Blackmore, Susan - Memes, Mind And Selves a.pdf - Memetyka - tekno-inez

Memes, Minds and Selves

Susan Blackmore

{ Department of Psychology

University of the West of England }

« Memes » ---when you hear that word, or worse still find yourself

saying it, do you get an irresistible urge to raise your hands in scare

quotes or giggle nervously to hide your embarrassment? If so you are

not alone. The very idea of the meme seems to strike fear into even the

most hardened evolutionist.

Some reject the meme outright as a ``meaningless metaphor'' or empty

analogy. However, my intention today is to argue that the idea of

memes as independent replicators is a useful and powerful idea---and

one that will prove essential to understanding the human mind.

I shall first outline the history of the idea of memes and then present

four examples of how a theory of memetics can be used to explain

specific phenomena; two of these I shall skip over quickly just to give

an idea of the kind of reasoning involved. The others I shall consider in

more detail. These are the origins of human altruism, and the size of

our brains. I shall conclude with some thoughts on the nature of

minds and selves.

In 1976 Dawkins published his best-selling [TSG] The Selfish Gene . This

book popularised the growing view in biology that natural selection

proceeds not in the interest of the species or of the group, nor even of

the individual, but in the interest of the genes. The genes are the true

replicators and it is their competition that drives the evolution of

biological design---or as he would now put it, Climbing Mount

Improbable .

It is often allowed to elderly and famous men that they can get away

with a few pages of wild speculation on forbidden topics at the very

end of their great books. I well remember my tutor warning me off the

last chapter of Eccles' book on the physiology of the giant squid axon

in which he tackled the naughty subject of consciousness. Well,

Dawkins was neither old nor (then) terribly famous, but he devoted his

last few pages to the topic of memes and has been much derided for it.

Dawkins, clear and daring as always, suggested that all life

everywhere in the universe must evolve by the differential survival of

slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities. Furthermore, these

replicators automatically band together in groups to create systems,

or machines, that carry them around and work to favour their

continued replication. The gene, he claimed, is not the only replicator

on our planet. Staring us in the face, though still drifting clumsily

about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator---a unit of

imitation. He gave it the name « meme » and as examples suggested

``tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or

of building arches.''

In just those few pages he laid the foundations for understanding the

evolution of memes. He discussed their propagation by jumping from

brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them

as living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will

group together. He laid the basis for his later analysis of religions as

co-adapted meme-complexes and argued that once a new replicator

arises it will tend to take over and begin a new kind of evolution.

Above all he treated them as independent replicators, chastising those

of his colleagues who tended always to go back to ``biological

advantage'' to answer questions about human behaviour. Yes, he

agreed, we got our brains for biological (genetic) reasons but now we

have them a new replicator has been unleashed and it need not be

subservient to the old.

The meme meme has done fairly well. The word has even been

considered for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. However,

the basic idea does not seem to have been either understood or much

used and its two greatest proponents, Dawkins and Dennett, have both

seemed to draw back from the idea after their initial enthusiasm.

Many writers prefer to avoid the term altogether. ``Meme'' does not

even appear in the index of many of the best recent books about

human origins and language such as Pinker's The Language Instinct ,

Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language , Mithen's

Prehistory of the Mind , or Tudge's The Day before Yesterday , nor in

those about human morality such as Ridley's The Origins of Virtue , or

Wright's The Moral Animal .

There have been many attempts to develop theories of the origins of

culture. Perhaps these use the same idea but call it something else.

Such theories might roughly be seen as falling along a continuum from

the outright rejection of cultural evolution, through most of

sociobiology and Wilson's image of the genes holding culture on a

leash, to schemes that treat cultural evolution as relatively

independent. Among the latter, only Durham uses the word ``meme''

and it may be no coincidence that he provides good examples of the

memes acting against the interest of the genes or forcing the

development of the genes in one direction rather than another.

However, even he makes inclusive fitness the final arbiter in his theory

of coevolution. As far as I can understand them, other authors do not

really treat their unit of cultural exchange as an independent

replicator. When they say ``adaptive'' or ``maladaptive'' they mean for

the genes. In other words, when it comes to the crunch they always fall

back on appeals to biological advantage, just as Dawkins complained

that his colleagues did twenty years ago.

Dawkins is clear on this issue when he says ``There is no reason why

success in a meme should have any connection whatever with genetic

success.'' I agree.

The most direct support for this view comes from a philosopher, not a

biologist. Dan Dennett has used the idea of memes in both his recent

books. He is absolutely clear that the meme is a separate replicator

and describes its ``replicator power'' in terms of the fundamental

algorithm of natural selection. He also goes further, describing a

person as the entity created when ``A particular sort of animal is

properly furnished by---or infested with---memes.'' His analysis is

thorough and fascinating, but he does not make specific empirical

predictions and few seem to have taken up his ideas.

There is a flourishing Internet community communicating about

memes, but as with all such groups the quality is mixed. Twenty years

on it therefore seems necessary for me to defend the very idea that the

meme is a replicator in its own right, as well as to prove its

usefulness.

The Meme as Replicator

It is widely agreed that for evolution to occur three things are needed;

variation, heredity or replication, and differential survival of the

copies made. There is enormous variety in the behaviours human

beings emit, these behaviours are copied, more or less accurately by

other human beings, and not all the copies survive. The meme

therefore fits perfectly.

Think of tunes, for example. Millions of variants are sung by millions

of people. Only a few get passed on and repeated and even fewer make

it into the pop charts or the collections of classics. Scientific papers

proliferate but only a few get long listings in the citation indexes. Only

a few of the disgusting concoctions made in woks actually make it

onto the TV shows that tell you how to Wok things and only a few of

my brilliant ideas have ever been appreciated by anyone! In other

words, competition to get copied is fierce.

Put another way, there needs to be a replicator that makes slightly

inaccurate copies of itself in an environment in which not all the

copies can survive. Whichever way you look at it, the meme seems to

fit. However, there are some cogent objections to the notion of the

meme as replicator. I shall consider three.

1: Memes are not like Genes

Unfortunately we only have one other well-known replicator with

which to compare the meme. I say unfortunately because this tends to

make us think that all replicators must be like genes. In fact genes may

be just one example of many potential replicators.

So we need not reject the idea of the meme just because it works so

differently from the gene. I suggest we should simply bear in mind the

similarities and differences and wait to find out how important these

are.

In definition genes and memes are comparable. The gene is an

instruction for building proteins, stored in a cell and passed on by

reproduction. The meme is an instruction for producing behaviour,

stored in a brain and passed on to other brains by imitation. However,

there are many differences in the way the replication takes place.

Genes use the cellular machinery to copy themselves rather accurately.

Memes have to be copied by using the brain itself as the replicating

machinery. One person has to observe another's behaviour and work

out somehow how to reproduce it. It is, if you like, a kind of reverse

engineering. Say you snap your fingers above your head. I can copy

this action relatively easily, yet the processes involved in my doing so

must be fiendishly complex and we are nowhere near to

understanding them. What we do know is that humans are supremely

good at imitating each other and do so a great deal from very early on

in their lives. It is this fiendishly complicated process that makes the

transmission of memes possible.

This fact also means that memetic transmission is in some sense

Lamarckian. That is, I copy the actions you make, not the instructions

your brains holds for making those actions. But don't forget that we

can easily ignore the vagaries of environmental constraints on

behaviour. If I trip over when demonstrating my fantastic new

combined garden hose and cat scarer, you will not copy my clumsiness

when turning the invention on me. If I tell you a brilliant story when I

have a sore throat you will not assume a hoarse voice when passing on

the gossip to your friends. Indeed language appears remarkably

resistant to the vagaries of individual voices and accents and language

must be a major way of passing on memes.

Whether we see the process as Lamarckian also depends in part on

what we consider the equivalent of the phenotype to be. If we follow

some authors in persisting in seeing the organism as the phenotype

then obviously the process is Lamarckian. If we follow Dawkins in

treating meme products such as words, music, gestures, skills and

fashions, as the equivalent of the phenotype, then the process still

appears Lamarckian because these are the very things that are copied.

However, we might follow his other suggestion that memes are still

drifting clumsily about in their primeval soup. We can see the brain as

the replicating machinery for behaviours which have not yet created

clear phenotypes. In this case the process is not so obviously

Lamarckian.

Blackmore, Susan - Memes, Mind And Selves a.pdf

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