The Meme Machine (39 page)

A similar argument applies to numerical systems. Arithmetic is formidably hard using Roman numerals but easy with any system that relies on the
position
of a numeral, like the Arabic system that we, and most of the world, now use.

This drive towards uniformity is interesting, and is stronger than was the case for the evolution of language. In the case of writing, the invention of a new system is so difficult that borrowing one from elsewhere is more common, and novel systems are at a disadvantage. Once an adequate system has begun to evolve it has a natural advantage, in spite of any shortcomings due to historical accident and arbitrary conventions. When just a few systems exist, the one that produces slightly more, slightly better or slightly longer–lived copies begins to fill the world with its products, and the products take the idea of that copying system with them. The result is pressure towards one copying system taking over entirely from all the others.

We are all too familiar with this process. The standard
QWERTY
keyboard was devised to prevent the letters sticking together in the earliest manual typewriters; it is far from the optimum for modern keyboards and yet is almost universally used. Once music could be recorded and stored, vinyl disks of just two sizes and three rotation speeds captured the market, but have now mostly disappeared. Standard reel–to-reel tapes hung on for a while after the invention of the much smaller cassette tape but then cassettes persisted in a single format until the compact disk appeared, and may or may not continue to survive alongside it. Whether they do or not should be predictable from memetic principles. The number of memes that can be crammed on to a CD is dramatically greater than the number on tape, and CD technology allows rapid random access. Therefore, once cheap CD copying devices become available, CDs will surely outnumber cassettes, carrying with them the memes for that copying mechanism. The number of compact disks in the world is now so huge, not to mention the number of factories legitimately making them, and the even larger number illegally copying them, that an enormous step forward in fidelity or fecundity of copying would be
needed to oust the system for a new one. The same has happened with the format of computer disks.

Bearing in mind the dangers of comparing memes and genes, we can speculate that the same process works in both cases, producing a uniform high–fidelity copying system capable of creating a potentially infinite number of products. The genes have settled down, for the most part, to an exquisitely high–fidelity digital copying system based on DNA. The memes have not yet reached such a high–quality system and will probably not settle on one for a long time yet.

Returning to writing, I have described its evolution as a step towards greater longevity for memes based on language. That step opens the way for further steps in increasing fidelity and fecundity. Spelling can vary greatly, leading to ambiguity and low fidelity. Many languages began with optional spelling that gradually gave way to ‘correct’ ways of spelling every word, dictionaries that specify the correct spelling and, more recently, spell checkers that enforce the rules in electronically stored text.

Fecundity is obviously limited when writing is slow and difficult, as it was for marking clay or making clay tokens to stand for words. For most of its history, writing was a skill confined to a few specially trained scribes. This made political sense because of the power it gave to rulers. They alone could command scribes to keep records of barter, financial transactions, and taxes, or to maintain holy texts for the justification of oppression and war. In any case, the early writing systems were only capable of recording limited kinds of information. It took political and economic changes, as well as changes in writing itself, before writing could be used for poetry, novels, personal letters and recording history. Widespread literacy came later with its dramatic increase in the number of memes stored and passed on as marks on paper.

The printing press was a critical step for both fecundity and fidelity. Up until the fifteenth century, all copying of texts in Europe was done by scribes, often monks who spent a large proportion of their time copying and illuminating religious works. The work was slow and they made many errors. These errors are now of great interest to historians tracking the history of texts, but they certainly did not help fidelity. The time taken meant that few copies could be made, and books were an expensive commodity for only the richest and most powerful people. This restricted the ideas in books to those for which there was financial backing – that is, ideas maintaining political, economic, and religious power. Once books were cheaply available the kinds of memes contained in them could proliferate and change. Written material is no longer confined to lists of taxes and religious tracts, but is constrained by quite
different market forces. The memes took a great step forward when they got into books.

Memes in books provide a good example of a selection system at work. In this system, the replicators are the memes: the ideas, stories, theories or instructions conveyed in the printed words. These either get copied or not, and their content affects the likelihood of their being copied. The copying machinery is the publishing houses, printing presses, and factories in which the books are made. The selective environment is the minds of authors in which memes compete to get into the final text, a world full of bookshops that stock the books or not, the book reviewers and magazines that publicise the books or not, and the people who buy and read them and recommend them to their friends – or not. We humans are, obviously, critical to the whole process. However, our creative role is not that of an independent designer conjuring ideas from nowhere. Rather we are the copying machines, and parts of the selective environment, in a vast evolutionary process driven by the competition between memes.

As I write this book I think of my mind as a battleground of ideas. There are far more of them than can possibly find their way on to the final printed pages. ‘I’ am not an independent conscious entity creating the ideas out of nowhere. Rather, this brain has picked up millions of memes from all its education, reading, and long hours of thinking, and they are all fermenting in there as the fingers type. After this internal selective process is over and the manuscript is sent off there will be more selection, by the readers chosen by the publisher, and ultimately by the reviewers, bookshops and readers out there in the world. Whether the book sells a few hundred copies or a few hundred thousand copies will depend entirely on that selective process.

Communications

Railways, roads and ships may not seem to be directly concerned with memetic copying, but they play a role in speeding up the process of memetic competition. They carry to distant places the letters in which memes are written and the goods and people who convey ideas. They also increase the number of people who are in contact with each other which provides a larger and more varied meme pool. Just as biological evolution produces more species on large landmasses than on small islands, so memetic evolution produces more developments when more people are joined together into a memetic system. Roads, railways, and airlines
connect larger and larger numbers of people together, just as common languages and writing systems do.

In a 1901 classic,
Cosmic Consciousness,
the mystic Richard Bucke predicted that with the invention of ‘aerial navigation’, cities would no longer be needed and rich people would live in beautiful places, evenly spread out across the globe. In fact, cities have increased dramatically in population and rural depopulation is the norm. Why is this? A memetic answer, though a slight digression from copying technology, takes a familiar form. People who live in cities meet more people and therefore pick up and pass on more memes than people who live in isolated places. Among these memes are behaviours that are only possible (or are much easier) in cities – eating out and going to pubs, going to cinemas, theatres, museums and art galleries, visiting friends at a moment’s notice, or having a high–powered job at the centre of the action. The city–dweller not only picks up these memes but meets other people who also have them. Once these habits are picked up they are hard to drop.

Meanwhile, the people who live in the country meet fewer people, and do not have the opportunity to pick up the habits of exciting city life -unless they go to the city, in which case they may be lured by all the memes they find there. There is a critical imbalance operating here. When city–dwellers go to the country they meet few rural dwellers because they are widely spread out, and pick up few rural memes because few exist; but when country folk go to the city they meet lots and lots of city people and lots of new ideas. The consequence is memetic pressure for city–dwelling.

You may object that people make their choices about where to live either out of economic necessity or by freely choosing the life they know will make them happier. But is this really so? Economic necessity is often not a question of food and clothes for the family, but of buying televisions and cars and all the other trappings of a meme–rich life. The more we are exposed to memes the more we seem to acquire a hunger for them that is rarely satisfied. And happiness is very hard to judge. We may think that having a more exciting life, closer to the centre of the action, will make us happier, but we may be wrong. I suggest that we are, to a far greater extent than we would like to believe, driven to our choices by the pressure of memes.

This memetic argument suggests that there will be pressure for people to live in vast cities whenever the following conditions obtain: first, that there is enough communication between the country and the cities to set up the imbalance, and second, that people’s main form of communication is still face to face, or via cheap local phone calls. If memetic
transfer were truly independent of distance then the demographic pressures would change.

••••••

The telegraph and telephone, radio and television, are all steps towards spreading memes more effectively. They increase the fecundity of the copying process, and the distance over which it operates. People have often been unable to predict how such inventions would actually be used and which would last and which not, but from a memetic point of view prediction should be relatively easy. Anything with higher fidelity, fecundity, and longevity than its rivals should be successful. From the first electric telegraph, in 1838, to the telex machine and fax, fidelity and fecundity have gone on increasing – opening up new niches for further development along the way.

The telephone was bound to be a success. People are genetically evolved to chat and gossip (Dunbar 1996), and want to exchange news and views, creating lots of memes in the process. They can spread the memes by letters which take minutes or hours to write, and days to arrive, or they can ring each other up. People who use the phone will get more ideas spread simply because it is quicker, and those ideas include the idea of using the phone. Mobile phones have progressed very rapidly from being an executive luxury to being indispensable to every doctor, plumber, and aspiring teenager.

Letters will win out only when there is a need for longevity over fecundity. Fax machines combine the fidelity and longevity of writing with the speed (and hence fecundity) of the telephone. Photocopiers were a fantastic step for fecundity. Interestingly, people keep predicting the end of books. When radio came along predictions were made that no one would read any more. The same was proclaimed with the advent of television and then personal computers. In fact, books of a TV series can sell millions, and bookshops are selling more, not fewer, books than ever. Perhaps this is because memes can take different routes to success, just as genes do with their alternative strategies under
r
-selection and
K
-selection (p. 100). Electronic–mail messages go for high fecundity, low fidelity, and low longevity (people send out lots, do not bother to write carefully or correct the mistakes, and throw them away). Letters go for low fecundity, high fidelity, and high longevity (people write fewer letters, construct them carefully and politely, and often keep them). Books are high on all three.

All this makes a lot more sense if you look at the process as memetic competition. Any copying process that produces a successful combination
of high–fidelity, long–lasting copies of memes will spread more memes and, in the process, spread itself. As this process continues more memes spread faster and faster. Note that the consequence of this is a headache for humans. Competition in business, publishing, the arts and science all depends on the transfer of memes. As memetic transfer speeds up so the competition speeds up, and people without the latest technology fail in that competition. We are driven by the latest technology to have to read all those books today, send that fax now, or be on the end of a phone line to Japan at three in the morning. We may think all this progress is designed for our own happiness, and indeed we may sometimes very much enjoy our meme–rich lives, but the real driving force behind it all is the interest of the memes.

From copy–the-product to copy–the-instruction

So far, I have talked about increasing fidelity in rather general terms. I want now to be more specific and apply two further principles to how copying systems increase their fidelity. The first is the switch from analogue to digital systems and the second the switch from copy–the-product to copy–the-instruction.

Digitising information is a good way to increase fidelity because it reduces errors in storage and transmission (p. 58). Language includes discrete words and is therefore more digital than other communications such as cries, howls, and calls. Writing extends the digitisation by committing certain sounds to certain letters, enforcing standard spellings and, above all, by allowing the vagaries of handwriting to be ignored by anyone who has learnt an alphabet. The ability of humans to read scrawly idiosyncratic handwriting is amazing, and computers are still bad at it. We are essentially able to interpret a wide variety of scribbles as being the letter ‘p’ or the letter ‘a’, thus creating a digital signal out of an analogue one. The same has been true of sound–receiving technology as it switched from grooves in disks or analogue magnetic signals stored on tape, to digital recording and storage. Indeed, it was the advent of digital sound recording that made it obvious that digital is better than analogue. Many radio stations have already changed over to entirely digital systems with a significant improvement in quality. The copying of DNA has built–in error–correction mechanisms that far exceed anything the memes have yet created.