Darwin's Dangerous Idea (70 page)

The Philosophical Importance of Memes
369

meme rules anybody; what makes a person the person he or she is are the CHAPTER 12:
The invasion of human brains by culture, in the form of
coalitions of memes that govern—that play the long-term roles in deter-memes, has created human minds, which alone among animal minds can mining which decisions are made along the way. (We will look more closely
conceive of tilings distant and future, and formulate alternative goals. The
at this idea in chapters 16 and 17.)

prospects for elaborating a rigorous science of memetics are doubtful, but the
Whether or not the meme perspective can be turned into science, in its
concept provides a valuable perspective from which to investigate die
philosophical guise it has already done much more good than harm, contrary
complex relationship between cultural and genetic heritage. In particular, it
to what Gould has claimed, even though, as we shall see, there may be
other
is the shaping of our minds by memes tiiat gives us the autonomy to transcend
applications of Darwinian thinking in the social sciences that truly deserve
our selfish genes.

Gould's condemnation. What, in fact, is the alternative to this through-and-through Darwinian vision of a mind? A last hope for the Darwin-dreaders is CHAPTER 13: A
series of ever more powerful types of mind can be defined in
simply to deny that what happens to memes when they enter a mind could
terms of the Tower of Generate-and-Test, which takes us from the crudest
ever, ever be explained in "reductionistic," mechanistic terms. One way
trial-and-error learners to the community of scientists and other serious
would be to espouse outright Cartesian dualism: the mind just can't be the
human thinkers. Language plays the crucial role in this cascade of cranes,
brain, but, rather, some
other
place, in which great and mysterious
and Noam Chomsky's pioneering work in linguistics opens up die prospect of
alchemical processes occur, transforming the raw materials they are fed—the
a Darwinian theory of language, but this is
a
prospect he has mistakenly
cultural items we are calling memes—into new items that transcend their
shunned, along widi Gould. The controversies surrounding die development
sources in ways that are simply beyond the ken of science.12

in recent years of a science of die mind have been sadly amplified into
A slightly less radical way of supporting the same defensive view is to
antagonisms by misperceptions on both sides: are die critics calling for
concede that the mind is, after all, just the brain, which is a physical entity
cranes or skyhooks?

bound by all the laws of physics and chemistry, but insist that it nevertheless does its chores in ways that defy scientific analysis. This view has often been suggested by the linguist Noam Chomsky and enthusiastically defended by his former colleague the philosopher/psychologist Jerry Fodor (1983), and more recently by another philosopher, Colin McGinn ( 1991 ). We can see that this is a
saltational
view of the mind, positing great leaps in Design Space that get "explained" as acts of sheer genius or intrinsic creativity or something else science-defying. It insists that somehow the brain itself is a skyhook, and refuses to settle for what the wily Darwinian offers: the brain, thanks to all the cranes that have formed it in the first place, and all the cranes that have entered it in the second place, is itself a prodigious, but not mysterious, lifter in Design Space.

It will take some further work to turn this highly metaphorical confrontation into a more literal one, and resolve it, in chapter 13. Fortunately for me, much of this work has already been done by me, so I can once again avoid reinventing the wheel by simply reusing a wheel I've made before. My next exaptation is from my 1992 Darwin Lecture at Darwin College, Cambridge (Dennett 1994b).

12. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin (1984, p. 283) claim that memes presuppose a "Cartesian" view of the mind, whereas in fact memes are a key (central but optional) ingredient in the best alternatives to Cartesian models (Dennett 1991a).

The Role of Language in Intelligence
371

nonmiraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately "mechanical" explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we CHAPTER THIRTEEN

can do is anything beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros ( assembled in space and time).

Losing Our Minds to

Still, there is a huge difference between our minds and the minds of other species, a gulf wide enough even to make a moral difference. It is—it must be---due to two intermeshed factors, each of which requires a Darwinian
Darwin

explanation: (1) the brains we are born with have features lacking in other brains, features that have evolved under selection pressure over the last six million years or so, and (2) these features make possible an enormous elaboration of powers that accrue from the sharing of Design wealth through cultural transmission. The pivotal phenomenon that unites these two factors is language. We human beings may not be the most admirable species on the planet, or the most likely to survive for another millennium, but we are without any doubt at all the most intelligent. We are also the only species with language.

Is that true? Don't whales and dolphins, vervet monkeys and honeybees 1. THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN INTELLIGENCE

(the list goes on) have languages
of sorts?
Haven't chimpanzees in laboratories been taught rudimentary languages
of sorts?
Yes, and body language is
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

a sort of language, and music is the international language ( sort of), and

—ANONYMOUS '

politics is a sort of language, and the complex world of odor and olfaction is another, highly emotionally charged language, and so on. It sometimes seems We are not like other animals; our minds set us off from them. That is the that the highest praise we can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is claim that inspires such passionate defense. It is curious that people who want the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language—of sorts.

so much to defend this difference should be so reluctant to examine the This admiration for language—real language, the sort only we human beings evidence in its favor coming from evolutionary biology, ethology, pri-use—is well founded. The expressive, information-encoding properties of matology, and cognitive science. Presumably, they are afraid they might learn real language are practically limitless (in at least some dimensions), and the that, although we are different, we aren't different
enough
to make the life-powers that other species acquire in virtue of their use of proto-languages, defining difference they cherish. For Descartes, after all, the difference was hemi-semi-demi-languages, are indeed similar to the powers we acquire absolute and metaphysical: animals were just mindless automata;
we
have thanks to our use of real language. These other species do climb a few steps souls. Descartes and his followers have suffered calumny over the centuries at up the mountain on whose summit we reside, thanks to language. Looking at the hands of animal-lovers who have deplored his claim that animals have no the vast differences between their gains and ours is one way of approaching souls. More theoretically minded critics have deplored his faintheartedness the question we now must address: just how does language contribute to from the opposite pole: how could such a sound, ingenious mechanist flinch intelligence?

so badly when it came to making an exception for humanity?
Of course
our What varieties of thought require language? What varieties of thought (if minds are our brains, and hence are ultimately just stupendously complex any) are possible without language? We watch a chimpanzee, with her soulful

"machines"; the difference between us and other animals is one of huge degree, not metaphysical kind. It is no coincidence, I have shown, that those face, inquisitive eyes, and deft fingers, and we very definitely get a sense of who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore evolutionary the mind within, but, the more we watch, the more our picture of her mind accounts of human mentality: if human minds are

swims before our eyes. In some ways she is so human, so insightful; yet we soon learn (to our dismay or relief, depending on our hopes ) that in other ways she is so dense, so uncomprehending, so unreachably cut off from our human world. How could a chimp who so obviously understands A fail to 1. This
bon mot
appeared in the
Tufts Daily,
attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, understand
B?
Consider a few simple questions about chimpanzees.

but I daresay it is a meme of more recent birth.

372 LOSING OUR MINDS TO DARWIN

The Role of Language in Intelligence
373

Could they learn to tend a fire—could they gather firewood, keep it dry, the way we do. The differences are not necessarily in the products, but in the preserve the coals, break the wood, keep the fire size within proper bounds?

control structures within the brains that create them. A child might study a And if they couldn't invent these novel activities on their own, could they be weaverbird building its nest, and then replicate the nest herself, finding the trained by human beings to do these things? Here's another question. Suppose right pieces of grass, and weaving them in the right order, creating, by the you imagine something novel—I hereby invite you to imagine a man very same series of steps, an identical nest. A film of the two building climbing up a rope with a plastic garbage-pail over his head. An easy mental processes occurring side by side might overwhelm us with a sense that we task for you. Could a chimpanzee do the same thing in her mind's eye? I were seeing the same phenomenon twice, but it would be a big mistake to wonder. I chose the elements—man, rope, climbing, pail, head—as familiar impute to the bird the sort of thought processes we know or imagine to be objects in the perceptual and behavioral world of a laboratory chimp, but I going on in the child. There could be very little in common between the wonder whether a chimp could
put them together
in this novel way—even by processes going on in the child's brain and in the bird's brain. The bird is accident, as it were. You were provoked to perform your mental act by my (apparently) endowed with a collection of interlocking special-purpose verbal suggestion, and probably you often perform similar mental acts on minimalist subroutines, well designed by evolution according to the your own in response to verbal suggestions you give yourself—not out loud, notorious
need-to-know principle
of espionage: give each agent as little but definitely in words. Could it be otherwise? Could a chimpanzee get itself information as will suffice for it to accomplish its share of the mission.

to perform such a mental act without the help of verbal suggestion?

Control systems designed under this principle can be astonishingly suc-These are rather simple questions about chimpanzees, but nobody knows cessful—witness the birds' nests, after all—whenever the environment has the answers—yet. The answers are not impossible to acquire, but not easy enough simplicity and regularity, and hence predictability, to favor pre-either; controlled experiments could yield the answers, which would shed design of the whole system. The system's very design in effect makes a light on the role of language in turning brains into minds like ours. I raise the prediction—a wager, in fact—that the environment will be the way it must be question about whether chimpanzees could learn to tend a fire because, at for the system to work. When the complexity of encountered environments some point in prehistory, our ancestors tamed fire. Was language necessary rises, however, and unpredictability becomes a more severe problem, a for this great civilizing advance? Some of the evidence suggests that it different design principle kicks in: the
commando-team principle,
illustrated happened hundreds of thousands of years—or even as much as a million by such films as
The Guns of Navarone,
give each agent as much knowledge years (Donald 1991, p. 114)—
before
the advent of language, but of course about the total project as possible, so that the team has a chance of ad-libbing
after
our hominid line split away from the ancestors of modern apes, such as appropriately when unanticipated obstacles arise.

chimpanzees. Opinions differ sharply. Many researchers are convinced that So there is a watershed in the terrain of evolutionary Design Space; when a language began much earlier, in plenty of time to underwrite the tarn ing of control problem lies athwart it, it could be a matter of chance which direction fire (Pinker 1994). We might even try to argue that the taming of fire is itself evolution propels the successful descendants. Perhaps, then, there are two incontrovertible evidence for the existence of early language—if we can just ways of tending fires—roughly, the beaver-dam way and our way. If so, it's a convince ourselves that this mental feat
required
rudimentary language. Or is good thing for us that our ancestors didn't hit upon the beaver-dam way, for if fire-tending not such a big deal? Perhaps the only reason we don't find they had, the woods might today be full of apes sitting around campfires, but chimps in the wild sitting around campfires is that in their rainy habitats there we would not be here to marvel at them.

is never enough tinder around to give fire a chance to be tamed. (Sue Savage-I want to propose a framework in which we can place the various design Rumbaugh's pygmy chimps in Atlanta love to go on picnics in the woods, options for brains, to see where their power comes from. It is an outrageously and enjoy staring into the campfire's flames, just as we do, but she tells me oversimplified structure, but idealization is the price one should often be she doubts that they could be relied on to tend a fire, even with training.) willing to pay for synoptic insight. I call it the Tower of Generate-and-Test; If termites can create elaborate, well-ventilated cities of mud, and wea-as each new floor of the Tower gets constructed, it empowers the organisms verbirds can weave audaciously engineered hanging nests, and beavers can at that level to find better and better moves, and find them more efficiently.2