Until these and other problems of initial theoretical orientation are resolved, skepticism about memes will continue to be widespread and heartfelt. Many commentators are deeply opposed to any proposals to recast questions in the social sciences and humanities in terms of cultural evolution, and this opposition is often expressed in terms of a challenge to prove that âmemes existâ:
Genes exist [these critics grant] but what are memes? What are they made of? Genes are made of DNA. Are memes made of neuron-patterns in the brains of enculturated people? What is the material substrate for memes?
There are some proponents of memes who have argued in favor of an attempt to identify memes with specific brain structuresâa project still entirely uncharted, of course. But on current understandings of how the brain might store cultural information, it is unlikely that any independently identifiable common brain structures, in different brains, could ever be isolated as the material substrate for a particular meme. While some genes for making eyes do turn out to be identifiable whether they occur in the genome of a fly, a fish, or an elephant, there is no good reason to anticipate that the memes for wearing bifocals might be similarly isolatable in neuronal patterns in brains. It is vanishingly unlikely, that is, that the brain of Benjamin Franklin, who invented bifocals, and the brains of those of us who wear them, should âspellâ the idea of bifocals in a common brain-code. Besides, this imagined path to scientific respectability is based on a mistaken analogy. In his 1966 book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, the evolutionary theorist George Williams offered an influential definition of a gene as âany hereditary information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change,â and as he went on to stress in his 1992 book, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, âA gene is not a DNA molecule; it is the transcribable information coded by the moleculeâ (p. 11).
Genes, genetic recipes, are all written in the physical medium of DNA, using a single canonical language, the nucleotide alphabet of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine, triplets of which code for amino acids. Let every strand of smallpox DNA in the world be destroyed; if the smallpox genome is preserved (translated from nucleotides into the letters A, C, G, and T and stored on hard disks on computers, for instance), smallpox is not truly extinct; it could have descendants someday, because its genes still exist on those hard disks, as what Williams calls âpackages of informationâ (1992, p. 13).
Memes, cultural recipes, similarly depend on one physical medium or another for their continued existence (they arenât magic), but they can leap around from medium to medium, being translated from language to language, from language to diagram, from diagram to rehearsed practice, and so forth. A recipe for chocolate cake, whether written in English in ink on paper, or spoken in Italian on videotape, or stored in a diagrammatic data structure on a computerâs hard disk, can be preserved, transmitted, translated, and copied. Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the likelihood of a recipe getting any of its physical copies replicated depends (mainly) on how successful the cake is. How successful the cake is at doing what? At getting a host to make another cake? Usually, but even more important is getting the host to make another copy of the recipe and passing it on. Thatâs all that matters, in the end. The cake may not enhance the fitness of those who eat it; it may even poison them, but if it first somehow provokes them to pass on the recipe, the meme will flourish.
This is perhaps the most important innovation in outlook permitted by recasting investigations in terms of memes: they have their own fitness as replicators, independently of any contribution they may or may not make to the genetic fitness of their hosts, the human vectors. Dawkins (1976) put it this way: âWhat we have not previously considered is that the cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itselfâ (p. 200 of rev. ed.). The anthropologist F. T. Cloak (1975) put it this way: âThe survival value of a cultural instruction is the same as its function; it is its value for the survival/replication of itself or its replica.â
Those who question whether âmemes existâ because they cannot see what material thing a meme could be should ask themselves if they are equally dubious about whether words exist. What is the word âcatâ made of? Words are recognizable, reidentifiable products of human activity; they come in many media, and can leap from substrate to substrate in the process of being replicated. Their standing as real things is not in the slightest impugned by their abstractness. In the proposed taxonomy, words are but one species of memes, and the other species of memes are the same kind of things that words areâyou just canât pronounce or spell them. Some of them you can dance, and some of them you can sing, or play, and others you can follow by making something out of the various building materials the world provides. The word âcatâ isnât made out of some of the ink on this page, and a recipe for chocolate cake isnât made of flour and chocolate.
There is no single proprietary code, parallel to the four-element code of DNA, that can be used to anchor meme-identity the way gene-identity can be anchored for most practical purposes. This is an important difference, but one of degree. If the current trend of language extinctions continues at its present pace, in the not-so-distant future every person on earth will speak the same language, and it will then be difficult to resist the temptation (which should still be resisted!) to identify memes with their (now practically unique) verbal labels. But so long as there are multiple languages, to say nothing of the multiple media in which nonlinguistic cultural items can be replicated, we are better off to keep strictly to the abstract, code-neutral understanding of a meme as a âpackage of information,â bearing in mind that, for high-fidelity replication to occur, there must always be some âcodeâ or other. Codes play a crucial role in all systems of high-fidelity replication, since they provide finite, practical sets of norms against which relatively mindless editing or proofreading can be done. But even in the clearest cases of codes, there are often multiple levels of norms. Suppose Tommy writes the letters âSePERaTEâ on the blackboard, and Billy âcopiesâ it by writing âseperate.â Is this really copying? The normalization to all lowercase letters shows that Billy is not slavishly copying Tommyâs chalkmarks but, rather, being triggered to execute a series of canonical, normalized acts: make an âs,â make an âe,â etc. It is thanks to these letter-norms that Billy can âcopyâ Tommyâs word at all. But he does copy Tommyâs spelling error, unlike Molly, who âcopiesâ Tommy by writing âseparate,â responding to a higher norm, at the level of word spelling. Sally then goes a step higher, âcopyingâ the phrase âseparate butt equalââall words in good standing in the dictionaryâas âseparate but equal,â responding to a recognized norm at the phrase level. Can we go higher? Yes. Anybody who, when âcopyingâ the line in the recipe âSeparate three eggs and beat the yolks until they form stiff white cones,â would replace âyolksâ with âwhites,â knows enough about cooking to recognize the error and correct it. Above spelling and syntactic norms are a host of semantic norms as well.
Norms can both hinder and help replication. The anthropologist Dan Sperber (2000) has distinguished copying from what he calls âtriggered productionâ and has noted that in cultural transmission âthe information provided by the stimulus is complemented with information already in the system.â This complementing tends to absorb mutations instead of passing them on. Evolution depends on the existence of mutations that can survive the proofreading processes of replication intact, but it does not specify the level at which this survival must occur. A brilliant cooking innovation might indeed get corrected away by an all-too-knowing chef in the course of passing on the recipe, but other âerrorsâ might get through and replicate indefinitely. Meanwhile, the correction o
f other varieties of noise at other levels, responding to spelling norms or others, must be ongoing, in order to keep the copying process faithful enough so that multiple exemplars of each innovation can be tested against the environment. As Williams puts it, âA given package of information (codex) must proliferate faster than it changes, so as to produce a genealogy recognizable by some diagnostic effectsâ (1992, p. 13). Recognizable, that is, to the unfocused, independently varying environment, so it can yield probabilistic verdicts of natural selection that have some likelihood of identifying adaptations of projectible fitness.
Just how big or small can a meme be? A single musical tone is not a meme, but a memorable melody is. Is a symphony a single meme or is it a system of memes? A parallel question can be asked about genes, of course. No single nucleotide or codon is a gene. How many notes or letters or codons does it take? The answer in both cases tolerates blurred boundaries: a meme, or a gene, must be large enough to carry information worth copying. There is no fixed measure of this, but the bountiful system of case law on copyright and patent infringements indicates that verdicts on particular cases form a relatively trustworthy equilibrium that is stable enough for most purposes.
Other objections to memes seem to exhibit an inverse relationship between popularity and soundness: the more enthusiastically they are championed, the more ill informed they are. They have been patiently rebutted again and again by proponents, but those who are appalled by the prospect of an evolutionary account of anything in human culture donât seem to notice. A common mistake is for critics to imagine that memes must be more like genes than they need to be for the three conditions to be met. It has been observed, for instance, that when an individual first acquires some encountered cultural item, this is typically not a case of imitating a single instance of it. (If I take up the practice of wearing my baseball cap backward, or add a new word to my working vocabulary, am I copying the first instance of it I ever noticed, or the most recent instance, or am I somehow averaging over all of them?) This embarrassment of riches in the search for the parent of the new offspring does complicate the model of cultural replication, but it does not in itself disqualify the process as one of replication. For instance, the ultra-high-fidelity copying of computer files depends in many instances on error-correcting code-reading systems that in effect let âmajority ruleâ determine which of several candidate exemplars should count as canonical. In such cases, no single vehicle of the information can be identified as the source, but it is an instance of replication if anything is. Darwinâs trio of requirements is both substrate-neutral and implementation-neutral to a degree that is not always appreciated.
Is cultural evolution Darwinian?
Marking these unresolved problems of nomenclature and individuation, we can turn to the more fundamental and important question: Do any of these candidates for Darwinian replicator actually fulfill the three requirements in ways that permit evolutionary theory to explain phenomena not already explicable by the methods and theories of the traditional social sciences? Or does this Darwinian perspective provide only a relatively trivial unification? It would still be important to conclude that cultural evolution obeys Darwinian principles in the modest sense that nothing that happens in it contradicts evolutionary theory, even if cultural phenomena are best accounted for in other terms. In The Origin of Species, Darwin himself identified three processes of selection: âmethodicalâ selection by the foresighted, deliberate acts of farmers and others intent on artificial selection, âunconsciousâ selection, in which human beings have engaged in activities that have unwittingly contributed to the differential survival and reproduction of species, mostly on their way to domestication, and ânaturalâ selection, in which human intentions have played no role at all. To this list we can add a fourth phenomenon, genetic engineering, in which the intention and foresight of human designers plays a still more prominent role. All four of these phenomena are Darwinian in the modest sense. Genetic engineers do not produce counterexamples to the theory of evolution by natural selection, any more than plant breeders over the eons have done; they produce novel fruits of the fruits of the fruits of evolution by natural selection. The idea of memes promises similarly to unify under a single perspective such diverse cultural phenomena as deliberate, foresighted scientific and cultural inventions (memetic engineering), such authorless productions as folklore, and even such unwittingly redesigned phenomena as languages and social customs themselves. As we enter the age of deliberate, purportedly foresighted tinkering with our own genomes and the genomes of other species, we face the prospect of strong interactions between genetic and memetic evolution, including many that may take off without having been foreseen at all. It behooves us to investigate these possibilities with the same vigor and attention to detail we devote to the investigation of the evolution of carbon-based pathogens and the swift disappearance of natural barriers that have structured the biosphere until very recently.
We should also remind ourselves that, just as population genetics is no substitute for ecology, which investigates the complex interactions between phenotypes and environments that ultimately yield the fitness differences presupposed by genetics, no one should anticipate that a new science of memetics would overturn or replace all the existing models and explanations of cultural phenomena developed by the social sciences. It might, however, recast them in significant ways, and provoke new inquiries in much the way genetics has inspired a flood of investigations in ecology. The books listed under Further Reading explore these prospects in some detail, but still at a very programmatic and speculative level. At this time there are still only a few works that might be listed as pioneering empirical investigations in specialized branches of memetics: Hull (1988), Pocklington and Best (1997), Gray and Jordan (2000).
Further Reading
Aunger, Robert, [June 2002], The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate. New York: Free Press.
âââ, ed., 2000, Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka, 2000, Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blackmore, Susan, 1999, The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bonner, John Tyler, 1980, The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson, 1985, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brodie, Richard, 1996, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle: Integral Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, and Marcus Feldman, 1981, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dawkins, Richard, 1976, The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rev. ed., 1989.
Dennett, Daniel, 1995, Darwinâs Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster.
âââ, 2001, âThe Evolution of Culture.â Monist, vol. 84, no. 3, pp. 305â24.
âââ, 2005, âFrom Typo to Thinko: When Evolution Graduated to Semantic Norms.â
In S. Levinson and P. Jaisson, eds., Culture and Evolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Durham, William, 1992, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Hull, David, 1988, Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laland, Kevin, and Gillian Brown, 2002, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lynch, Aaron, 1996, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. New York: Basic Books.
Pocklington, Richard, in press, âMemes and Cultural Viruses.â In Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Journal
Artificial Life
Web Journal
Journal of Memetics. Available at http:
//www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/.
Other References
Cloak, F. T., 1975, âIs a Cultural Ethology Possible?â Human Ecology, vol. 3, pp. 161â82. Gray, Russell D., and Fiona M. Jordan, 2000, âLanguage Trees Support the Express-Train Sequence of Austronesian Expansion.â Nature, vol. 405 (June 29, 2000), pp. 1052â55.
Moravec, Hans, 1988, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Pocklington, Richard, and Michael L. Best, 1997, âCultural Evolution and Units of Selection in Replicating Text.â Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 188, pp. 79â87.
Sperber, Dan, 2000, âAn Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture.â In Robert Aunger, ed., Darwinizing Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, George, 1966, Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
âââ, 1992, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
APPENDIX B Some More Questions About Science
1 An invitation to an investigation
In a democracy with freedom of religion, people are entitled to declare their religion to be the only true religion, and then to refuse all invitations to defend their declaration. In a democracy, we also let people be conscientious objectors, but we donât thereby give or imply any endorsement whatever to their claims. If you decline to put your beliefs on the line, then your beliefs, whatever they are, really cannot be given any consideration in the ongoing investigation, which has no use for one-sided declarations that will not be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and cross-examination. Weâll definitely consider your (apparent) beliefs as dataâthere are people, and you are one of them, who make various avowals but cannot be enticed to place those avowals in the arena of investigationâbut we will not make the mistake of counting your declaration as an opinion offered as a contribution to our inquiry.
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