Memes

MEMES

I haven’t mentioned memes yet, which may make some readers wonder if I have abandoned them. Not at all. The concept of memes is one of my favorite thinking tools, and I have a lot to say about it—too much to put in this book! I have already said a great deal about memes elsewhere (Dennett, 1990, 1991a, 1995a, to cite a few examples). For various reasons many people have a visceral dislike of the concept, so they tend to fall for the many criticisms that have been raised. I have decided that I should try one more time to make the case for memes and deal with all the critics, both the serious critics and the white-knuckled meme-haters, but that will take a small book of its own. In the meantime, those who want to know more about memes should take a look at my essay on them, “The New Replicators” (2002; also in Dennett, 2006a).

But here, as a preview, is a brief introduction to the serious concept of memes (in contrast to its over-popular loose usage by Internet denizens). As Dawkins (1976) pointed out, when he introduced the concept of the meme as a cultural item that gets itself copied, the fundamental principle of biology is

that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. . . . The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process. But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replication 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 which leaves the old gene panting far behind. [p. 206]

Two main insights that flow from this thinking tool dramatically alter the landscape of our imaginations when we think about human culture and creativity. First, memes shatter the otherwise seductive idea that there are only two routes to good Design: it’s either genes or genius. For most thinkers, until memes open their eyes, if something in human life exhibits the telltale signs of adaptation of means to ends or functional efficiency, it must be either a product of genetic natural selection or a product of deliberate, comprehending, intending human thinking—intelligent design. Orgel’s Second Law—evolution is cleverer than you are—might seem to enshrine the two options, but in fact there is a third possibility, and it is everywhere instanced: nongenetic, cultural selection, accomplished by the same process of mindless natural selection that gives us the genes. A vivid example is provided by an observation about Polynesian canoes more than a century old: “every boat is copied from another boat. . . . it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others” (Alain, 1908). This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary. Evolution takes care of the quality control. The same is true of grammatical rules, words, religious practices, and many other bedrock features of human culture: nobody designed them, and they’re not “in our genes,” but they are nevertheless quite excellently designed.

The second insight is that the price we pay for having this extra information highway, this bounteous medium of design and transmission that no other species enjoys, is that memes have their own fitness, just like all the other symbionts that thrive in our company, and their fitness is to some degree independent of our own fitness. Blindness to this idea is endemic, and is particularly evident when people discuss evolutionary accounts of religion. “Oh, so you’re working on an evolutionary theory of religion. What good do you think religions provide? They must be good for something, since apparently every human culture has religion in some form or other.” Well, every human culture has the common cold too. What is it good for? It’s good for itself. We should be prepared to find cultural replicators that are not beneficial but that manage to thrive nevertheless. This evens the playing field of theories of cultural evolution, replacing the blinkered idea that cultural innovations—just like genetic innovations—always enhance the fitness of those who transmit them. Memes are informational symbionts, and like the mutualist symbionts by the trillions that also inhabit us, we couldn’t live without them, but that doesn’t mean they are all our friends. Some are harmful plagues we could well do without.