Contents
by
Daniel C. Dennett, Director, Center for Cognitive Studies
Whether the meme meme deserves to flourish depends in part on how well if can account for itself. Adam Westoby's "The Ecology of Intentions" makes a fine double contribution to this reflexive task, both as analysis and example. If you read it, you will see for yourself the variety of original and incisive ideas about memes that prompted me to become its willing vector. And if you read it, you will yourself provide another data point measuring the power of memes--whatever their intrinsic virtue--to spread by harnessing human minds to the task of their further replication. The draft before you is not just unfinished and unpublished; it is full of blemishes, gaps, half-baked ideas that distract us from the best ideas in it. Life is short, so why will you read it? Perhaps to see how Westoby's memes got as far as this (the Zahavi Principle at work in the memosphere).
These memes exited their nest through an extraordinary bottleneck: the relentless activity of a single unparalyzed finger on a wordprocessor keyboard. That does not make them good ("for us"), but it does make them powerful; the task of getting them out dominated Adam Westoby's last years. Shortly after his death, his brother, Mark Westoby (some of whose own work in biology is briefly discussed by me in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 234-5), sent me the manuscript and the accompanying "brief background" account, with a request that I advise him about how to get his brother's work to the right minds. Some months later I found the time to look at this uninvited but curiously inviting package, and began to put in motion the process in which you are now participating. I considered undertaking the editorial task required to fit Westoby's manuscript for regular publication, but rejected it; the task was huge, and I had my own pile of projects to tend to. In the end, after sharing the manuscript with a few of my favorite advisors and informants on such topics--Richard Brodie, the late Ben Cullen, Aaron Lynch, Alex Rosenberg and Don Ross--and considering their advice, I offered to make the rough draft available as a Working Paper of the Center, which is the form in which you now see it, and in which it may be cited. Mark Westoby has provided me with further items about his brother and his work, which appear as appendices here. I never met Adam Westoby, nor have I met Mark yet, but some of their memes are now among mine, and I am pleased to have them on board.
The Center for Cognitive Studies has become something of an informal, self-selected depot for current work on memes, and I am sorry to say that I have been simply unable to filter, evaluate and transmit the material that has been sent to me so far. Piles of manuscripts lie as yet unread on my shelves--other authors should be warned of this--and Westoby's vehicle is the first that I now send on its way with this equivocal--but effective?-- endorsement. I wish I had had the opportunity to discuss it with Adam Westoby, since I would have tried to adjust his vision of several of the philosophical topics he boldly tackles, and also would have asked him to expand on the passages I found most suggestive and illuminating. But that is just a selfish reaction; every reader can execute one editorial function or another on this rich set of materials.
We at the Center would appreciate being informed of any discussions and commentaries of these ideas.
Brief background to the manuscript
"Ecology of Intentions"
Mark Westoby
March 1995
The manuscript is of about 50,000 words and was written by my brother Adam Westoby. The current version dates to July 1994. Following that time, Adam's remission from myeloma ended and he died in November 1994. The July 1994 version represents a revision following comments he received on an earlier version, dated December 1993.
The manuscript takes the "meme" metaphor and applies it to a range of topics in cultural history, education and political economy. The metaphor is also developed beyond its usual form, notably by grafting "intentionality" on to it.
A brief outline of Adam's personal history may help to explain the mixture
of ideas and knowledge he brought to the manuscript. In 1964 he went up to
Balliol College Oxford, initially to read physics but switching within a month
or two to Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He graduated with BA Hons I in
1967, and during 1967-8 did a one-year BPhil with a thesis on Haeckel's
relation to Marx. By the mid-60's he was active in trotskyist politics. Much of
his time went on activism (newspaper sales, union organization etc) and on
marxist theory for some years. During this period the question of the nature of
the State in the Soviet Union (also
From 1970 he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Dept of Education of the Open University, a position he held for the remainder of his life. He developed readers and course materials in the sociology and economics of education.
In 1973 he was diagnosed with syringomyelia, a progressive spinal cord disability. He underwent a number of operations to slow its progress, but by the 80's he was spending much of his time in a wheelchair. From the late 70's on he lived with Sabitha Hasan, a lawyer (now judge) who had been disabled as a child by polio. They had two sons, born 1984 and 1987. During the 80's he was involved also with his father's progressive disability and eventual death (1988) from motor neurone disease. His experience of his young children, combined with his sharp-edged relationship with his own father, further shaped his thinking about the transmission of ideas. In 1989 he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, contracted pneumonia while under chemotherapy, and was not expected to survive. He emerged alive, though much weakened, and in clinical depression during 1990-91. By this time he could move only in a powered wheelchair, could sit up only for a few hours at a time, and could use a wordprocessor only with one finger of his right hand.
During 1989-90 the whole face of Soviet-bloc politics had changed, and it had become impossible for him to recover his former expertise in this area. At different times from 1989 onwards I had conversations with him about memes (my own background is in evolutionary biology), extending first over many weeks in hospital, then days at a time at his home, interspersed with phone and email conversations from Australia. The manuscript "Ecology of Intentions" takes the metaphor of memes and applies it to a range of themes from Adam's continuing interests, including some large ones (the subjectivity of meaning; money and the social surplus).
The Ecology of Intentions: How to make Memes and Influence People: Culturology
Draft - please comment
Adam Westoby
tel 081-459 4668
fax 081-451 1641
Note to readers of this draft
Thank you for commenting. This note is to help you do so more effectively.
The date of this draft is printed above. It supercedes previous drafts.
Errors. Please point these out. Do not fear that your explanations will be too elementary.
Main text and footnotes. I hope to make the main text as readable as possible, consigning details, problems etc to the notes. Help in this regard will be especially welcome.
Footnotes. These are a miscellany of:
Drafting/editing comments are placed in square brackets [thus]. They are mainly intended to be intelligible to me.
References/bibliography. This is very much a working version, both overgrown and incomplete. Conversely, the fact that I have annotated an item does not imply that I have read all of it. Some items got there via book reviews etc.
Search pointers. && marks a search pointer in the text for my use: eg &&start, &&codes, &&pause, &&end. Please ignore them.
Many thanks
Adam Westoby
The Open University
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This draft explores some ideas that see culture as organic.
Viewed as livng things, cultures as a whole, and their parts, depend on at least two types of adaptation:
Culture must be adapted for direct or indirect transmission from living humans to other living humans; much of it is learned behaviour. It must be adapted, crudely speaking, for both parasitism and reproduction. Cultural objects must dwell within individual psyches, and they must pass between them.
Much of what follows is a sort of "natural history" of cultural objects, paying particular attention to these two features and the interplay between them.
I also have a practical - or, if you prefer, ethical - aim: to help us discuss what forms of culture we humans can most happily share our world with.
Because cultural objects need both to get inside individual humans, and to pass between them, they exist (like carbon-based forms of life) as sequences of differentiated phases. This has some general consequences which it may be useful to sketch at the outset:
Corresponding to "parasitism" and "reproduction" in cultural objects are two enigma-areas of the human sciences:
These problems are linked. Indeed I might recast them as follows:
I return to these problems in more detail later. However one approaches them, they are problems of complexity, of wholes being more than the sum of their parts. If I mention them now, it is only to introduce an "atomic" device which I think can help us make them a little more manageable: memes.
This derives not from physics but from biology. To begin with evolutionary biology analysed variation and natural selection among organisms. More recently its focus has shifted towards genes - the units of biological inheritance. Biologists remain divided on how best to think about relations between genes and organisms, and about how far life is naturally organised as organisms.
When questions analogous to these are transposed to human cultures they give rise to severe difficulties. I try to make progress by sidestepping them, at least initially. To do so I borrow a term invented by the biologist Richard Dawkins: memes, the units of cultural inheritance and selection.
What sorts of things are memes? Dawkins defined memes by analogy with genes. Just as, in biological reproduction, genes replicate themselves and "jump" from parent to offspring, surviving beyond the limited lifespan of individual organisms, so we may think of memes as a new form of life, leaping from mind to mind in human cultural transmission. Memes are "patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers and so on". Memes replicate themselves (Dawkins holds) like genes: "by imitation ... in the broadest sense". They share certain fundamental characteristics with genes: "longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity" (1976, 208). However, memes also vary, and the more successful variations proliferate. {footnote 1}
Memes range from relatively slight - a few whistled notes of a popular tune - to great interconnected assemblages of memes. Such collaborating assemblages of memes are analogous, Dawkins argues, to the "survival machines" (that is, organisms) in which biological genes congregate to propagate themselves from generation to generation. We could, for example, regard "an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes" (Dawkins 1977, 212). I shall come back to the question how memes are incorporated in larger cultural objects. For the moment I ignore the distinction between simpler and more complex memes and treat them all interchangeably. The letter "i" is a meme; so is a paperback, a supermarket orange, a character in a film, a funeral, a screwdriver, a military command, a firework display, a quadratic equation, or a political party.
Writers such as
An advantage of the meme meme (as Dawkins rightly calls it) is that it gives us a relatively commonsense way of looking at problems of subject and object, personal and public, without collapsing one into the other. Thinking of memes as life forms which parasitise or domesticate humans helps avoid one-dircctional teleologyg. Memes make use of humans in senses just as real as those in which humans make use of artefacts and ideas. And it helps us to avoid humanist prejudices: by keeping memes conceptually separate from people, it allows us to examine some of their intrinsic characteristics, which cannot be reduced to those of human individuals.
My core argument is that the principles of cultural selection, as encapsulated in the notion of "memes" and their evolutionary interplay, may have much to offer the human sciences - a little as the principles of natural selection have increased the understanding of biologists. I discuss various ways in which memes affect people, in which people affect memes, and - particularly important - in which memes interact with each other in the larger ecology of memes.
Memes serve as my working answer to the question "What is a cultural object?" I know that there are powerful objections to thinking about cultures as collections of objects, and I do not mean to dismiss these. (Later on (Chapters ) I look at some of the problems thrown up by a memetic view of human - and other - cultures.) I simply want to suggest:
I take it as widely agreed that human culture is not yet so "user-friendly" as to be open to no improvement. I want to suggest ways in which we could helpfully think of this - as the problem of breeding better-domesticated memes.
By taking Dawkins' meme as a starting point I don't mean to dismiss its various near-synonyms and connected ideas. I discuss some of them ("culturegens", "brain bugs", "viruses of the mind" and the epidemiology of beliefs, etc) in Chapter X. One of the things I should like to do is "evolve" (that is, vary and select from) the meme meme, to help it function and proliferate a little better. {Footnote 2}
"Tell me, how did you love my picture?" - Sam Goldwyn
What types of meme might we expect to be successful?
Let us look at some common meme adaptations, using the convenient shorthand of biological functionalism. What sorts of things might memes do if they "wanted" (and for our purposes they all do) to increase their success among the population of memes? More specifically, what sorts of things might memes do
Memes' environments, after all, consist largely of other memes.
One - but only one - possible way is for a meme to adapt so as to be more palatable or more desired by more human beings more of the time. A very large number of human artefacts are of this sort.
Consider the orange laid out in neat peeled segments next to my keyboard. It is an outcome of combined genetic and memetic selection, and allows us to compare them.
What is chiefly interesting to me about my orange is its convenient packaging of pulp and juice, high in sugars and distinctively flavoured. I enjoy eating it; it refreshes my concentration; and it forms a healthy alternative to biscuits.
The orange however, began its career with quite different functions. Fruiting developed (starting about million years ago) as a secondary adaptation of the sexual reproduction of flowering plants. Natural selection acted in favour of variants which surrounded their seeds with tissues appetising to animals. Two factors, in particular, acted through the foraging behaviour of animals to drive the evolutionary development of fruity organs around seeds:
better seed dispersion allowed offspring plants to populate the surrounding terrain more widely and proliferate better (for example by competing less intensely for light) improving seeds' chances of rooting by depositing them on the ground well mixed with animal excrement
Natural selection, however, explains only certain basics of my orange. It has also been greatly changed, in the last few moments of its evolutionry history, by cultural selection. The package of genes has become a meme.
In the few centuries that orange trees have been cultivated humans have applied increasingly knowledgeable selection, driving evolution at an accelerated rate in pursuit of enhanced desirability to humans. The characteristics that have been modified or emphasised by human selection include:
colour: attractiveness to animals has been enhanced to attract consumers
sweetness and taste: quite different selective pressures have been applied to my eating orange than, for example, to oranges for marmalade or Cointreau
seedlessness: the original raison d'etre of the orange's evolution has become an inconvenience. The very few seeds that may make it into my intestinal tract will pass on into an urban sewage system in which they have no hope of germinating.
uniformity: the varied shapes and sizes of fruit on wild orange trees have yielded to the astonishing similarity of Grade I eating oranges. This allows them to be shipped on carton with standard indentations, to be sold for a standard price, and to reduce the cost of distribution. The uniformity in the supermarket tray arises from cultural selection both between orange tree genes, and, at grading, between harvested fruit.
And, before the orange slides along the check-out counter to become mine, further cultural selection occurs, in which orange tree genes from round the world - Spain, Florida, Morocco and South Africa - compete to reproduce. They do so, however, not through excrement-smeared seeds, but through quite different memes - such as coins and balance sheets.
Derivative memes
Markets - with their continual revolutionising of both products and tastes - provide one modern, general forum of meme selection. In markets, money forms the institutional environment in which commodity-memes complement and compete with each other (through market research, product development etc, with their feedbacks on production and consumption). Comparisons between biology and commerce are now commonplace, and terminology naturally exchanges: market research creates economic "niches"; superceded commodities become "extinct", etc.
Palatability or desirability to humans is not neccessarily direct. In markets memes can be desired because they give access to other memes - for example, because they may be exchanged for them. If a type of meme emerges which can easily be exchanged for many other types, it can become desirable independently of any use of its own, emancipating its desirability, so to say, from particular desires. Money is such a meme, and the recomposition of desire as avarice, and the sense of the magical quality of money which humans now acquire in childhood, is one of the great accomplishments of memetic evolution. Intention becomes separated from all specific desires and all particular desirers; replicating its value, it passes, endlessly, from hand to hand. The emergence of money memes has had profound effects on the overall ecology of memes, forcing other memes to evolve effective symbioses with money, or face extinction.
(Some parenthetical questions: why do some variations of money succeed over others? Why does bad money drive out good? Essentially because simulating or diluting the currency are variations which shift the balance of probabilities as between the two things that holders of money may do with it: hold on to it, or spend it. The paradox is real partly because it is apparent.{Footnote 3} One of the reasons why you can't take money with you when you die (if you try, it ceases to be money) may be that this destroys its exchangeability - put more generally, its intentionality. I return to the question of intentionality later.{Footnote 4}
The method of reproducible experiment in science can be viewed as another pervasive meme, in some ways like money. Very occasionally it gets subjected to analogous tests: Is it falsifiable? Or forgeable? Can it be replicated? It circulates tirelessly among expanding numbers of human individuals and institutions, insinuating itself into mental life wherever it can. Where it does it transforms our methods of thinking, and with it the practical world we create.{Footnote 5}
Why, then, does bad science not drive out good? Essentially because - like the spider's web, or the virus' sneeze {Footnote 6} - it has (to a degree) successfully imposed its own organisation of development, its own replicative history, on part of its environment, as "norms". Science's price for economic and intellectual freedom is - among other things - the capture or exclusion of other memes. Similar relations hold for other normalising memes, and their obverses: deviance, disability etc.)
In invoking money, or science, we also implied small galaxies of other memes (property/theft, ownership, contract, price, etc, in the first case; and reason/mysticism, evidence, law, order, etc, in the second). This is quite natural, as memes, like genes, go around in gangs.{Footnote 7}
Indirect palatability can take other forms. Human beings also compete, and a meme's unpalatability to one person can be the basis of its desirability to another - rather as an insect repellent or an antibiotic is a meme designed to be objectionable or lethal to other species. An eviction order, like a bullet, is a type of meme which proliferates by making itself desirable to (some, but not all) human beings.
Certain memes, however, seem to be irreducibly unpalatable. Perhaps, as sociobiology occasionally seems to suggest, it is negative prescriptions - "Thou shalt not commit adultery" - which are most like this. This sort of meme has various options open to it to increase its circulation. It can link itself as tightly as possible ("Till death do us part") to other memes that are highly palatable - parental enjoyment, domestic bliss, home cooking, and so on. Marriage, incorporating and preserving its prohibitions and irritations, is such a meme-amalgam - analogous to the fruit that disperses many types of seed.
For some unpalatable memes, though, the pill simply won't carry enough sugar. At this point a meme's adaptation may need to work more interior changes. It may, for example, try to persuade carriers by distinctively human mechanisms: not that it would, on balance, be pleasant to ingest it, but that they ought to do so. Law, morality, political correctness and good taste are meme-ingredients of this sort. Various subsidiary means have developed to encourage these. Some appeal to human beings' wish simultaneously to conform to and maintain status within the group: socialisation, and its modern philosophical expression, universalisability. Others reinforce themselves with a moral carrot - eternal salvation - or with a stick conscience, hellfire, etc.
Yet linking a meme to its "should" need not be a grim business. Fashion, as much as morality, is fuelled by others and their expectations. Many delights of flirtation - and of social reproduction in general - are "frequency dependent" - accentuated by being generally relished: Cosi fan tutti.{Footnote 8} And many memes proliferate by causing their human vehicles to internalise purposes beyond themselves and their kin: in a word, to embrace meaning in life.{Footnote 9}
Considering meme adaptations will also lead me to ask - though not to resolve - some more opaque questions. Let me mention a few of them here:
Memes have numerous adaptations to their symbioses with humans. How have humans adapted to their memetic environments?
Why, even in solitude, do we feel shame, or joy, or laughter? What drives the evolution of our species' taste for meaning in life?
Why are we caught in the momenta of moods which seem to arise outside and despite our selves?
Is the relative speed of meme evolution changing? In the past generations upon generations of our ancestors changed so gradually that it was imperceptible. Yet today teenagers inhabit a world unrecogniseable to their parents. What has accelerated?
As this Cook's tour of culture suggests, Dawkins' meme meme promises (or threatens) to apply to a rich variety of cultural phenomena. It may indeed do this, but only by behaving as DNA-based life has done in colonising the biosphere - by evolving very diverse forms suitable for particular niches and problems.
Facets of memes: an overview
Like biologists, our task is thus to make some sort of preliminary classification of memes' features - only now slightly more detailed than the distinction between parasitism and reproduction with which I began. I have found it useful to distinguish 12 principal facets, to each of which the general principles of natural selection apply. What follows is, of course, intended as a shopping list, not as dogma.
These features of memes are neither exhausive nor exclusive. They do not, even together, define memes. And we cannot draw wholly watertight distinctions between them. For example the borderline between feelings and values is extremly fuzzy. I have nonetheless found it helpful, in trying to think about memes, to separate out these 13 points, and I refer back to them in the following chapters. This is why I have given them shorthand names.
"Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail" - Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma
What sorts of problems might the meme meme help with? One, I think, is the apparent autonomy of culture.
The transmission of culture means, among other things, its passage from one human mind to another. A cultural trait is one that passes reasonably successfully, in recoogniseable form, from mind to mind, and is to that extent independent of particular minds and psychologies. A standpoint prominent in the human sciences at least since Marx and Durkheim is that of the autonomy - relative, or less so - of culture. It has been greatly encouraged by mass manufacture and mass education.
On this view the psyches of new born human infants are highly malleable - blank slates, or "general purpose" software - ready for the learning which their cultures of upbringing subsequently imprint upon them. A concommitant principle of this independence of cultural "software" from neuro-psychological "wetware" is an emphatic anti-psychologism, such as that which Durkheim expressed:
"The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness."
However, over the last few years ideas from human biology, in the form of "evolutionary psychology", have laid seige to views of human psyches as blank sheets of paper on which cultures autonomously evolve their messages. "Evolutionary psychologists" take aim at social science's assertion, or assumption, of cultural autonomy. They argue it is wrong to suppose that social and cultural regularities are all sui generis, not dependent on human beings' evolved biology. The life sciences are now starting to explain many important components of human psychology as adaptations of the hunter-gatherer life lived by human beings until the relatively recent evolutionary past (up to about 10-12,000 years ago, when agriculture began to take root in the Near East). Human beings' assymetries of sexual preferences; our patterns of male jealousy and of female adultery; the propensity of young men to form agressive coalitions for war; children's play fighting; attachment (and grief) between carers and children; our sex differences of spatial perception; our colour categories; our body language; our tastes for salt, sugar, fatty foods and open landscapes - all these (argue "evolutionary psychologists") may in principle be understood as universally human, "species typical" adaptations of hunter-gatherer life in a largely untouched nature.{Footnote 13}
The programme of "evolutionary psychology" raises problems of its own.{Footnote 14} Can we separate out genetically transmitted adaptations from culturally transmitted ones? Can we combine genetic and cultural transmission within a single ("co-evolutionary") framework? I discuss such problems below in the context of the sociobiologists' bete noir, the "Standard Social Science Model".
Cultural diversity and biodiversity
A related problem is that of cultural diversity. Nowadays our world is very different from the natural surroundings of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Almost everything that urban humans see has been made or modified by other humans. Consider tangible artefacts alone. Many of these are mass-produced objects, but their variety of types rivals that generated by organic evolution. The contemporary individual, it is estimated, may encounter (and need to discriminate) 20-30,000 different specialised objects of common use during her or his lifetime (Petroski, 1993, 23).{Footnote 15} If our active vocabulary has greatly contracted, compared to our hunter-gatherer forbearers, with respect to living species (see, eg, Levi-Strauss, ), it has much expanded with respect to made objects.{Footnote 16} Indeed Basalla estimated that the number of distinguishable technical inventions now patented exceeds by a factor of two or three the number of different flora and fauna species identified by biologists.
How does technodiversity come to rival biodiversity? Knowledge of the basic machinery regulating evolution among genes has transformed biology. We now think in terms of the chemical mechanisms of genetic replication, of the discrete nature of inheritance, of the sources of variability and selection, of specialised reproductive organs and the isolation of germ lines, of speciation, sexual recombination, and kin selection. Such concepts are fundamental to our understanding of the diversity of life-forms based on DNA-RNA replication. And they form the groundwork which evolutionary psychologists bring to bear on humans' universal, "species-typical", psychological architecture.
The history of biological classification suggests some of the difficulties.
Early classifications tended to distinguish species pragmatically - as, for
example, in creation myths, or in "herbals" which grouped plants
according to their medicinal uses.{Footnote 17} Only gradually did biological
thought come to distinguish species in the modern manner (Aristotle, for
example, did not always view them as reproductively separated) or to see their
distinctive organs in terms of their functions for the organisms themselves.{Footnote 18} From there it was a further step
to the Darwin-Wallace view of the evolution of species, and of the biological
present as a "still" from a much longer historical film.
By placing memes at centre stage our understanding of culture can gain additional help from biology. Genes are difficult and arbitrary of definition, but that does not make them less real, or less fundamental to our understanding of biological evolution. I suggest that we allow that memes are similarly difficult to define, but nonetheless treat them as real. Studying the natural history of memes and their selection may even help nature/nurture debates to yield more fruit.
Several approaches have already been developed, though they have attacked the matter from different angles and used a variety of terminologies. Population biologists have refocussed their tools on learned or cultural traits ("memes" or "culturegens") and have developed formal models of the incidence and spread of learned behaviours in communicating populations of organisms. The transmission of learned behaviour has been studied in a variety of animal as well as human populations (Bonner 1980, Delius 1991). Models have been developed of cultural and genetic "coevolution" or "dual inheritance".{Footnote 21}
There is a conceptual difference between a form of learned behaviour as a cultural trait, replicated by transmission from human individual to human individual, and the part which the behaviour plays in the replicative cycles of a cultural complex. Singing Silent Night is behaviour learned by multitudes of small children; the song's collective rendition is a commonly-encountered element in Christian congregations' rituals of winter renewal. The direct replication of memes from person to person is part - but only part - of the processes through which institutions persist across generations.
[WHAT is the meme, virus in this example?]
[Historical studies of technological and cultural change have often treated it as broadly analogous to histories of biological organisms.{Footnote 22} And crucial qualitative distinctions have been drawn between different types of meme, and the relationships between their evolutionary characteristics, and those of the humans who carry them.{Footnote 23}{Footnote 24}]
What sorts of phenomena might an evolutionary ecology of memes help us to understand?
Is the social superorganic: a meme's-eye view?
In my opinion the most interesting is the central conundrum in response to which ideas of the autonomy of culture have spread in the social sciences: the compulsiveness of the cultural and social. Cultural beliefs and practices have a variable and often arbitrary character. They combine this with their compelling, obligatory, "instinctive" action through and on individual human beings. "Our" institutions precede us and prevent us choosing. Students of society thus often posit the social as something independent of and - at least logically - prior to the individual, and reject ideas of already-formed human animals. Indeed many social scientists err in the opposite direction, conceptualising the cultural and cultures as things developing independently of individuals, and reifying culture alone as the propellant of individual action. This is a view which, in its pure form, "evolutionary psychologists" regard as fantasy.{Footnote 25}
Suppose, however, we set aside for a moment our questions about how the social and cultural drive individual humans in the ways that they do. Let us also set aside our even larger questions about what memes essentially are, or if they really exist at all. Suppose, instead, we ask questions of the following types:
These are two distinct questions, since much of the environment of many memes consists of other memes.
Rather than puzzling over the problem of how memes drive individual people, let us step back a little and concentrate on the distinct question: what drives meme evolution - the selection of traits to become more frequent among memes?
In borrowing such concepts as adaptation, together with connected ideas, such as exaptation from evolutionary biology I do not mean that they are easy of definition there. (An exaptation is, roughly speaking, an adaptation which, over subsequent evolutionary time, has assumed a different function from that which initially gave rise to selection pressure in its favour. An example is the ear-bones of mammals, which began as the gill-structures of our remote aquatic ancestors. Exaptations are rather important among memes.) The idea of an adaptation is, however, so central to understanding why organisms (and memes) are as they are, that it is unavoidable.{Footnote 26}
Memes' and genes' environments
What is the environment of a particular meme? Or, to borrow a further idea from evolutionary biology, what formed its "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" - that is, the (historical) environment in which the meme's (or organism's) characteristic adaptations arose and became incorporated. The environment of evolutionary adaptedness may be very dissimilar from the present environment. A central contention of "evolutionary psychology", for example, is that the environment of evolutionary adaptedness which has shaped the "species-typical" psychology of today's humans is not today's environment, but the environment in which our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived before the agricultural revolution.{Footnote 27}
To anticipate by a little the answer to the corresponding question about memes' environments of evolutionary adaptedness: for most of the memes we are familiar with not only do (or did) their EEAs consist largely of other memes, but those other memes were themselves already adapted through memetic evolution in highly complex ways.
One - but only one - of the ways in which a meme's adaptations can increase its meme's success is by helping its incidence in a human population. The compulsive - though arbitrary - power of culture has much to do with this: a meme tends to succeed among its coexisting and competing memes if, for whatever reason, it can predominate in individual humans and among human populations. In this indirect sense memes are democrats; in order to get selected they must "try" to find ways of getting and staying in human beings. In similar fashion, genes "try" to get incorporated in species (or "gene pools").
Selection, invention and intention
There is an important distinction between the environments of evolutionary adaptedness of biological organisms, and those of memes. Biological adapations arise, are selected for, and become embodied in the organism because they are successful for the organism in its current environment (though they may then endure long after the environment of adaptedness changes - and this includes the other adaptations gathered in the same organism). Natural selection is "blind"; it "tries out" solutions, selecting or discarding them, just on those problems which it can feel under its hands at the moment. The functional design of organisms is not the result of any supraorganic intention. Insofar as we may speak of organisms "trying" out variations, this is a convenient but metaphorical shorthand.
With memes, however, it is otherwise. They do frequently adapt to the future as well as to the present and past. Successful memes are (almost by definition) those that adapt most successfully to their actual future. Memes are intricately bound up with intentions, in a way that genes are not. My introduction of intention is a small but significant mutation of Dawkins' meme-concept. Dawkins conceives of memes as consisting essentially of similar copies in living human brains, and as replicating through imitation. I broaden the matter slightly: one - but only one - of the forms intention can assume is imitation.
An example or two may help illustrate the difference. The meme threatening hell fire, as Dawkins points out
"...is highly effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a machiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination techniques. However I doubt if the priests were that clever. Much more probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness which genes display" (Dawkins 1977, 212).
There are two distinct questions about memes and consciousness here. The first is: Are (human) consciousness and intentions integral to memes' propagation? And the answer, for many memes, is Yes. The second question is: are memes conscious? Dawkins implies that the answer to this question is No. But for some types of meme, at least, the answer may be a complicated sort of Yes.
Take on of the more complex memes in which the hellfire and other memes have
been incorporated - the Protestant reformation. When Luther composed his theses
attacking the Pope's marketing of indulgences to finance St Peter's, and nailed
them on the door of the church at Wittenberg, he was intentionally propagating
one complex of memes (armed with people - people who were, in turn, to be armed
with Luther's new-forged memes) to compete with another: setting, so to say,
one family (or coalition) of memes to catch another. The Roman church had
encouraged the commercialisation of indulgences as a solution to certain future
problems posed by prior memes: Pope Leo X's extravagance and his need for funds
to complete St Peter's; and, on the part of the purchasers of indulgences, the
dread of hellfire and the intention (or at least hope) of avoiding it in
exchange for cash. Fusing the attractions of salvation and economy, Luther's
recombined complex of doctrinal propositions spread through
Notice that the memes involved varied along a sort of spectrum from rather sophisticated ones, that had evolved among and in relation to other memes which themselves already had an elaborate evolutionary history - like Luther's denial that the Papacy could delegate the remission of sins to professional pardoners - to relatively "primitive" ones - like the fear of pain or fire. We may think of parallels, perhaps, with the increasingly complex chemical history of biological evolution, or of analogies with higher organisms, many of which have evolved wholly within elaborate cycles of adaptation and dependency on each other - for nutrients, for shelter and support, for reproduction, and so on.
The evolution of intentionality
Intentionality is involved in generating scientific as well as religious memes. Here is how another biologist, Wolpert (1992, xii), sees scientific innovation, contemplating both his own experience and the overall evolution of science:
"Since science is unique, it is to be expected that scientific creativity has its own special characteristics quite different from those of the arts...Scientific genius is often characterised by a "psychic courage" which requires scientists to include in their ideas assumptions for which they have very little evidence."
Perhaps significantly, Wolpert sees natural science as arising out of the lineage of Western Christianity, with its penchant for logic among a paucity or confusion of evidence{Footnote 29}. He sums up the problem thus:
"The puzzle lies in how scientists decide which experimental data or which theoretical construct they are willing to give up when these are in conflict" (Wolpert 1993, 116)
The decision what to cling to and what to abandon is not peculiar to science. However, it arises for memes in a way that it does not for genes.
Memes raise a fascinating but difficult question, with roots in the histories of biological reactivity and animal behaviour: that of the emergence of intentionality, self-consciousness, and rational thinking as a function of organic life.{Footnote 30} This is a question I skirt round. More generally, I steer as clear as possible of general questions about ultimate or essential sources of change in memes. At this stage of our knowledge a piecemeal "natural history" approach, describing memes and some of their adaptations and relationships, seems to me the more useful.
But turning away from theorizing about origins and toward investigating the historical details of particular adaptations, does not mean escaping from the problems of intention. Human history involves the continual inception of new intentions in a least two senses:
Any overview of memes and the patterns of intention linked with them requires us to consider types of intention that only arise in fairly recent, historical times. However there may be a compensatory advantage to this: we have fuller and directer evidence on intentions for the more recent past. Provided we avoid getting hung up on questions of essential or ultimate origins, and concentrate on particular adaptations, we may take advantage of the fact that evidence on the historical past is very rich compared with that on Pleistocene or earlier times. Since then there have arisen many psychological processes and practical techniques that were not around earlier. Can thinking about memes help us understand them? Can memes and their evolution be studied as phenomena distinct from DNA-based evolution - a little as our understanding of organic life is distinguishable from (though consistent with) physics and chemistry?
We need to take account of intentions. But we must avoid getting bogged down in questions about what intention (or its associated notions: meaning, consciousness, free will, etc) essentially is (or, for that matter, biologically was). Instead I take a fairly matter-of-fact view of intentions and meanings, and ask more prosaic and immediate questions about how they are transmitted, preserved, disguised, enforced and so on. One point I underline is that intentions need not be either individual, mental or subjective. They take effect through minds, but to pass from one mind to another they frequently take extra-somatic forms: for example, in an artefact made by one subject for use or consumption by others. The physical phase of such a meme embodies intention, not only when it explicitly expresses intention (as in a No Entry sign, or an "If ... then ... do ... " instruction in a computer programme), but when its impersonal purpose is implicit in its nature (as in a lollipop, or an airliner)
One advantage of intention is that it enriches the evidential record, at least compared with that left by genes and organisms, whose remains survive mainly in fossils. The primary reason for this is that many memes are made to last - by a combination of invention and selection. This applies to intangible as well as tangible memes; the song survives the singer, though the temple may crumble. Organisms, on the other hand, are designed to reproduce, senesce, and die. Very few individuals provide lasting remains; only their genes are immortal, recombined in their descendants. Whatever the difficulties of interpreting it, the trail of historical evidence is of great importance. As far as carbon-based life forms are concerned, an estimated 99% of the species that have lived to date are now extinct (though, granted, classifying memes among "species" is even more difficult).{Footnote 31}
That history is such an important source of evidence does not contradict the
fact that it acts on the present only indirectly, through the structures it has
already produced.{Footnote 32} Evolution "tinkers";
it must start from the functional equipment already in existence. We may
sometimes feel, as the traveller who got lost in Yorkshire was told: "If
tha' really wants to get to
In culture, as in biology, ontogeny remains rooted in phylogeny - though not in the same way. For languages based on the Latin alphabet, for example, the QWERTY keyboard, though suboptimal in several respects, has become ontogenetically incorporated in typewriter and microcomputer design. Efforts to step round or short-circuit its irrationality run into memetic obstacles embodied in humans' enculturation and training.{Footnote 33} For memes as for genes, co-evolution - interdependent natural selection of multiple entities - leads seamlessly into irrationality, extravagance and invention.{Footnote 34}
In biological structures variations are more likely to be viable - that is, not lethal to the organism or its offspring - the later they come in the organism's development.{Footnote 35} What the genetic code of an organism specifies is not a depiction of the organism at any future stage of its development, but a developmental programme for the organism's life cycle (including the all-important and oft-repeated "loop" specifying reproduction of the organism's genetic code). The chances of a random change being made early in the program and leaving subsequent steps viable or functional are less than for changes later in the developmental sequence. If we think of one of those many storied buildings one can contruct with dominoes on a hard table, it is clear that a very slight disturbance of a domino nearer to the base is more likely to bring the whole thing tumbling down than a similar disturbance to one of the upper dominoes.{Footnote 36}
With memes, however, intentional redesign substitutes, in part, for chance variation. The possibility thus arises (or, to be exact, becomes vastly more probable) of substantial alterations to the base of the structure: substituting dominoes near the bottom, replacing some of them with completely different types of building blocks, or even removing superfluous ones altogether.
Consider the following account of meme adaptation. It is Lorenzo da Ponte, explaining how he turned Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro into the libretto for Mozart's opera:
"The duration prescribed as being usual for dramatic performances, a certain number of characters generally introduced into the same, and some other prudent considerations and exigencies imposed by morality, place and spectators, were the reasons why I did not make a translation of this excellent comedy, but rather an adaptation or, let us say, an extract.
"To this end I was obliged to reduce the sixteen characters of which it consists to eleven, two of which may be performed by a single person, and to omit, apart from an entire act, many a very charming scene and a number of good jests and sallies with which it is strewn, in place of which I had to substitute canzonettas, arias, choruses and other forms, and words susceptible to music, things which can be supplied only by verse, but never by prose."{Footnote 37}
Human intentions allow meme adaptation to "cut through" or "streamline" existing structures, finding alternative routes to existing or imagined outcomes, in a way that biological redesign cannot.{Footnote 38} {Footnote 39} They also encourage exaptations - the turning of existing adaptations to new uses. Indeed, a great deal of cultural evolution consists of inventing new ends which existing means can be converted to propel.{Footnote 40}
When they embody intentions, memes in some degree detatch them from individual human agents. In one famous passage of his Decline and Fall, Edward Gibbon asks about the adaptations to human intentions that made Christianity so successful:
"Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned: that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church?" (Gibbon, XV)
The "secondary causes" of any successful ideology includes myriad of individual human intentions, coherently oriented. Intentions may be embodied in very specific and (especially where expressed in symbolic systems) apparently minor ways.
A further theological meme - that of the Trinity - furnishes an example of this - and of intention's streamlining effects.
Most of today's Christian memes of God descend from the doctrine of the Trinity adopted by the Council of Nicea (325), which proliferated as orthodoxy in the mystery at the heart of the Nicene Creed. How was the tripartite God to be defined in a way which did justice to its family origins, its administrative functions, and the divinity of Christ? The theologians settled upon an ambiguous but precise formula: a single God existing in three persons and of one substance, the Son being perpetually generated by the Father but simultaneously co-eternal with Him.
But they did so only after years of disputation, in which arguments and counter-arguments sprouted vigorously, producing doctrinal tangles which included most of the imaginable ways in which the components of the Trinity could be put together.
Thus one of the key decisions of Constantine's Council at Nicea was procedural rather than substantive: to reduce the thickets of previous controversy, and consider just two alternative Greek terms, differing by a single letter, for describing the identity or resemblance between Father and Son: either St Athanasius' assertive homoousion ("of one substance") or the more cautious homoiousion ("of like substance") favoured by the supporters if Arius of Alexander.
The single iota separating them marked a distinction (as Gibbon faintly exaggerates) "invisible to the nicest theological eye". More visibly, it was expressed in the formidable array of anathemas, against Arianism and other heresies, behind which the Nicene theologians sought to protect their preferred formula. The concentration of intention - in this case organizational and political, as well as theological - shaped formulaic choice and heightened doctrinal creativity. The decision that the doctrinal edifice as a whole should balance on the inclusion or deletion of a single letter was recognition of the many (and often poorly-understood) alternative combinations of formulae that had been advanced and found wanting, many of them before the disputants were born.
Barkow (1989, p250) writes of meme variation:
"Some categories or subcategories of cultural information do seem to lend themselves to a "meme" or "culturegen" approach; for example, whether I brush my teeth with a rotary motion or up-and-down and side-to-side. Others, such as my perception of the nature of the Holy Trinity, do not seem to lend themselves to particulate approaches."
This needs qualifying. What may be suceptible to "particulate approaches" are particular variations. These can appear quite local within the overall meme-complex they inhabit, but have very general, and partly intended, consequences for the larger meme.
The point is that apparently trivial symbolic changes can contain large
intentions with profound repercussions. When the iota was reintroduced
"The whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian". The
Arians succeeded partly by increasing the infectiousness of their meme, setting
their theological ideas to music as popular songs. In the 320's common folk
from
God memes have one distinctive and interesting feature. While they evolve, the object to which they refer, being eternal and unchanging, does not. This furnishes us with a sort of rudimentary experimental control. When God-memes undergo rapid change, we can reasonably attribute this to the memes' circumstances. In the context of our Arian example, the candidates needed to gain the assent of the senior ecclesiastics promulgating doctrine - a requirement that reduced the variants to two, rather simply related, contenders.{Footnote 42}
Selection among biological structures is absolutely "blind", genetic variation arising wholly by chance, while memetic adaptation is only relatively so. The fact that cultural adaptation has intended as well as unintended consequences focuses variation, injecting an element of conscious design and accelerating the incorporation of successful features and the attenuation of unsuccessful ones. The distinction between genetic and cultural evolution is only relative. They combine in domestication, the foundation of much human culture, and, more recently, in the possibilities opened up by direct examination and manipulation of our and other species' genetic material.
The idea that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited is rather basic to biology - now almost one of its defining characteristics. But what phenomena the principle applies to, and in what ways, remains an empirical question. A large part of the study of culture involves investigating how acquired characters are transmitted - and how transmissibility gets acquired or invented.
It is certainly possible, as Delius (1991) argues, that the apparent ability of memes to transmit changes acquired within individual brains (and its corollary ideas, of intention, creativity etc) is an illusion, arising from the very limited extent to which we understand meme selection within the individual's memory and its underlying neural structures. Thus what we call "intention" is in fact a concealed process of random variation and selection within a long-lived host of memes with a much shorter lifespan, analogous (say) to intra-host evolution of micro-organisms' antibiotic resistance. Edelman's (1992) "theory of neuronal group selection" - which draws on our understanding of how immune systems learn - has similarities with this view. {Footnote 43} I remain agnostic, concentrating on processes of meme transmission between humans, and continuing with the commonsense, or "folk", view of meme change within individuals as (at least partly) "intentional".
For gene-contred biology the vehicles for genes, and therefore the "candidates" for selection among them, are individual organisms, not species. Traits such as genetically transmitted altruistic behaviour (alarm calls at predators) or altruistic organs (mammary glands) or even whole organisms (sterile worker bees) - which benefit other individual members of the same species can therefore evolve only where the individuals benefitted share genes with the individuals expressing the trait: Hamilton's (?1964) kin selection, or inclusive fitness.{Footnote 44} This modern, gene-centred view has largely replaced earlier habits of thought which supposed that traits could be selected "for the good of the species"{Footnote 45}. More generally, the appropriate units of selection remain difficult and debated matters in evolutionary biology.
But human beings are sometimes nice to some of those who are not their kin. And some are nasty to those who are close kin. What is more, some people would like to be nicer than they generally are. And prisons, psychiatric hospitals and committees contain yet others who would be even nastier than they are, if they were allowed.
This is where an advantage of treating memes as real comes in. Memes can evolve (and many of them have evolved) powerful and sophisticated means for coercing, motivating, persuading and repelling human beings - fruit, saliva and teeth, so to speak. True, we are still a long way from understanding the "biochemistry" through which these adaptations work.{Footnote 46} But there is less doubt that they exist. Organs - such as patriotism, or prisons - that would require group selection to evolve among individual humans may, nonetheless, evolve from variations among memes.
One common characteristic through which natural selection between memes takes place (though it is certainly not the only one) is differences between memes in the numbers and qualities of human beings they succeed in "recruiting" or "ingesting" - a very rough analogy, perhaps, to differences between individual animals of the same species in foraging or predation efficiency. Patriotism (regarded as a virtue, even by the other side) emerges from a long process of competition among loyalties on a variety of territorial, linguistic, etc bases, where the size of groups competing for individuals' loyalties ranges from the family to humanity as a whole. Prisons remind us that recruiting or ingesting support is often indirect. Prison restrains and punishes those it incarcerates, but it succeeds by being a morally appealing device for the politically powerful. Its nutrition comes both from those incarcerated and, more importantly, from the values and intentions of the population at large.
These examples contain a more general point: the compulsions of our social world may become more intelligible once we get into the habit of seeing them as efficient meme adaptations, rather than as final causes of individuals' behaviour.{Footnote 47}Naturally, there are many things, such as love, or war, which we can get to grips with only by combining accounts of memetic and genetic adaptation.{Footnote 48} Many memes develop a sort of "territoriality" - personal, not spatial - whereby they include or repel humans according (chiefly) to their memetic characteristics. (The quotation marks are essential, as notions of species, individual organisms and hence territoriality do not transfer easily from genes to memes.)
Applied biology - antibiotic drugs, for example - raises the question of who is being domesticated by whom: humans by bacteria, or bacteria by humans? Similar questions arise with humans and memes. Human populations, and their culturally and morally differentiated groups, act as both prey and predators of memes. From our point of view some moral memes - for example - are frighteningly supra-organic, unpredictable and often rapacious. But from their point of view, memes are just getting on with the everyday businesss of life. And some memes - some formal organizations, for example - engage in elaborate intercourse with each other. Like you and me at breakfast time, such memes are not concerned with the feelings - still less the intentions - of their sausages, or the atoms (or humans) of which they themselves are composed. They are too busy telling each other their plans for the day, or last night's dreams (and, perhaps, persuading themselves that their dream-work was perfectly proper). We can get inside their skins only by regarding them as being as real as organisms, or persons.
The assemblages in which memes unite for survival and propagation do not neccessarily have physical or even biological foundations. Memes can hang around together for more general reasons, and in more abstract ways. In many cases this is because they have gotten used to each other in the past - as in the specialisms of academic knowledge, or the division of labour more generally. But new and unexpected affiliations can also form. Like upwardly mobile football hooligans, memes seem to dissolve and reassemble their ranks for each season (indeed for each match, even each penalty). They form and reform as gaudily clad but often hostile crowds: orthodox versus heretic, U versus non-U, entailed versus excluded, true versus false, and so on and so forth.
Naturally, the patterns of meme-crowds are also memes, and get transmitted around as such. Myths, magic, religion, mathematics etc are (so to speak) "carnivore" memes whose life patterns reflect the general feeding, nesting or swarming habits of other forms. These more specialised meme machines - which, of course, may compete vigorously with each other - are reinforced by numerous forms of invention or recruitment.
Many memes go in for differentiated infection or domestication of human beings, forming a sort of "priesthood" of specially conditioned human types, and evolving markedly different morphologies within their life cycle for more effective spread - that is, for becoming endemic or epidemic in the human population. This point sounds abstract, but is actually quite familiar to the humans who specialise in the initial spread of the more abstract, "spore" memes: ideologists and intellectuals. As Plekhanov expressed it (in one of this century's more successful memes):
"Propaganda is providing many ideas to a few people. Agitation is moving many people by means of a few ideas. And agitation depends on propaganda."{Footnote 49}
Similar infective and innoculative technologies are fundamental to education.
Memes may succeed by organizing their human disseminators in new and highly differentiated ways, rather as modern military forces employ most of their personnel on administrative, logistical and technical tasks, and only a minority on combat duties (or, perhaps, as parasites may inhabit different hosts at different phases of their life cycle). The military simile is apt, since one important function of such meme meta-machines is to contain and reduce the opposing meme meta-machines of rival meme-complexes. Rivalry is defined by reference to yet other - logical, ideological, and theological - meme complexes.
Here, as in many other meme contexts, truth or falsity are not necessarily the important things, and sometimes they are completely irrelevant. Adaptations are selected according to the maxim: "My meme, right or wrong!" National anthems and advertising, the defense of orthodoxy against heresy, dictatorship and the doctrine of cabinet responsibility, a national curriculum and a guillotine, hypothesis and experiment, even the conventions of peer review - are various forms that memes' equipment against their competitors have evolved. I do not mean to suggest that truth is unimportant, merely that it is just one category of meme (or meta-meme) among many, surviving as best it can in a testing environment.
"What are you famous for?" "For nothing. I am just famous." - Iris Murdoch, Flight
Memes do a wide range of things in their efforts to propagate. They rhyme, scan and get themselves set to music; some make themselves sweet, or sour, or both; some exaggerate their obnoxiousness or durability ("The word of God endureth for ever"); some become succinct or memorable, or simply turn up the volume; some parade gorgeous tails - or tales; some sprout wings and take off; some lumber after their mates, or pursue their prey, on thousands of footnotes.
One of the interesting and relatively recent things memes have done is try to emulate the more exact replicative techniques (and the built-in obsolescence) of biological life. This was first and most effectively done with tangible mass production - pins, cars, wedding rings, and so on - but similarly potent technologies are fast developing for moral and aesthetic memes. For both there is a trade-off between durability and cheapness - partly analogous to that between longevity and fecundity in organisms.{Footnote 50}
Many of these cheaper and more plentiful memes require the human beings who use them to be reshaped a little. Schools ensure that hearts and minds develop in accordance with proper templates.{Footnote 51} The development of standardised, quality-controlled production lines seems to require - for memes as much as for genes - the protection of the germ-line from the clamour and accidents which afflict the soma: insulating the design shop and the specialists who work there from the hubbub of the proletariat on the factory floor.
"Population genetics .... may be defined as that branch of epidemiology that deals with infectious elements transmitted exclusively from parent to offspring." - GC Williams, Natural