forms have been shown to arise variously by change of
notes and the combination of parts of other existing songs ... The
appearance of the new form was an abrupt event and the product was quite
stable over a period of years. Further, in a number of cases the variant
was transmitted accurately in its new form to younger recruits so that a
recognizably coherent group of like singers developed.' Jenkins refers to
the origins of new songs as `cultural mutations'.
Song in the saddleback truly evolves by non-genetic means. There are other
examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but not these are just
interesting oddities. It is our own species that really shows what cultural
evolution can do. Language is one example out of many. Fashions in dress
and diet, ceremonies and customs, art and architecture, engineering and
technology, all evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly
speeded up genetic evolution, but has really nothing to do with genetic
evolution. As in genetic evolution though, the change may be progressive.
There is a sense in which modern science is actually better than ancient
science. Not only does our understanding of the universe change as the
centuries go by: it improves. Admittedly the current burst of improvement
dates back to the Renaissance, which was preceded by a dismal period of
stagnation, in which European scientific culture was frozen at the level
achieved by the Greeks. But, as we saw in chapter 5, genetic evolution too
may proceed as a series of brief spurts between stable plateaux.
The analogy between cultural and genetic evolution has frequently been
pointed out, sometimes in the context of quite unnecessary mystical
overtones. The analogy between scientific progress and genetic evolution by
natural selection has been illuminated especially by Sir Karl Popper. I
want to go even further into directions which are also being explored by,
for example, the geneticist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, the anthropologist F.T.
Cloak, and the ethnologist J.M. Cullen.
As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations
that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have
tried to look for `biological advantages' in various attributes of human
civilization. For example, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism for
solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose
individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. Frequently
the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is
implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories
in terms of orthodox gene selection. Man may well have spent large portions
of the last several million years living in small kin groups. Kin selection
and selection in favour of reciprocal altruism may have acted on human genes
to produce many of our basic psychological attributes and tendencies. These
ideas are plausible as far as they go, but I find that they do not begin to
square up to the formidable challenge of explaining culture, cultural
evolution, and the immense differences between human cultures around the
world, from the utter selfishness of the Ik of Uganda, as described by Colin
Turnbull, to the gentle altruism of Margaret Mead's Arapesh. I think we
have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument
I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the
earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern
man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas
on evolution. I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but, I think Darwinism is too
big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. The gene
will enter my thesis as an analogy, nothing more.
What, after all, is so special about genes ? The answer is that they are
replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the
accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to
have similar universal validity ? When astronauts voyage to distant planets
and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and
unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all
life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry ? If
forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon,
or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death
at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on
chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still
be any general principle that is true of all life ? Obviously I do not know
but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle.
This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of
replicating entities.(1) The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the
replicating entity that prevails on our planet. There may be others. If
there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost
inevitable tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and
other, consequent, kinds of evolution ? I think that a new kind of
replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in
the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its
primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate
that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new
replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission,
or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I
want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene'. I hope my classicist
friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.(2) If it is any
consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to
`memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with
`cream'.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in
the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes
propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a
process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist
hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and
students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea
catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to
brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of
this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind
you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme
for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically,
millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over.'
Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool.
Probably it originated many times by independent `mutation'. In any case,
it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself ? By the spoken and
written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such
high survival value ? Remember that `survival value' here does not mean
value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The
question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its
stability and penetrance in the cultural environment ? The survival value
of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological
appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling
questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be
rectified in the next. The `everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against
our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less
effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea
of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or
infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Some of my colleagues have suggested to me that this account of the survival
value of the god meme begs the question. In the last analysis they wish
always to go back to `biological advantage'. To them it is not good enough
to say that the idea of a god has `great psychological appeal'. They want
to know why it has great psychological appeal. Psychological appeal means
appeal to brains, and brains are shaped by natural selection of genes in
gene-pools. They want to find some way in which having a brain like that
improves gene survival.
I have a lot of sympathy with this attitude, and I do not doubt that there
are genetic advantages in our having brains of the kind we have. But
nevertheless I think that these colleagues, if they look carefully at the
fundamentals of their own assumptions, will find that they begging just as
many questions as I am. Fundamentally, the reason why it is good policy for
us to try to explain biological phenomena in terms of gene advantage is that
genes are replicators. As soon as the primeval soup provided conditions in
which molecules could make copies of themselves, the replicators themselves
took over. For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the
only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not
necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions
arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new
replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of
their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be
subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains,
provided the `soup' in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes
had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We
biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we
tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution.
Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicate. But just as not
all genes that can replicate do so successfully, so some memes are more
successful in the meme-pool than others. This is the analogue of natural
selection. I have mentioned particular examples of qualities that make for
high survival value among memes. But in general they must be the same as
those discussed for the replicators of Chapter 2: longevity, fecundity, and
copying-fidelity. The longevity of any one copy of a meme is probably
relatively unimportant, as it is for any one copy of a gene. The copy of
the tune `Auld Lang Syne' that exists in my brain will last only for the
rest of my life.(4) The copy of the same tune that is printed in my volume
of The Scottish Student's Song Book is unlikely to last much longer. But I
expect there will be copies of the same tune on paper and in people's brains
for centuries to come. As in the case of genes, fecundity is much more
important than longevity of particular copies. If the meme is a scientific
idea, its spread will depend on how acceptable it is to the population of
individual scientists; a rough measure of its survival value could be
obtained by counting the number of times it is referred to in successive
years in scientific journals.(5) If it is a popular tune, its spread
through the meme pool may be gauged by the number of people heard whistling
it in the streets. If it is a style of women's shoe, the population
memeticist may use sales statistics from shoe shops. Some memes, like some
genes, achieve brilliant short-term success in spreading rapidly, but do not
last long in the meme pool. Popular songs and stiletto heels are examples.
Others, such as the Jewish religious laws, may continue to propagate
themselves for thousands of years, usually because of the great potential
permanence of written records.
This brings me to the third general quality of successful replicators:
copying-fidelity. Here I must admit that I am on shaky ground. At first
sight it looks as if memes are not high-fidelity replicators at all. Every
time a scientist hears an idea and passes it on to somebody else, he is
likely to change it somewhat. I have made no secret of my debt in the book
to the ideas of R.L. Trivers. Yet I have not repeated them in his own
words. I have twisted them round for my own purposes, changing the
emphasis, blending them with ideas of my own and of other people. The memes
are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quite unlike the
particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It looks as though
meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending.
It is possible that this appearance of non-particulateness is illusory, and
that the analogy with genes does not break down. After all, if we look at
the inheritance of many genetic characters such as human height or
skin-colouring, it does not look like the work of indivisible and unbendable
genes. If a black and an white person mate, their children do not come out
either black or white: they are intermediate. This does not mean the genes
concerned are not particulate. It is just that there are so many of them
concerned with skin colour, each one having such a small effect, that they
seem to blend. So far I have talked of memes as though it was obvious what
a single unit-meme consisted of. But of course that is far from obvious. I
have said a tune is one meme, but what about a symphony: how many memes is
that ? Is each movement one meme, each recognizable phrase of melody, each
bar, each chord, or what ?
I appeal to the same verbal trick as I used in Chapter 3. There I divided
the `gene complex' into large and small genetic units, and units within
units. The `gene' was defined, not in a rigid all-or-none way, but as a
unit of convenience, a length of chromosome with just sufficient
copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. If a
single phrase of Beethoven's ninth symphony is sufficiently distinctive and
memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony, and used
as the call-sign of a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station,
then to that extent it deserves to be called one meme. It has,
incidentally, materially diminished my capacity to enjoy the original
symphony.
Similarly, when we say that all biologists nowadays believe in Darwin's
theory, we do not mean that every biologist has, graven in his brain, an
identical copy of the exact words of Charles Darwin himself. Each
individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin's ideas. He probably
learned them not from Darwin's own writings, but from more recent authors.
Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read this book
would scarcely recognize his own theory in it, though I hope he would like
the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some
essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who
understands the theory. If this were not so, then almost any statement
about two people agreeing with each other would be meaningless. An
`idea-meme' might be defined as an entity that is capable of being
transmitted from one brain to another. The meme of Darwin's theory is
therefore that essential basis of the idea which is held in common by all
brains that understand the theory. The differences in the ways that people
represent the theory are then, by definition, not part of the meme. If
Darwin's theory can be subdivided into components, such that some people
believe component A but not component B, while others believe B but not
A, then A and B should be regarded as separate memes. If almost everybody
who believes in A also believes in B -- if the memes are closely `linked'
to use the genetic term -- then it is convenient to lump them together as
one meme.
Let us pursue the analogy between memes and genes further. Throughout this
book, I have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious,
purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes them behave
rather *as if* they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a
shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose. For example, when
we say `genes are trying to increase their numbers in future gene pools',
what we really mean is `those genes that behave in such a way as to increase
their numbers in future gene pools tend to be the genes whose effects we see
in the world'. Just as we have found it convenient to think of genes as
active agents, working purposefully for their own survival, perhaps it might
be convenient to think of memes in the same way. In neither case must we
get mystical about it. In both cases the idea of purpose is only a
metaphor, but we have already seen what a fruitful metaphor it is in the
case of genes. We have even used words like `selfish' and `ruthless' of
genes, knowing full well it is only a figure of speech. Can we, in exactly
the same spirit, look for selfish or ruthless memes ?
There is a problem here concerning the nature of competition. Where there
is sexual reproduction, each gene is competing particularly with its own
alleles -- rivals for the same chromosomal slot. Memes seem to have nothing
equivalent to alleles. I suppose there is a trivial sense in which many
ideas can be said to have `opposites'. But in general memes resemble the
early replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup,
rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments. In
what sense then are memes competing with each other ? Should we expect them
to be `selfish' or `ruthless', if they have no alleles ? The answer is that
we might, because there is a sense in which they must indulge in a kind of
competition with each other.
Any user of a digital computer knows how precious computer time and memory
storage space are. At many large computer centres they are literally costed
in money; or each user may be allotted a ration of time, measured in
seconds, and a ration of space, measured in `words'. The computers in which
memes live are human brains.(6) Time is possibly a more important limiting
factor than storage space, and it is the subject of heavy competition. The
human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few
things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it
must do so at the expense of `rival' memes. Other commodities for which
memes compete are radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper
column-inches, and library shelf-space.
In the case of genes, we saw in Chapter 3 that co-adapted gene complexes may
arise in the gene pool. A large set of genes concerned with mimicry in
butterflies became tightly linked together on the same chromosome, so
tightly that they can be treated as one gene. In Chapter 5 we met the more
sophisticated idea of the evolutionarily stable set of genes. Mutually
suitable teeth, claws, guts, and sense organs evolved in carnivore gene
pools, while a different stable set of characteristics emerged from
herbivore gene pools. Has the god meme, say, become associated with any
other particular memes, and does this association assist the survival of
each of the participating memes ? Perhaps we could regard an organized
church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written
tradition, as a co-adapted set of mutually-assisting memes.
To take a particular example, an aspect of doctrine that has been very
effective in enforcing religious observance is the threat of hell fire.
Many children and even some adults believe that they will suffer ghastly
torments after death if they do not obey the priestly rules. This is a
peculiarly nasty technique of persuasion, causing great psychological
anguish throughout the middle ages and even today. But it is highly
effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a
Machiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination
techniques. However, I doubt if the priests were that clever. Much more
probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival by virtue of
those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness that successful genes display.
The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self perpetuating, because of its
own deep psychological impact. It has become linked with the god meme
because the two reinforce each other, and assist each other's survival in
the meme pool.
Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means
blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The
story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so
that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded
evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency
to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that
they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The
meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious
expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Blind faith can justify anything.(7) If a man believes in a different god,
or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind
faith can decree that he should die -- on the cross, at the stake, skewered
on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in
Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating
themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious
blind faith.
Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into
opposition. For example, the habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited
genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool,
except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social
insects. But still, a meme for celibacy can be successful in the meme pool.
For example, suppose the success of a meme depends critically on how much
time people spend in actively transmitting it to other people. Any time
spent in doing other things than attempting to transmit the meme may be
regarded as time wasted from the meme's point of view. The meme for
celibacy is transmitted by priests to young boys who have not yet decided
what they want to do with their lives. The medium of transmission is human
influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example
and so on. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it happened to be the case
that marriage weakened the power of a priest to influence his flock, say
because it occupied a large proportion of his time and attention. This has,
indeed, been advanced as an official reason for the enforcement of celibacy
among priests. If this were the case, it could follow that the meme for
celibacy could have greater survival value than the meme for marriage. Of
course, exactly the opposite would be true for a gene for celibacy. If a
priest is a survival machine for memes, celibacy is a useful attribute to
build into him. Celibacy is just a minor partner in a large complex of
mutually-assisting religious memes.
I conjecture that co-adapted meme-complexes evolve in the same kind of way
as co-adapted gene-complexes. Selection favours memes that exploit their
cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment
consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool
therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set,
which new memes find it hard to invade.
I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side as
well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and
memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But
that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even
your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features,
in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation
passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to
reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection
of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a
direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that
she bears not a single one of the old king's genes. We should not seek
immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea,
compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on,
intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates
may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams
has remarked, but who cares ? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo,
Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
However speculative my development of the theory of memes may be, there is
one serious point which I would like to emphasize once again. This is that
when we look at the evolution of cultural traits and at their survival
value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about. Biologists, as
we have seen, are accustomed to looking for advantages at the gene level (or
the individual, the group, or the species level according to taste). What
we have not previously considered is that a cultural trait may have evolved
in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.
We do not have to look for conventional biological survival values of traits
like religion, music, and ritual dancing though these may also be present.
Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are
capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do
not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation, though that would
certainly help. All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable
of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit the capacity to the full.
I now close the topic of the new replicators, and end the chapter on a note
of qualified hope. One unique feature of man, which may or may not have
evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes
(and, if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no
foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. The fact that they
replicate, together with certain further conditions means, willy nilly, that
they will tend towards the evolution of qualities which, in the special
sense of this book, can be called selfish. A simple replicator, whether
gene or meme, cannot be expected to forgo short-term selfish advantage even
if it would really pay it, in the long term, to do so. We saw this in the
chapter on aggression. Even though a `conspiracy of doves' would be better
for every single individual than the evolutionarily stable strategy [=ESS],
natural selection is bound to favour the ESS.
It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for
genuine, disinterested, true altruism. I hope so, but I am not going to
argue the case one way or another, nor to speculate over its possible memic
evolution. The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark
side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious
foresight -- our capacity to simulate the future in imagination -- could
save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have
at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests
rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the
long-term benefits of participating in a `conspiracy of doves', and we can
sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have
the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the
selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of
deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism --
something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed
before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and
cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own
creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish
replicators.(8)
NOTES
(1) I would put my money on one fundamental principle ... all life evolves
by the differential survival of repicating entities.
My wager that all life, everywhere in the universe, would turn out to have
evolved by Darwinian means has now been spelled out and justified more fully
in my paper `Universal Darwinism' and in the last chapter of The Blind
Watchmaker. I show that all the alternatives to Darwinism that have ever
been suggested are in principle incapable of doing the job of explaining the
organized complexity of life. The argument is a general one, not based upon
particular facts about life as we know it. As such it has been criticized
by scientists pedestrian enough to think that slaving over a hot test tube
(or cold muddy boot) is the only method of discovery in science. One critic
complained that my argument was `philosophical', as though that was
sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the fact is that neither he
nor anybody else has found any flaw in what I said. And `in principle'
arguments such as mine, far from being irrelevant to the real world, can be
more powerful than arguments based on particular factual research. My
reasoning, if it is correct, tells us something important about life
everywhere in the universe. Laboratory and field research can tell us only
about life as we have sampled it here.
(2) Meme
The word meme seems to be turning out to be a good meme. It is now quite
widely used and in 1988 it joined the official list of words being
considered for future editions of Oxford English Dictionaries. This makes
me the more anxious to repeat that my designs on human culture were modest
almost to vanishing point. My true ambitions -- and they are admittedly
large -- lead in another direction entirely. I want to claim almost
limitless power for slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities, once they
arise anywhere in the universe. This is because they tend to become the
basis for Darwinian selection which, given enough generations, cumulatively
builds systems of great complexity. I believe that, given the right
conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or
machines, that carry them around and work to favour their continued
replication. The first ten chapters of The Selfish Gene had concentrated
exclusively on one kind of replicator, the gene. In discussing memes in the
final chapter I was trying to make the case for replicators in general, and
to show that genes were not the only members of that important class.
Whether the milieu of human culture really does have what it takes to get a
form of Darwinism going, I am not sure. But in any case that question is
subsidiary to my concern. Chapter 11 will have succeeded of the reader
closes the book with the feeling that DNA molecules are not the only
entities that might form the basis for Darwinian evolution. My purpose was
to cut the gene down to size, rather than to sculpt a grand theory of human
culture.
(3) ... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically
DNA is a self-replicating piece of hardware. Each piece has a particular
structure, which is different from rival pieces of DNA. If memes in brains
are analogous to genes they must be self-replicating brain structures,
actual patterns of neurological wiring-up that reconstitute themselves in
one brain after another. I had always felt uneasy spelling this out aloud,
because we know far less about brains than about genes, and are therefore
necessarily vague about what such a brain structure might actually be. So I
was relieved to receive very recently a very interesting paper by Juan
Delius of the University of Konstanz in Germany. Unlike me, Delius doesn't
have to feel apologetic, because he is a distinguished brain scientist
whereas I am not a brain scientist at all. I am delighted, therefore, that
he is bold enough to ram home the point by actually publishing a detailed
picture of what the neuronal hardware of a meme might look like. Among the
other interesting things he does is to explore, far more searchingly than I
had done, the analogy of memes with parasites; to be more precise, with the
spectrum of which malignant parasites are one extreme, benign `symbionts'
the other extreme. I am particularly keen on this approach because of my
own interest in `extended phenotypic' effects of parasitic genes on host
behaviour (see Chapter 13 of this book and in particular chapter 12 of The
Extended Phenotype). Delius, by the way, emphasizes the clear separation
between memes and their ('phenotypic') effects. And he reiterates the
importance of coadapted meme-complexes, in which memes are selected for
their mutual compatibility.
(4) `Auld Lang Syne'
`Auld Lang Syne' was, unwittingly, a revealingly fortunate example for me to
have chosen. This is because, almost universally, it is rendered with an
error, a mutation. The refrain is, essentially always nowadays, sung as
`For the sake of auld lang syne', whereas Burns actually wrote `For auld
lang syne'. A memically minded Darwinian immediately wonders what has been
the `survival value' of the interpolated phrase, `the sake of'. Remember
that we are not looking for ways in which people might have survived better
through singing the song in altered form. We are looking for ways in which
the alteration itself might have been good at surviving in the meme pool.
Everybody learns the song in childhood, not through reading Burns but
through hearing it sung on New Year's Eve. Once upon a time, presumably,
everybody sang the correct words. `For the sake of' must have arisen as a
rare mutation. Our question is, why has the initially rare mutation spread
so insidiously that it has become the norm in the meme pool ?
I don't think the answer is far to seek. The sibilant `s' is notoriously
obtrusive. Church choirs are drilled to pronounce `s' sounds as lightly as
possible, otherwise the whole church echoes with hissing. A murmuring
priest at the altar of a great cathedral can sometimes be heard, from the
back of the nave, only as a sporadic susurration of `s's. The other
consonant in `sake', `k', is almost as penetrating. Imagine that nineteen
people are correctly singing `For auld lang syne', and one person, somewhere
in the room, slips in the erroneous `For the sake of auld lang syne'. A
child, hearing the song for the first time, is eager to join in but
uncertain of the words. Although almost everybody is singing `For auld lang
syne', the hiss of an `s' and the cut of a `k' force their way into the
child's ears, and when the refrain comes round again he too sings `For the
sake of auld lang syne'. The mutant meme has taken over another vehicle.
If there are any other children there, or adults unconfident of the words,
they will be more likely to switch to the mutant form next time the refrain
comes round. It is not that they `prefer' the mutant form. They genuinely
don't know the words and are honestly eager to learn. Even if those who
know better indignantly bellow `For auld lang syne' at the top of their
voice (as I do!), the correct words happen to have no conspicuous
consonants, and the mutant form, even if quietly and diffidently sung, is
far easier to hear.
A similar case is `Rule Britannia'. The correct second line of the chorus
is `Britannia, rule the waves'. It is frequently, though not quite
universally, sung as `Britannia rules the waves'. Here the insistently
hissing `s' of the meme is aided by an additional factor. The intended
meaning of the poet (James Thompson) was presumably imperative (Britannia,
go out and rule the waves !) or possibly subjunctive (let Britannia rule the
waves). But it is superficially easier to misunderstand the sentence as
indicative (Britannia, as a matter of fact, does rule the waves). This
mutant meme, then, has two separate survival values over the original form
that it replaced: it sounds more conspicuous and it is easier to understand.
The final test of a hypothesis should be experimental. It should be
possible to inject the hissing meme, deliberately, into the meme pool at a
very low frequency, and then watch it spread because of its own survival
value. What if just a few of us were to start singing `God saves our
gracious Queen' ?
(5) If the meme is a scientific idea, its spread will depend on how
acceptable it is to the population of individual scientists; a rough measure
of its survival value could be obtained by counting the number of times it
is referred to in successive years in scientific journals.
[ Sorry, I left this note out. It's rather long, and contains 3 figures
(relatively hard to copy and put into an HTML page) that unfortunately are
important to the note's text -- and anyway, the note is probably of interest
only to settled bureaucratic scientists concerned mainly with the # of times
their own publications are quoted in papers by others. :-):-) But !, since
you have read so far, I think you are pretty interested in this stuff --
please consider buying the book ! I think it really would be a worthwhile
investment in yourself. ]
(6) The computers in which memes live are human brains.
It was obviously predictable that manufactured electronic computers, too,
would eventually play host to self-replicating patterns of information --
memes. Computers are increasingly tied together in intricate networks of
shared information. Many of them are literally wired up together in
electronic mail exchange. Others share information when their owners pass
floppy disks around. It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs
to flourish and spread. When I wrote the first edition of this book I was
naïve enough to suppose that an undesirable computer meme would have to
arise by a spontaneous error in the copying of a legitimate program. Alas,
that was a time of innocence. Epidemics of `viruses' and `worms',
deliberately released by malicious programmers, are now familiar hazards to
computer-users all over the world. [Un-original paragraph break]
My own hard disc has to my knowledge been infected in two different virus
epidemics during the past year, and that is a fairly typical experience
among heavy computer users. I shall not mention the names of particular
viruses for fear of giving any nasty little satisfaction to their nasty
little perpetrators. I say `nasty', because their behaviour seems to me
morally indistinguishable from that of a technician in a microbiology
laboratory, who deliberately infects the drinking water and seeds epidemics
in order to snigger at people getting ill. I say `little', because these
people are mentally little. There is nothing clever about designing a
computer virus. Any half-way competent programmer could do it, and half-way
competent programmers are two-a-penny in the modern world. I'm one myself.
I shan't even bother to explain how computer viruses work. It's too
obvious.
[ Hear, hear ! .... So even Dawkins is not immune to burst off in `flames'
and in useless gratuitous morality and ethics. :-):-) Still, nevertheless,
this note (bar the moralisms) does contain some interesting stuff. ]
What is less easy is how to combat them. Unfortunately some very expert
programmers have had to waste their valuable time writing virus-detector
programs, immunization programs and so on (the analogy with medical
vaccination, by the way, is astonishingly close, even down to the injection
of a `weakened strain' of the virus). The danger is that an arms race will
develop, with each advance in virus-prevention being matched by
counter-advances in new virus programs. So far, most anti-virus programs
are written by altruists and supplied free of charge as a service. But I
foresee the growth of a whole new profession -- splitting into lucrative
specialisms just like any other profession -- of `software doctors' on call
with black bags full of diagnostic and curative floppy disks. I use the
name `doctors', but real doctors are solving natural problems that are not
deliberately engineered by human malice. My software doctors, on the other
hand, will be, like lawyers, solving man-made problems that should never
have existed in the first place. In so far as virus-makers have any
discernible motive, they presumably feel vaguely anarchistic. I appeal to
them: do you really want to pave the way for a new cat-profession ? If not,
stop playing at silly memes, and put your modest programming talents to
better use.
(7) Blind faith can justify anything.
I have had the predictable spate of letters from faith's victims, protesting
about my criticisms of it. Faith is such a successful brainwasher in its
own favour, especially a brainwasher of children, that it is hard to break
its hold. But what, after all, is faith ? It is a state of mind that leads
people to believe something -- it doesn't matter what -- in the total
absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then
faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it
anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that `evolution is a
matter of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they
arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly
available evidence.
I said `it doesn't matter what' the faithful believe, which suggests that
people have faith in entirely daft, arbitrary things, like the electric monk
in Douglas Adam's delightful Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He
was purpose-built to do your believing for you, and very successful at it.
On the day that we meet him he unshakingly believes, against all the
evidence, that everything in the world is pink. I don't want to argue that
things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft.
They may of may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding
whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of faith over
another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed. Indeed the fact that true
faith doesn't need evidence is held up as its greatest virtue; this was the
point of my quoting the story of Doubting Thomas, the only really admirable
member of the apostles.
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly
told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to
such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental
illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in
extreme cases they are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for
further justification. Keith Henson has coined the name `memeoids' for
`victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own
survival becomes inconsequential ... You see lots of these people on the
evening news from such places as Belfast or Beirut'. Faith is powerful
enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to
decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they
honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
What a weapon ! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals
of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the
tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
(8) We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish
replicators.
The optimistic tone of my conclusion has provoked skepticism among critics
who feel that it is inconsistent with the rest of the book. In some cases
the criticism comes from doctrinaire sociobiologists jealously protective of
the importance of genetic influence. In other cases the criticism comes
from a paradoxically opposite quarter, high priests of the left jealously
protective of a favourite demonological icon ! Rose, Kamin, and Lewontin in
Not in Our Games have a private bogey called `reductionism'; and all the
best reductionists are also supposed to be `determinists', preferably
`genetic determinists'.
Brains, for reductionists, are determinate biological objects whose
properties produce the behaviours we observe and all the states of thought
or intention we infer from that behaviour&bnsp;... Such a position is, or
ought to be, completely in accord with the principles of sociobiology
offered by Wilson and Dawkins. However, to adopt it would involve them in
the dilemma of first arguing the innateness of much human behaviour that,
being liberal men, they clearly find unattractive (spite, indoctrination,
etc.) and then to become entangled in liberal ethical concerns about
responsibility for criminal acts, if these, like all other acts, are
biologically determined. To avoid the problem, Wilson and Dawkins invoke a
free will that enables us to go against the dictates of our genes if we so
wish ... This is essentially a return to unabashed Cartesianism, a
dualistic deus ex machina.
I think that Rose and his colleagues are accusing us of eating our cake and
having it. Either we must be `genetic determinists' or we believe in `free
will'; we cannot have it both ways. But -- and here I presume to speak for
Professor Wilson as well as for myself -- it is only in the eyes of Rose and
his colleagues that we are `genetic determinists'. What they don't
understand (apparently, though it is hard to credit) is that it is perfectly
possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour
while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified,
overridden or reversed by other influences. Genes must exert a statistical
influence on any behaviour pattern that evolves by natural selection.
Presumably Rose and his colleagues agree that human sexual desire has
evolved by natural selection, in the same sense that anything ever evolves
by natural selection. They therefore must agree that there have been genes
influencing their sexual desires -- in the same sense as genes ever
influence anything. Yet they presumably have no trouble with curbing their
sexual desires when it is socially necessary to do so. What is dualist
about that ? Obviously nothing. And no more is it dualist for me to
advocate rebelling `against the tyranny of the selfish replicators'. We,
that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to
rebel against them. As already noted, we do so in a small way every time we
use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large
way, too.
KEY TO BIBLIOGRAPHY
The numbers in brackets refer to the numbered references in the
bibliography. References for the body of Chapter 11 are preceded by a -,
those for the notes by a >.
- Arapesh tribe (133)
- blending inheritance (69)
- Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (32, 33)
- Cloak, F.T. (37)
- cultural evolution (20, 32, 33, 37, 62, 128)
- Darwin, C.R. (41)
> Delius, J.D. (58)
> determinism (47,51,154)
- faith (94)
> Henson, H.K. (94)
- Humphrey, N.K. (99)
- Ik tribe (175)
- Jenkins, P.F. (101)
> Kamin, L.J. (154)
> Lewontin, R.C. (110, 154)
- Mead, M. (133)
-> meme (20, 58)
> parasites (47, 89, 90, 160)
- particulate inheritance (69, 129, 153)
- Popper, K. (150, 151)
- primeval soup (144)
> reductionism (154)
- religion (94)
- replicator (47, 48)
> Rose, S. (154)
- saddleback (101)
- Trivers, R.L. (170, 171, 172, 173, 174)
- Turnbull, C. (175)
> universal Darwinism (49, 50)
- Williams, G.C. (181, 183)
> Wilson, E.O. (185)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
20. Bonner, J.T. (1980) The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
32. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1971) Similarities and dissimilarities of
sociocultural and biological evolution. In Mathematics in the
Archaeological and Historical Sciences (eds. F.R. Hodson, D.G. Kendall, and
P. Tautu). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 553-41.
33. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Feldman, M.W. (1981) Cultural Transmission and
Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
37. Cloak, F.T. (1975) Is a cultural ethnology possible? Human Ecology 3,
161-82.
41. Darwin, C.R. (1859) The Origin of Species. London: John Murray.
47. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: W.H. Freeman.
48. Dawkins, R. (1982) Replicators and vehicles. in Current Problems in
Sociobiology (eds. King's College Sociobiology Group). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 45-64.
49. Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In Evolution from Molecules to
Men (ed. D.S. Bendall). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 403-25.
50. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman.
51. Dawkins, R. (1986) Sociobiology: the new storm in a teacup. In Science
and Beyond (eds. S. Rose and L. Appignanesi). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. pp.
61-78.
58. Delius, J.D. (in press [in 1989]) Of mind memes and brain bugs: a
natural history of culture. In The Nature of Culture (ed. W.A. Koch).
Bochum: Studienlag Brockmeyer.
62. Dobzhansky, T. (1962) Mankind Evolving. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
69. Fisher, R.A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
89. Hamilton, W.D. (1998) Sex versus non-sex versus parasite. Oikos 35,
282-90.
90. Hamilton, W.D. and Zuk, M. (1982) Heritable true fitness and bright
birds: a role for parasites? Science 218, 384-7.
94. Henson, H.K. (1985) Memes, L5 and the religion of the space colonies.
L5 News, September 1985, pp. 5-8.
99. Humphrey, N. (1986) The Inner Eye. London: Faber and Faber.
101. Jenkins, P.F. (1978) Cultural transmission of song patterns and
dialect development in a free-living bird population. Animal Behaviour 26,
50-78.
110. Lewontin, R.C. (1983) The organism as the subject and object of
evolution. Scientia 118, 65-82.
128. Maynard Smith, J. (1988) Games, Sex and Evolution. New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
129. Maynard Smith, J. (1988) Evolutionary Genetics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
133. Mead, M. (1950) Male and Female. London: Gollancz.
144. Orgel, L.E. (1973) The Origins of Life. London: Chapman and Hall.
150. Popper, K. (1974) The rationality of scientific revolutions. In
Problems of Scientific Revolution (ed. R. Harré). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
pp. 72-101.
151. Popper, K. (1974) Natural selection and the emergence of mind.
Dialectica 32, 339-55.
153. Ridley, M. (1985) The Problems of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
154. Rose, S., Kamin, L.J., and Lewontin, R.C. (1984) Not In Our Genes.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
160. Seger, J. and Hamilton, W.D. (1988) Parasites and sex. In The
Evolution of Sex (eds. R.E. Michod and B.R. Levin). Sunderland,
Massachusetts: Sinauer. pp. 176-93.
170. Trivers, R.L. (1971) The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly
Review of Biology 46, 35-57.
171. Trivers, R.L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In
Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man (ed. B. Campbell). Chicago: Aldine.
pp 136-79.
172. Trivers, R.L. (1974) Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist
14, 249-64.
173. Trivers, R.L. (1985) Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.
174. Trivers, R.L. and Hare, H. (1976) Haplodiploidy and the evolution of
the social insects. Science 191, 249-63.
175. Turnbull, C. (1972) The Mountain People. London: Jonathan Cape.
181. Williams, G.C. (1975) Sex and Evolution. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
183. Williams, G.C. (1975) A defense of reductionism in evolutionary
biology. In Oxford Surveys in Biology (eds. R. Dawkins and M. Ridley), 2,
pp. 1-27.
185. Wilson, E.O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Joel Olson
And that would be The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins?
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Memes don't exist - pass it on. - B. Taylor
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