The term ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any kind of behaviour that is passed from person to person by imitation. Like genes, memes are replicators. That is, they are information that varies and is selectively copied. While genes compete to get copied when plants and animals reproduce, memes compete to get stored in our memories and passed on to someone else.
On this view our minds and culture are designed by the competition between memes, just as the biological world has been designed by natural selection acting on genes. Familiar memes include words, phrases, and stories; TV and radio programmes; chess, bridge, and computer games; famous symphonies and mindless jingles; the habits of driving on the left (or the right), eating with a knife and fork, wearing clothes, and shaking hands. These are all different kinds of information that have successfully been copied from person to person. Without them we would not be fully human.
The idea of memes is highly controversial. Critics argue that memes have not been proved to exist, cannot be identified with any chemical or physical structure as genes can, cannot be divided into meaningful units, provide no better understanding of culture than existing theories, and undermine the important notions of free will and personal responsibility. Proponents respond that memes obviously exist, since humans imitate widely and memes are simply defined as whatever they imitate. Also, the demand for a physical basis is premature. The structure of DNA was not discovered until a century after Darwin, so we may be in the equivalent of the pre-DNA phase in the new science of memetics. The question of units is tricky for genes too, and we can study memes by using whatever unit is replicated in any given situation — which may be anything from a few notes to an entire symphony, or a few words to a whole story.
More important is whether memetics really can provide new insights into human behaviour or culture. One example is Dawkins's idea of religions as viruses of the mind. A biological virus is a small package of information that uses someone else's copying machinery for its own replication. An equivalent in memes might be a chain letter or e-mail virus. For example, you might receive an e-mail message that says ‘A deadly virus called “Happy Birthday” is circulating by e-mail. IBM and Microsoft warn that it is powerful and untreatable. It will destroy all the information in your computer. Pass this warning on to all your friends immediately’. This little piece of information is a complete lie but by using threats (to your computer), promises (you can help your friends), and an instruction to pass it on, it thrives. Religions, argues Dawkins, have a similar structure. They use threats (hell, damnation, and horrible punishments), promises (heaven, salvation, and God's love), and instructions to pass them on (teach your children, read the texts, pray, and sing in public). Moreover, they use other tricks to protect themselves from scepticism. A child who asks why she can't see God is told to have faith, not doubt.
This approach also explains something that is inexplicable in biological terms — the celibate priest. A true celibate cannot pass on his genes, but having no children means he can devote his time and resources to spreading more memes. So the meme for celibacy succeeds. Apart from religions, other viral memes include alternative therapies that don't work, new age fads and cults, and astrology, which is immensely popular even though most of its claims have been tested and found to be false.
Of course, not all memes are viruses. Indeed the vast majority are the foundation of our lives and cultures, including all of the arts and sports, transport and communications systems, political and monetary systems, and science. And note that science has a very different structure from religion. Both are ‘memeplexes’ (groups of memes that work together), and science certainly contains viral memes such as false theories and fraudulent claims, but the very basis of science is the method of testing all claims. This means that science eventually throws out ideas that prove useless or false.
language is another important example. Although humans appear to have an innate tendency to learn language, the words we use are learned by imitation (i.e. they are memes). Blackmore has argued that once early humans became capable of imitating sounds, memetic evolution drove the gradual improvement of language, and with it the restructuring of our brains to be especially good at learning language. In a similar way she argues that our big brains were driven by, and for, the memes. Any of our early ancestors who had slightly bigger brains and were therefore slightly better at imitation would have been at an advantage because they could pick up and use the latest memes — whether these were ways of hunting, cooking food, wearing clothes, or dancing and singing. These people would therefore have attracted more mates and had more offspring. Therefore, as the memes spread, so did genes for having big brains capable of spreading them, and (perhaps more importantly) of selecting which memes to copy and which to reject. If this is so, the whole of human evolution has been shaped by the successful memes of the past, and we are products of two sets of replicators, memes and genes, not just one.
There are several mysteries about human nature that might potentially yield to a memetic explanation. Humans are far more co-operative and altruistic than any other species. Indeed, in those cultures with the best communications and hence the most memes, many altruistic ideas thrive — such as pacifism, vegetarianism, charity work, recycling, the Green movement, and the caring professions. Many people put enormous efforts into helping others who are not their relatives (i.e. do not share their genes) and who are unlikely or unable to reciprocate in the future. In other words, these behaviours are hard to explain in biological terms. The memetic approach is to ask why these particular memes spread. Perhaps we spend more time with the most altruistic people and so their memes get more chances to spread, including their altruistic memes. These are testable ideas which might, in the future, allow memetics to be found useful or to be rejected.
Human consciousness is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. According to the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett, humans are a particular sort of ape infested with memes, and human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes. He argues that the brain builds multiple drafts of what is happening at any time, and one of these drafts is the story we tell ourselves about a self who is in charge. In other words the self is a kind of ‘benign user illusion’ of the human brain. Blackmore suggests it is not benign at all. In her view the self is the root of human suffering, yet it is a collection of memes that have come together for their own mutual protection and propagation. Ideas that become ‘my’ beliefs, or ‘my’ hopes or intentions, are at an advantage and survive. They then carry with them the idea of a self that not only has beliefs and opinions, but free will and consciousness. All this, argues Blackmore, is illusion. Our actions are the result of memes and genes competing to be copied in a complex environment, not of a self with free will. In this view human consciousness is distorted by the false idea of a self, and can be changed by practices like meditation, which undermine the idea.
This is where the moral objections of critics come to the fore. They argue that without a sense of self with free will and personal responsibility, we could not have effective legal systems and could not expect people to behave morally and co-operatively. Memetics clearly strikes at the heart of human nature. Yet if the theory of memes is right we cannot reject it on those grounds, and we may have to rethink many of our most precious ideas.
According to memetics that rethinking is urgent. Communications systems are rapidly expanding to spread more memes. Satellite systems, mobile telephones, and e-mail mean that everyone spreads more memes than ever before, even if this does not necessarily improve their lives and may burden them with information overload. The Internet is a vast playground for memes, many of which will propagate a round the world without any human having control over them or even noticing them. If we are to understand this rapid change, we may need a much better theory of memetics.
— Susan Blackmore
Bibliography
- Blackmore, S. J. (1999). The meme machine. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (New edition with additional material, 1989.)
- Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin's dangerous idea. Penguin, London
