The Meme Machine (7 page)

Just the same can be seen in the world of the mind. Dawkins (1993) coined the term ‘viruses of the mind’ to apply to such memeplexes as religions and cults – which spread themselves through vast populations of people by using all kinds of clever copying tricks, and can have disastrous consequences for those infected. Children’s games and crazes spread like infections (Marsden 1998a), and Dawkins suggested that children are vulnerable to ‘mental infections’ that more sophisticated adults can easily reject. He tried to distinguish useful memeplexes, such as science, from viral ones – an issue to which we will return.

This theme has been taken up in popular books on memetics, such as Richard Brodie’s
Virus of the Mind
(1996) and Aaron Lynch’s
Thought Contagion
(1996), both of which provide many examples of how memes spread through society and both of which emphasise the more dangerous and pernicious kinds of memes. We can now see that the idea of a virus is applicable in all three worlds – of biology, of computer programs and of human minds. The reason is that all three systems involve replicators and we call particularly useless and self–serving replicators ‘viruses’.

But if the theory of memetics is right, viruses are not the only memes, and memetics should not become a science of mind viruses. Indeed, the vast majority of memes (like the vast majority of genes) cannot be considered as viral at all – they are the very stuff of our minds. Our memes is who we are.

According to Dennett, our minds and selves are created by the interplay of the memes. Not only are memes replicators like genes (and fit his evolutionary algorithm perfectly) but human consciousness itself is a product of memes. He has shown how the competition between memes to get into our brains has made us the kinds of creatures we are. As he puts it ‘The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes’ (Dennett 1991, p. 207).

On this view we cannot possibly hope to understand the nature and origins of the human mind without an effective theory of memetics. But before beginning to build that theory I want to consider some previous attempts at describing the evolution of ideas. To understand the special contribution of memetics we need to understand how it differs from other theories of cultural evolution.

CHAPTER 3

The evolution of culture

From the early days of Darwinism analogies have been drawn between biological evolution and the evolution of culture. Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer studied the evolution of civilisations, which he viewed as progressing towards an ideal something like that of Victorian English society. Lewis Morgan’s evolutionary theory of society included the three stages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation. The historian Arnold Toynbee used evolutionary ideas in identifying over thirty distinct civilisations some of which were derived from others and some of which went extinct, and even Karl Marx used evolutionary analogies in his analysis of society. Fifty years after Darwin, the American psychologist James Baldwin said that natural selection was not merely a law of biology but applied to all the sciences of life and mind, an early version of Universal Darwinism (Baldwin 1909), and he coined the term ‘social heredity’ to describe the way individuals learn from society by imitation and instruction (Baldwin 1896).

In some ways it is obvious that ideas and cultures evolve – that is, changes are gradual and build on what went before. Ideas spread from one place to another and from one person to another (Sperber 1990). Inventions do not spring out of nowhere but depend on previous inventions, and so on. However, truly Darwinian explanations require more than just the idea of accumulating changes over time. As we shall see, some theories of cultural evolution are little more than this idea; others try to specify a mechanism but still come back to biological evolution as the only driving force, while just a few involve the concept of a second replicator as memetics does. This is what makes memetics so distinctive and so powerful. The whole point of a memetic theory of cultural evolution is to treat memes as replicators in their own right. This means that memetic selection drives the evolution of ideas in the interests of replicating the memes, not the genes. This is the big difference that separates memetics from most previous theories of cultural evolution.

Language provides a good example of cultural evolution. Darwin pointed out the parallel between species and different languages: ‘We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation … A
language, like a species, when extinct, never … reappears’ (Darwin 1859, p. 422). He also spoke of words competing for survival. Darwin probably knew about the work of the British Judge Sir William Jones who, in 1786, found remarkable similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and concluded that all three languages must have sprung from a common source. But Darwin could not have seen many languages become extinct in his own lifetime nor have known just how many are now threatened. On a recent estimate, about 80 per cent of North American Indian languages are spoken largely by adults only, and are therefore likely to become extinct when those adults die. Similarly, about 90 per cent of Australian languages and perhaps 50 per cent of languages worldwide are doomed (Pinker 1994).

Nowadays, comparative linguists analyse the minute details of similarities and differences. They can often trace words back through many types of change such as the dropping of syllables and shifts in pronunciation. Thus, the evolutionary history of various languages can be accurately traced. Family trees of languages have been constructed that are comparable with the genetic family trees based on differences in DNA. Also, the migratory histories of whole peoples can be deduced from the languages that remain today. In Africa, for example, the 1500 or more surviving languages fall into just five main language groups, largely spoken by distinct racial groups, and their distribution can reveal which groups defeated others in the past. From a few remaining words it can be deduced that the pygmies once had their own languages but were forced into adopting those of neighbouring black farmers, and that Semitic languages, the languages of the Bible and of Islam, came not from the Near East but from Africa. The American physiologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond (1997) uses language analysis as just one part of his masterful history of humanity over the past 13000 years. He explains how languages evolve along with the people who speak them, but he does not consider the elements of language as replicators in a new evolutionary process.

In his book
The Language Instinct,
Steven Pinker (1994) explicitly applies evolutionary thinking to the development of languages, looking at heredity, variation and the effects of isolation in allowing sets of variations to accumulate. However, he does not use the idea of a selfish replicator to understand language evolution and nor does he explain why language evolved in the first place. Perhaps the answer seems too obvious – that it was biologically adaptive. But, as we shall see, this is not necessarily the right answer, and memetics can provide new twists to the argument.

Another example is the spread of inventions. Probably the most important of all ‘inventions’ in human history was that of farming. Although there are still many arguments over the details, archaeologists generally agree that before about 10000 years ago all humans lived by hunting and gathering. Dating from around that time, finds in the Middle East include grains that are larger, and sheep and cattle that are smaller than their wild relatives and presumably domesticated. Farming then spread in a great wave, reaching places like Ireland and Scandinavia by about 4500 years ago. Just how many times food production arose independently is not known for sure although probably at least five times and possibly many more (Diamond 1997).

Diamond has explored the whole vexed question of why some peoples in some parts of the world ended up with all the goods – from food production to guns, germs and steel – while some have ended up still hunting and foraging, and others were completely wiped out. His answer has little to do with the innate abilities of the people themselves and everything to do with geography and climate. Food production, and the skills that went along with it, could spread easily across Europe with its East–West axis, but could not spread easily in the Americas with their North–South axis, dramatic climate variations, deserts and mountain ranges. Australia had no suitable domesticable animals, after the first humans who arrived obliterated the tame creatures they found there, and other islands, like New Guinea, are so mountainous and variable that techniques suitable in one place are unsuitable a few miles away. With this kind of analysis Diamond has explained how farming spread, bringing more complex societies in its wake.

But why did farming spread at all? The answer might seem to be obvious – for example, that farming makes life easier or happier, or that it provides a genetic advantage to the people who practise it.

In fact, it seems that farming did not make life easier, nor did it improve nutrition, or reduce disease. The British science writer Colin Tudge (1995) describes farming as ‘the end of Eden’. Rather than being easier, the life of early farmers was utter misery. Early Egyptian skeletons tell a story of a terrible life. Their toes and backs are deformed by the way people had to grind corn to make bread; they show signs of rickets and of terrible abscesses in their jaws. Probably few lived beyond the age of thirty. Stories in the Old Testament describe the arduous work of farmers and, after all, Adam was thrown out of Eden and told ‘In the sweat of thy
face shalt thou eat bread’. By contrast modern hunter–gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over have given up an easier life in favour of a life of toil and drudgery?

Tudge assumes ‘that agriculture arose because it was favoured by natural selection’ (1995, p. 274) and therefore looks for a genetic advantage. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighbouring hunter–gatherer’s lands and so destroy their way of life. For this reason, once farming arrives no one has the luxury of saying ‘I want to keep the old way of life’. However, we know from the skeletons of early farmers that they were malnourished and sickly. So was there really a genetic advantage?

Memetics allows us to ask a different question. That is, why were farming practices successful as memes? In other words, how did these particular memes get themselves copied? The answers might include their benefits to human happiness or to human genes, but are not confined to those possibilities. Memes can spread for other reasons too, including less benign ones. They might spread because they
appear
to provide advantages even when they do not, because they are especially easily imitated by human brains, because they change the selective environment to the detriment of competing memes, and so on. With a meme’s eye view we ask not how inventions benefit human happiness or human genes, but how they benefit themselves.

Turning to more modern technology, from the invention of the wheel to the design of cars, there is plenty of evidence that innovations evolve in the sense that they arise from what went before. In
The Evolution of Technology
, George Basalla (1988) develops an evolutionary account of the way in which hammers, steam engines, trucks and transistors have come about. Playing down the importance of heroic inventors he emphasises the gradual process of change through imitation and variation. For example, many features of wooden buildings were reproduced in stone by the Greeks, the first iron bridge built in the late 1770s was modelled on woodworking practices, and even the humble plastic bucket often still shows signs of its origins in metal. Transistors were only gradually miniaturised and radio signals very gradually transmitted further and further.

Basalla questions the idea of technology making progress towards any grand goal such as ‘the advancement of humanity’ or ‘the overall
betterment of the human race’ (Basalla 1988). In true Darwinian fashion he sees technology as developing only from the present situation with very limited specific goals and suggests we discard the entire illusion of technological progress. But I would add here another word of caution concerning the word ‘progress’. The word can be used in at least two different ways. One implies progress towards some goal or objective; the other implies only increasing design, increasing complexity, or any kind of continuous development
without
a particular goal or end point built in. Basalla, like Gould, throws out both kinds of progress. I would throw out only the first. Today’s technology is far more sophisticated and complex than that of 10000 years ago, and that is progress of the second kind. But, there is no progress towards some predetermined or ultimate goal. We did not have to go from stone axes to fax machines – we did have to go from stone axes to something more specialised, more designed and more improbable. In Dennett’s terminology, there has been ever more exploration of the Design Space of possible artefacts. In Dawkins’s terminology, technology has been slowly climbing its own Mount Improbable. This is technological progress, if not progress towards anything in particular.

So why do we have fax machines? Why Coca Cola cans and wheelybins? Why Windows 98 and felt–tip pens? I want answers to these specific questions. ‘Because we want them’ is not a sufficient answer. ‘Because we need them’ is clearly untrue. If we want to understand how the fantastic complexity of our technological world came about it is not enough just to say that technology evolves, without providing a mechanism. In later chapters I shall explain how a memetic approach can help.