The Meme Machine (11 page)

Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic. Whether consciously or not, parents shape their children’s behaviour by the way they reinforce them. The best reward for children is attention, and rewards work better than punishment. So if parents pay lots of attention to their children when they are behaving well, and act uninterested when they scream or have tantrums, then behaving well is simply in the best interests of the kids and they will do it. Parents who do everything for their children end up with dependent children, while those who expect their children to find their own games kit, and leave them to reap teacher’s wrath if they are late for school, end up with children who take responsibility for themselves. You may think you taught your daughter to ride a bike but in all probability you just bought the bike, provided encouragement, and trial and error did the rest. There is not necessarily anything memetic in all of this (apart from the idea of riding a bike at all). Much of what we learn, we learn only for ourselves and cannot pass on.

In practice, we can probably never tease out those things we have personally learned by imitation from those we have learned in other ways – but in principle the two are different. We know lots of things that are not memes. Some authors, however, imply that virtually everything we know is a meme (e.g. Brodie 1996; Gabora 1997). Brodie includes operant conditioning, and indeed all conditioning, as memetic. Gabora goes even further and counts as a meme ‘anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience’. This is extremely confusing. It takes away any power of the idea of the meme as a replicator and adds nothing to the already difficult problem of how to deal with consciousness. If we are going to make progress we need to stick to our clear and simple definition.

What about emotions? Emotions are an inextricable part of human life and even play a key role in rational thought and decision making. The neurologist Antonio Damasio (1994) has worked with many patients who have brain damage, often in the frontal lobe, that causes them to lose their normal emotional responses and become emotionally flat. Far from turning into super–rational decision–makers, able to plan their lives without all the irritating distraction of unwanted emotions, they become almost paralysed with indecision. Whether to choose pickle and pumpkin crisps, or cheese and onion, can become a nerve–racking dilemma to be resolved only by long and careful thought, and a normal life becomes impossible. Most of us would just think ‘well, I feel like cheese and onion today’ not realising that the emotions have done the complex work of juggling the possible consequences, weighing up the results of past experiences, throwing these in with species–specific preferences and coming up with some rough and ready bodily reaction that allows that tiny verbal part of our brain to say ‘I think I’ll have the cheese and onion please – if you don’t want it’.
Star Trek’s
Mr Data is simply implausible. If he truly had no feelings he would not be able to decide whether to get up in the morning, when to speak to Captain Picard, or whether to drink tea or coffee.

Emotions and thought are intimately linked in other ways too. There are rather few hormones, such as adrenaline and noradrenaline, that control emotional states, but we can experience a vast array of different emotions according to how we interpret and label our physiological responses. In this way you could say that memes come to be involved in our emotions, but are emotions memes? The answer is – only if they can be transmitted to someone else by imitation.

It is almost a truism to say ‘you can’t possibly know how I’m feeling’. Emotions are private and notoriously difficult to communicate. We write poems, give roses, and paint pictures to try, in some small way, to communicate them. We might, of course, pick up an emotion from someone else, and this certainly looks like imitation, as when tears of sadness spring up in response to seeing another’s grief. This contagious spread of behaviour looks like imitation because one person does something and then another person does the same thing. But strictly speaking it is not. To understand why we need to define imitation.

Imitation, contagion, and social learning

The psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike (1898), was possibly the first to provide a clear definition of imitation as ‘learning to do an act from seeing it done’. Thorndike’s definition (although confined to visual information) captures the essential idea that in imitation a new behaviour is learned by copying it from someone else. A hundred years later we can see the importance of this point in distinguishing between ‘contagion’, ‘social learning’ and ‘true imitation’.

The term ‘contagion’ is used in many different ways. We may think of ideas as contagious, and compare the spread of memes with the spread of infectious or contagious diseases (Lynch 1996). Also the term ‘social contagion’ is used to describe the spread of behaviours, such as crazes or even suicide, through society (Levy and Nail 1993; Marsden 1998). However, this is not the kind of contagion I want to contrast with imitation. Rather, I mean what has variously been called instinctive imitation, behavioural contagion, social facilitation, co–action, or (simply) contagion (Whiten and Ham 1992). Unfortunately, social psychologists often confuse imitation and contagion, or treat them as the same thing (Grosser
et al.
1951; Levy and Nail 1993). However, comparative psychologists (those comparing animal and human behaviour) have recently made clear a useful distinction.

Yawning, coughing and laughter are all extremely contagious in humans. Indeed, it can be difficult not to laugh if everyone around you is already laughing. This kind of contagion is thought to rely on specific stimulus feature detectors which detect laughing or yawning in someone else and then trigger the same innate behaviour as the response. In other animals, alarm calls and other vocalisations can be contagious, but contagious laughter appears to be limited to humans (Provine 1996). Other examples include the spread of moods and emotions through crowds, and the way people will stop to look at something if they see other people staring.

This kind of contagion is not true imitation. We can see why by considering Thorndike’s simple definition. Yawning, coughing, laughing, and looking are innate behaviours. When we start laughing because everyone else is laughing we have not learned ‘how to do an act’. We already know how to laugh, and the kind of laugh we make is not modelled on the laugh we hear. So this kind of contagion is not imitation and should not be counted as memetic.

Then there is social learning (as opposed to individual learning), which
is learning that is influenced by observing, or interacting with, another animal or person. Imitation is one form of social learning but there are others that are not truly imitative. Animal researchers have recently made considerable progress in distinguishing between these kinds of learning, and finding out which animals are capable of true imitation (Heyes and Galef 1996). The results have been surprising.

In 1921, in the south of England, tits (small garden birds) were seen prising open the wax–board tops of milk bottles left on the doorstep. Subsequently, the habit became widespread across England and some parts of Scotland and Wales, with other species of bird joining in, and foil tops being pecked as well. That the tits learned from each other was suggested by the way the trick spread gradually from village to village, and across different areas, although it was obviously independently reinvented many times (Fisher and Hinde 1949). With the advent of supermarkets and cardboard cartons, the bottle left by the milkman is becoming rare, but even today you will occasionally find your silver top pierced.

The spread of milk bottle pecking was a simple cultural phenomenon but purists would argue that it was based not on imitation, but on a simpler kind of social learning (Sherry and Galef 1984). Imagine that one bird learned, by trial and error, that there was cream to be had by pecking at the bottles. Then another bird chanced by and saw the pecking and the obviously pecked top. Pecking is a natural action for tits and now that the attention of the second bird had been drawn to the bottle it was more likely to land on it and peck too. Reinforcement in the form of nice tasty cream would lead this bird to repeat the action and possibly be seen by other birds, and so on. The fact that the birds used lots of different methods for opening the bottles also suggests they did not learn by direct imitation.

This kind of social learning is sometimes called ‘stimulus enhancement’ – the stimulus, in this case the bottle top, has become more readily noticed. Similarly, ‘local enhancement’ is when attention is directed towards a specific place. Animals also learn from each other which objects or places to fear or ignore. For example, young rhesus monkeys learn to avoid snakes after seeing their parents react fearfully to a snake, and octopuses will attack something they have seen others attacking. Birds and rabbits learn not to fear trains by following others who are not afraid, and therefore become used to the frightening noise. Oystercatchers open mussel shells by either stabbing or hammering techniques according to their tradition, and birds learn to choose migration routes and nesting sites from other birds (Bonner 1980, gives many interesting examples). But none of these processes is true imitation because no new behaviours
are passed on from one animal to another (for reviews of social learning and imitation see Heyes and Galef 1996; Whiten and Ham 1992; Zentall and Galef 1988).

Other famous examples that look like true cultural learning based on imitation include the troop of Japanese monkeys that learned to wash sweet–potatoes, and chimpanzees that learned how to fish for termites by poking sticks into the mounds. However, further study of the spread of these skills, and of the animals’ learning abilities, suggests that both these traditions depend on individual learning and the kinds of social learning described above, not on true imitation (Galef 1992). So if you want to be really precise about it you have to say that bottle top pecking, termite fishing and sweet–potato washing are not true memes – though they do come close.

What about your neighbourhood blackbird who sings like your alarm clock or imitates a car alarm? True imitation does occur in birds, although their powers of imitation are limited to sounds, and to rather specific kinds of sound at that (with the possible exception of parrots who may be able to imitate simple gestures). For this reason birdsong has long been treated as a special case (Bonner 1980; Delius 1989; Thorndike 1898; Whiten and Ham 1992). Many songbirds have long traditions. The young learn what to sing by imitating their parents or neighbours. In chaffinches, for example, the nestling may hear its father sing long before it is capable of singing itself. A few months later it begins to make a wide variety of sounds, gradually narrowing down to the song it heard as a chick. Experiments show that there is a critical period for learning and that the bird has to hear its own song and match it to the remembered song it is imitating. Hand–raised birds can learn songs from tape recorders and adopted birds sing songs more like their adopted, not biological, parents. Some species learn many songs from neighbours and a few, like parrots and mynahs, can imitate human speech. So we can count birdsong as a meme. Indeed, the cultural evolution of chaffinch song has actually been studied in terms of the mutation, flow and drift of song memes (Lynch
et al.
1989), and studies of singing honeyeaters have shown that their song meme pool is more diverse on mainland Australia than on a nearby island (Baker 1996). Birdsong is therefore unlike the examples of social learning we were considering before.

The difference can be explained like this. Imitation is learning something about the form of behaviour through observing others, while social learning is learning about the environment through observing others (Heyes 1993). The tits already knew how to peck; they only learned
what
to peck. The monkeys already knew how to be frightened, they only learned
what
to fear.

After nearly a century of research there is very little evidence of true imitation in non–human animals. Birdsong is obviously an exception, and we may be simply ignorant of the underwater world of dolphin imitation. Chimpanzees and gorillas that have been brought up in human families occasionally imitate in ways that their wild counterparts do not (Tomasello
et al.
1993). However, when apes and human children are given the same problems, only the children readily use imitation to solve them (Call and Tomasello 1995). It seems we are wrong to use the verb ‘to ape’ to mean imitate, for apes rarely ape.

By contrast, humans are ‘the consummate imitative generalist’ (Meltzoff 1988, p. 59). Human infants are able to imitate a wide range of vocal sounds, body postures, actions on objects, and even completely arbitrary actions like bending down to touch your head on a plastic panel. By 14 months of age they can even delay imitation for a week or more (Meltzoff 1988), and they seem to know when they are being imitated by adults (Meltzoff 1996). Unlike any other animals, we readily imitate almost everything and anything, and seem to take pleasure in doing so.

If we define memes as transmitted by imitation then we must conclude that only humans are capable of extensive memetic transmission. Some other theorists have included all forms of social learning in their definitions of cultural evolution (e.g. Boyd and Richerson 1985; Delius 1989). Their mathematical models may usefully apply to all; however, I suggest that it will be better for memetics to stick to the original definition of memes. The reason is that the other forms of social learning do not support a replication system with true heredity, because the behaviour is not really copied.

We can think of it this way. In social learning, one animal may invent a new behaviour during individual learning and then somehow lead a second animal into such a situation that it is likely to learn the same new behaviour – or perhaps the first can behave in such a way as to change the contingencies of learning for the second animal so that it learns the same (or a similar) new behaviour. The result looks like copying but it is not, because the behaviour must be created anew by the second learner. The social situation, and the behaviour of the other animal plays a role, but the details of the first behaviour are not transmitted and therefore cannot be built upon and refined by further selective copying. In this sense, then, there is no true heredity. This means there is no new replicator, no true evolution, and therefore the process should not be considered as memetic.