The Meme Machine (14 page)

Fortunately, we need not worry. All this trouble is caused by expecting there to be a close analogy between memes and genes when there need not be. We must remember Campbell’s Rule and the basic principle of memetics – that genes and memes are both replicators but otherwise they are different. We need not, and must not, expect all the concepts from biological evolution to transfer neatly across to memetic evolution. If we do we will hit trouble as we have done here.

My conclusion apropos Lamarck is that the question ‘Is cultural evolution Lamarckian’ is best not asked. The question only makes sense if you draw certain kinds of strict analogy between genes and memes but such analogies are not justified. We are best to confine the term ‘Lamarckian’ to discussion of biological evolution in sexually reproducing species. When we come to other kinds of evolution the distinction between mechanisms that ‘copy–the-instructions’ and those that ‘copy–the-product’ will prove more helpful.

Terminology

So what do we call that soup? The value of asking the question about Lamarck is that it does make us face up to some really tricky questions about terminology. Some previous authors have, understandably, evaded these questions, while others have launched in and made distinctions that might turn out not to be justified. In fact, the terminology of memetics is in a mess and needs sorting out. I am going to consider the use of three terms: meme, meme–phenotype (sometimes called phemotype), and meme vehicle.

First, what are we to count as a meme? In the case of the soup, is it the stored instructions in my brain, the soup itself, my behaviour in the kitchen, the words on the piece of paper, or all or none of these things? We might have doubts about the soup because, however delicious it is, you could not easily work out how it was made from tasting it – though perhaps an expert chef might be able to do it, just as a musician might be able to reconstruct a piece of music from hearing it. So do we need a different scheme for copyable meme products from uncopyable ones? I am deliberately making life difficult for myself because no consensus has yet emerged and if memetics is going to make progress we will have to agree on fundamentals like this. Let us see whether definitions exist that can help us sort it all out.

Dawkins (1976) initially did not commit himself at all and used the term ‘meme’ to apply to the behaviour, the physical structure in a brain, and memetic information stored in other ways. His original examples, remember, were tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or arches. Later he decided that ‘A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak’s i–culture)’ (Dawkins 1982, p. 109). This implies that the information in the clothes or the arches does not count as a meme. But later still he says that memes ‘can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer’ (Dawkins 1986, p. 158). Presumably, they still count as memes in all these forms of storage – not just when they are in a brain.

Dennett (1991, 1995) treats memes as the ideas that are passed on; whether they are in a brain or a book or some other physical structure, they are information undergoing the evolutionary algorithm. He points out that the structure of a meme may not be the same in any two brains -indeed it almost certainly will not be – but when a person carries out any behaviour there must be some kind of instruction stored in their brain,
and when someone else copies and remembers an action they must also create some kind of neural change. Durham (1991) also treats memes as information, again regardless of how it is stored.

In contrast, Delius (1989) describes memes as ‘constellations of activated and non–activated synapses within neural memory networks’ (p. 45), or ‘arrays of modified synapses’ (p. 54). Lynch (1991) defines them as memory abstractions and, in his memetic lexicon, Grant (1990) defines memes as information patterns infecting human minds. Presumably, on these latter definitions, memes cannot be carried by books or buildings, and the books and buildings must be given some other role. This has been done, by using further distinctions.

The usual way to make the distinction is, of course, by analogy with genes. A common one is to use the concept of the phenotype. Cloak (1975) was the first to do this and was very clear about it. He defined the i–culture as the instructions in people’s heads, and the m–culture as the features of people’s behaviour, their technology and social organisation. He explicitly likened his i–culture to the genotype and m–culture to the phenotype. As we have seen, Dawkins initially did not make such a distinction, but in
The Extended Phenotype
he says ‘Unfortunately, unlike Cloak … I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its “phenotypic effects” or “meme products” on the other’ (Dawkins 1982, p. 109). He then went on to describe the meme as the structure physically realised in the brain.

Dennett (1995) also talks about memes and their phenotypic effects, but in a different way. The meme is internal (though not confined to brains) while the design it shows the world, ‘the way it affects things in its environment’ (p. 349), is its phenotype. In an almost complete reversal, Benzon (1996) likens pots, knives, and written words (Cloak’s m–culture) to the gene, and ideas, desires and emotion (i–culture) to the phenotype. Gabora (1997) likens the genotype to the mental representation of a meme, and the phenotype to its implementation. Delius (1989), having defined memes as being in the brain, refers to behaviour as memes’ phenotypic expression, while remaining ambiguous about the role of the clothes fashions he discusses. Grant (1990) defines the ‘memotype’ as the actual information content of a meme, and distinguishes this from its ‘sociotype’ or social expression. He explicitly bases his memotype/socio–type distinction on the phenotype/genotype distinction.

Although these ideas have something in common they are not all the same and it is not at all clear, at least to me, which is better. On the whole, I think none of them really works because they have not appreciated the difference between the copying–the-product and copying–the-instructions.
The notion of a phenotype applies easily to one but not to the other and there may be other modes of transmission as well. I will not, therefore, use the concept of the meme–phenotype because I cannot give it a clear and unambiguous meaning.

Another analogy is made with the concept of the vehicle. Dawkins (1982) originally introduced the distinction between replicators and vehicles in the context of genetic selection, in order to make clear that the genes are the selfish replicators, while it is much larger units -typically (though not necessarily) whole organisms – that either live or die. He described organisms as vehicles for the genes, built to carry them around and protect them. Dawkins defines a vehicle as ‘any unit, discrete enough to seem worth naming, which houses a collection of replicators and which works as a unit for the preservation and propagation of those replicators’ (p. 114).

Using this concept, Dennett treats memes as ideas and the physical objects that carry them around as meme vehicles. So, for example, ‘A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind’ (Dennett 1995, p. 348 and 1991, p. 204). Pictures, books, tools and buildings are all meme vehicles for Dennett, and he explicitly makes the comparison with gene vehicles. Brodie (1996) follows Dennett and uses the term ‘vehicle’ for physical manifestations of a meme, as do others. However, there are problems with this analogy (Speel 1995). A wagon may indeed carry around the idea of spoked wheels but does it house a collection of replicators? Does it work as a unit for the preservation and propagation of its memes? A book may seem very much like a vehicle in this sense, but my pumpkin soup does not. I am not at all sure where to draw the lines here.

We must avoid the temptation of assuming there must always be a vehicle, and therefore forcing the memes to fit. Dawkins says he coined the ‘vehicle’ not to praise it but to bury it. There is no necessity for vehicles to form, and in many kinds of evolution they may not. We should not ask, ‘What is the vehicle in this situation,’ but, ‘Is there a vehicle in this situation and, if so, why?’ (Dawkins, 1994, p. 617). We might therefore ask whether memes do in fact group together to make ‘a unit for the preservation and propagation of those replicators’ and if so what would these true meme vehicles look like? Large self–preserving memeplexes such as religions, scientific theories, or political ideologies might fit the analogy better than wagons and recipes but obviously the term ‘vehicle’ is being used in quite a different sense here. Finally, the term ‘vehicle’ can be used in the very ordinary sense that people carry
both genes and memes around with them and thus act as their ‘vehicles’.

I have thought long and hard about these distinctions. I have tried to see which works well and which does not and so adopt one or other version. I have tried to make new ones of my own and despaired of it. In the end, I come back to what I have called the most basic principle of memetics – that genes and memes are both replicators but otherwise they are different. The analogy between genes and memes has led many people astray and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come. There is an analogy there but only because both are replicators. Beyond that the analogy is weak. There need be no exact memetic equivalent of the phenotype or the vehicle, any more than there are equivalents for strictly genetic concepts like alleles, loci, mitosis and meiosis. In biological evolution genes build their phenotypes but copy themselves straight down through the germ line, but in memetic evolution it can be more like a zigzag with memes hopping from brain to paper to computer and back to brain.

The conclusion I have come to from all of this, is to keep things as simple as possible. I shall use the term ‘meme’ indiscriminately to refer to memetic information in any of its many forms; including ideas, the brain structures that instantiate those ideas, the behaviours these brain structures produce, and their versions in books, recipes, maps and written music. As long as that information can be copied by a process we may broadly call ‘imitation’, then it counts as a meme. I shall use the term ‘vehicle’ only in the ordinary sense of carrying something around, and I shall not use terms like ‘sociotype’ or ‘meme–phenotype’ at all. If it turns out later that we need more terms and distinctions then I am sure someone will provide them. It will be easier for someone else to add on necessary distinctions at a later date than to demolish any unhelpful ones that I make now.

This has been a long struggle through some (and certainly not all) of the problems of memetics but I think it will stand us in good stead. Using the simple scheme we have arrived at, and bearing in mind the lurking dangers, we can get on with exploring just what a science of memetics can do – like explaining why we humans have such big brains.

CHAPTER 6

The big brain

The human brain is enormous. Why? Nobody knows for sure. Certainly there have been many theories of the origins of the huge human brain, but still none is universally accepted and a mystery remains. Most theorists assume that the big brain must have evolved by natural selection, such as the American neuroscientist and anthropologist Terrence Deacon (1997) who says ‘It cannot be doubted that such a robust and persistent trend in brain structure evolution reflects forces of natural selection’ (p. 344) – but if so we must be able to identify the selection pressures involved. So what are they? The answer is not obvious, and the explanatory task to be performed is great. It is basically this.

Origins of the human brain

Human brains today are capable of extraordinary feats quite beyond the abilities of any other species on the planet. Not only do we have language but we have invented fridge–freezers, the internal combustion engine and rocket technology; we can (well, some of us can) play chess, tennis and
Mega–Death 6;
we listen to music, dance and sing; and we have created democracy, social security systems and the stock market. What possible evolutionary advantage could these things have? Or more precisely what selective advantage could there have been for a brain capable of such things? We seem to have a brain ‘surplus to requirements, surplus to adaptive needs’ (Cronin 1991, p. 355).

In Darwin’s time this question so vexed Alfred Russel Wallace that, despite having independently discovered the principle of natural selection, he concluded that it could not account for man’s higher abilities (Wallace 1891). Primitive hunter–gatherers could not possibly have needed brains such as these, he reasoned, so there must have been some kind of supernatural intervention. Wallace supported the spiritualists who were claiming to be able to communicate with the surviving spirits of the dead, while Darwin fought against them. Wallace believed that the intellectual and spiritual nature of man was so far above that of the animals that we were different in kind from them. Although our
bodies were developed by continuous modification of ancestral animals, some different agency was required to explain our consciousness, morality and spiritual nature, ‘the higher feelings of pure morality’, courageous self–sacrifice, art, mathematics and philosophy.

Appealing to God or spirits to solve mysteries is no help and few, if any, scientists now favour Wallace’s ‘solution’. Nevertheless, this old argument highlights a real problem; our abilities are quite out of line with those of other living creatures and they do not seem obviously designed for survival.

The gulf is obvious in purely physical measurements (Jerison 1973). The modern human brain has a volume of about 1350 cubic centimetres (i.e. roughly three times as large as the brains of existing apes of comparable body size). A common way of comparing brain sizes is to use the ‘encephalisation quotient’ which compares a given animal’s brain–to-body ratio with the average for a group of animals. For any group of related animals a plot of brain size against body size yields a roughly straight line (on a log–log scale). If we humans are placed on such a line with our closest living relatives we just do not fit. Our encephalisation quotient compared with other primates is 3. Our brains are far too large for our bodies.