The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

by Kate Distin

Overview

Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins has suggested that culture evolves and that memes are the cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in the same way as genes function in the biological world. In this sense human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion? Kate Distin extends and strengthens Dawkins's theory and presents a fully developed and workable concept of cultural DNA. She argues that culture's development can be seen both as the result of memetic evolution and as the product of human creativity. Memetic evolution is therefore compatible with the view of humans as conscious and intelligent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521606271
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/20/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.59(d)

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Cambridge University Press
0521844525 - The Selfish Meme - A Critical Reassessment - by Kate Distin
Excerpt

1

Introduction

Shortly after we were married, my husband made me a mandolin. The body is built from rosewood and the bridge hand carved from ebony. Wood can be bent if you heat it, but he had no bending iron - so he curved the sides by rocking them over some hair curling tongs, clamped to the kitchen table.

I had wanted a mandolin since I was a child - for almost as long as I had been playing the violin. The two instruments have the same intervals between their strings, and it seemed to me that it must be easier to rest something across your lap, plucking at notes whose positions were marked out for you by frets, than to contort the whole of your upper body into the violinist's masochistic stance, attempting simultaneously to create notes on a standard scale with your left hand and to tame two feet of bow with your right. I already understood what instructions the notes on a stave were trying to give my fingers, and had lately been charmed by the mandolin music of Vivaldi and Oysterband. (I was naïve, as it happens. The mandolin does have all these advantages, but it also - as the fingers of my left hand will testify - has strings like cheese wire.)

My husband found the design in a woodworking magazine, tucked in amongst the usual advertisements and feature articles. An engineer by training, he had inherited both skills and tools from his father and grandfather. When the plans let him down, he spent some time thinking about the physics of the processes involved, learnt a bit about concert pitch, and then calculated the appropriate fret spacings from first principles. We read up on the mandolin's origins: where was it first invented, what sorts of music had people played on it, and for how many years? We were drawn into a study of the history of music, and debated over late-night bottles of wine whether its conventions were discovered or invented. By a pleasing coincidence, the hot novel of the year was Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

My mandolin is thus the end product of a trail of culture that stretches back across centuries and continents. Its creation was dependent on woodworking techniques and tools, on the development of stringed instruments and musical conventions, on the physics and mathematics of sound, and on the modern world of magazine articles and advertisements. As it grew, we were pointed in the directions of its historical and geographical origins, and our attention was drawn to philosophical and scientific theories about its music. It has links to a vast range of cultural areas, all of which are more like icebergs than mountains, their manifest modern complexities resting on unseen millennia of previous human thought and activity.

Richard Dawkins has said that "most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: 'culture'."¹ Culture is not humans' only distinguishing feature, but it is one unique and fascinating aspect of our species. In this context, "culture" is not intended to be either a description of a narrow range of purely artistic pursuits or a synonym for society. "A society refers to an actual group of people and how they order their social relations. A culture…refers to a body of socially transmitted information"² - the full spectrum of ideas, concepts and skills that is available to us in society. It includes science and mathematics, carpentry and engineering designs, literature and viticulture, systems of musical notation, advertisements and philosophical theories - in short, the collective product of human activities and thought.

How did this body of knowledge and methods emerge? How does it now continue to develop? This book defends the theory that culture evolves, and that memes provide the mechanism for that evolution.

"Evolution" is usually taken to apply only in the biological world, referring to the theory developed by Charles Darwin and others in the nineteenth century to account for the origin of species. In the twentieth century, Richard Dawkins and others pointed out that the core of Darwinian theory is actually rather sparse. Its essential elements are simply replication, variation and selection. If these requirements are met then evolution seems bound to happen. If organisms reproduce, passing their characteristics almost (but not always quite) accurately on to the next generation, and if their environment does not supply them with unlimited resources for their survival, then they will evolve: there will be a struggle for survival, and those organisms will be preserved whose traits are best fitted to the given environment. It is the business of science to investigate the actual pattern of development in our natural world, but at a more theoretical level Darwin's theory outlines a process that is inevitable once all of its elements are in place. Dawkins has suggested that this not only is true in biology but would also be the case in any other environment where all of those key elements were to be found - including culture.

The suggestion that evolution is not restricted to biology but may also take place in culture is appealing if hardly original. A metaphorical picture is often painted of ideas and theories "evolving" through time, but can it ever with justification be taken literally? That is, does Darwinism illustrate a process that can also be observed in culture? There are various versions of cultural evolutionary theory on the market, and this book explores what I see as the most compelling: the hypothesis that the units of cultural selection are elements, which Dawkins calls "memes", that share the important properties of genes.

The biggest danger for this hypothesis is the risk of its collapsing into the trivial assertion that some ideas survive whilst others disappear. Obviously cultures change, ideas spread and technology develops, but what do we gain by claiming that this is all due to memetic evolution? What does the meme hypothesis contribute to our understanding which other theories of cultural change do not?

One way of responding to this challenge is to take a very practical approach, and seek out areas of culture to which meme theory can fruitfully be applied. Most other books on memes have tended to follow this line, and have developed memetic explanations of phenomena such as religion, language and the size of the human brain. The best way of defending the meme hypothesis, from this perspective, is to show that it can provide useful accounts of developments in such key cultural areas. This is an approach in the best traditions of scientific experiment, using observation to confirm or falsify novel theories. Given a hypothesis about how culture develops, practical observations about what actually happens in human culture will surely provide a good method of testing its validity.

On the other hand, it is notoriously difficult to ensure that we take an objective view of the evidence when we are seeking to confirm a favoured hypothesis. Indeed, it is sometimes possible to present very different explanations of the same observations, each of which makes perfect sense from the perspective of a given hypothesis, but only one of which can be true. The history of science is littered with theories that once convinced the brightest of contemporary intellects, and our adversarial justice system also bears testimony to the potential for weaving different stories from the same body of evidence.

Behind that evidence, however, lies the truth, and there must surely be a more direct approach to its discovery. Rather than testing the practical implications of a novel theory, an alternative is to focus first on its underlying structure: to examine whether it could be true, is internally coherent and forms a solid basis for any empirical applications. Inevitably such investigations will have to take into account some observations of the phenomena that the theory purports to explain, but the focus will be on testing its structural foundations before trying to use it as a tool for scientific enquiry. It is this approach which I favour.

In the case of culture, for example, the question is not so much whether development in its various areas can be characterized as memetic as whether the meme hypothesis is true. According to Dawkins, culture evolves in the same way as biology - but in which ways, exactly, are the two processes "the same"? What would replication, variation or selection be in relation to culture? Is culture really made up of discrete units? To what extent can other concepts from genetics be transferred to memetics - concepts like vehicle and phenotype, virus and allele? Where are memes to be found, and what is the memetic equivalent of DNA?

Satisfactory answers to such questions will inevitably contribute to our understanding of cultural development. For example, if culture is a unique feature of humans, then meme theory should be able to explain what has enabled us to develop such a feature when nonhuman animals have not. Indeed, since other animals surely do pass on information and skills to each other, it should include an account of what is special about the "memes" that purportedly make up human culture. Supported by such theoretical investigations, it should of course be possible for meme theory to provide an account of how ideas change and develop in particular cultural areas like science and religion. Even more fundamentally, it should enable us to explore the relationship between memes and the human mind: do they create us, do we create them - or is there, as some would claim, no real difference between "us" and "them"?

This last question is obviously of huge significance for how we humans see ourselves. Some of the best-known names in the field - in particular Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore - believe that meme theory will completely overturn our traditional notions of responsibility, creativity and intentionality, just as many have taken the Darwinian revolution in biology to have overturned traditional notions of a creator God. On their view what we call our minds, with all their apparent powers of thought, decision making and invention, are actually parasitic meme complexes, our sense of control over which is illusory. If our mental and cultural lives are the results of a mindless evolutionary algorithm, they argue, then how can we claim an autonomous identity as independent "selves", with freedom and control over what goes on in those lives?

Despite the apparent power of this argument and the persuasiveness of its authors, my own conclusion - freely reached after many hours of genuinely creative thought and non-illusory choices - is that memetic evolution is quite consistent with a world of intentional, conscious and responsible free agents. And if it weren't, then common sense dictates that I should exercise my free will and reject meme theory in preference to dispensing with mind, conscience and autonomy. Fortunately, however, neither option is necessary, as this book will show.

2

The Meme Hypothesis

Richard Dawkins first proposed his version of cultural evolutionary theory in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. The main thrust of that book was a defence of the gene as the unit of biological selection and the organism as a "survival machine" for its genes. Towards the end, however, he added his view that culture also evolves and that "memes" are the units of cultural selection.

The key to Dawkins's idea is that Darwinian evolution is a particular instance of a process that we might also expect to find in other areas. It will be helpful, therefore, to begin with a swift review of Charles Darwin's theory of descent, before explaining how the meme hypothesis emerges from it. Having characterized Dawkins's own view of what has come to be termed "memetics", I then briefly defend its adoption against the alternative research programme of sociobiology. There is also in this chapter an important clarification of the relation between genes and memes. These introductory discussions provide history and context for the more detailed investigations of subsequent chapters.

Genetic Evolution

Natural Selection

In the early nineteenth century, the problem of the origin of species was so far from being solved that Darwin referred to it as the "mystery of mysteries". He worked on his own solution for more than two decades, until in 1859 The Origin of Species brought together a vast mass of previously isolated facts, all of which fitted into place when seen in the light of his theory of descent.

Darwin was famously inspired by Malthus to see that all organisms are engaged in a perpetual struggle for existence, due to the pressure of population on the available resources. Beginning with the facts that organisms in a species vary and that those variations are passed on to their offspring, he saw in addition that human beings have used this to their advantage by artificially selecting animals and plants with the most useful variations. He argued that, since organic variations useful to man have occurred, it seems likely that in thousands of generations some variations useful to each organism would also have occurred. If so, then because of the ongoing struggle for existence, any individual with such an advantage would have had the best chance of survival and procreation, and any injurious variation would lead to the destruction of its owner - with the result that those organisms are naturally selected which have the optimum fit to conditions of existence. Later, in The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin added that humans are subject to this evolutionary process just like any other animals. His view was that our unique mental features would one day be explicable by natural selection, which could also account for human social and ethical behaviour.

Genetics

Today, gene theory tells us that natural selection consists in the differential survival of replicators - things that make copies of themselves. In the struggle for existence, replicators with "longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity"¹ will have a better chance of survival than others, and it is now widely accepted that in biology those replicators are genes. A preliminary sketch of gene theory, based largely on Richard Dawkins's account, will thus provide a useful backdrop to his meme hypothesis.

As a starting point, familiarity with a little vocabulary from the language of genetics would be helpful: jargon in its best sense is useful both as shorthand and as a conceptual tool. Although this is not the point to digress into the technical details of genetic replication - this book is after all written by a philosopher rather than a cellular biologist - gene theory does provide the background to memetics, and it will often prove fruitful to explore the analogy between the two. Thus: a gene "stores" the information that it replicates in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) - that is to say that the gene occupies a particular locus (place) on a chromosome (a structure within a cell nucleus), and the chromosome is composed of DNA; the gene may also have alleles, which are alternative forms of it in the population, occupying the same locus on that chromosome and controlling the same sorts of things as it does (e.g., eye colour) - its phenotypic effects.

The story goes that in the "primeval soup" the competition for resources and space meant that the ancestors of genes fared best if they had some means of protection. Over time, the protective mechanisms that they developed evolved into more complex "survival machines" - in our case, the human body. Although genes are the units of reproduction, their existence within these "survival machines", or vehicles, means that they are selected indirectly: their differential survival rates depend on their phenotypic effects. So long as they replicate accurately, their effects will also be passed on to the next generation, but when genes do not make exact copies their effects will vary too, and individuals will survive or be eliminated as a result of such (un)favourable variations. Continuous, gradual changes of this sort will result, through successive generations, in new species and types.

Another significant feature of evolution, as Dawkins sees it, is the nature of the replicators. Famously, he refers to genes as "selfish". By this he means that each behaves in such a way as to increase its own welfare at the expense of other genes in the gene pool. Successful adaptations will result in its longer life, say, or increased fecundity. He certainly does not mean to imply that genes are consciously seeking their own replication, but simply that they cannot survive if they are inefficient at self- replication.

Why Accept Gene Theory?

At the time that The Origin was published, Darwin's ideas were highly controversial in a way that they are not, amongst scientists, today. Nonetheless, even then emergent theses in palaeontology, biology and geology were all contributing to an intellectual climate which was more receptive to the novel idea that species might change over time, and Darwin capitalized on this by collecting a mass of evidence in support of his theory. When Mendel's gene hypothesis came to light, it seemed to be Darwin's final vindication, for it provided a mechanism for evolution.

Today the explanatory success of neo-Darwinism is undeniable. Seeing things from the genes' point of view allows us to explain all sorts of superficially puzzling phenomena. A well-known example is biological altruism, when members of a species behave in ways that benefit other individuals at their own expense: the individual's behaviour may be detrimental to his own survival, but it promotes the survival of close members of his species - members who (because they are relatives, or just very much like him) share many of his genes. Thus his behaviour is "altruistic" at the individual, but "selfish" at the genetic, level.^*

This is a specific instance of explanatory success. In general, the point is that the survival of a species depends upon the preservation of its members' strengths. The existence of genes - units of transmission, to future generations, of the beneficial characteristics of the present generation - makes this possible. In particular, Mendel's theory of divisible and recombinable pairs of alleles provides the variation upon which selection can act. Not only via the recombination of genetic information, but also by its mutation (since genes' copying fidelity is not always exact), the gene pool varies, and selection ensures that advantageous variations are preserved. Hence, over enormous time spans, nature's immense variety can be explained. Such explanatory power justifies our acceptance of gene theory. Long before the identification of their physical basis in DNA there were very good reasons to believe in genes' existence, for they provide the basic material of selection.

The Meme Hypothesis

This, then, is the background to the meme hypothesis, which extrapolates from the Darwinian theory of biological evolution to apply the concept of selection more generally. As Dawkins puts it, "Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene":² its essential feature is the differential survival of replicators - any replicators. Whatever the type of replicator involved, Dawkins conjectures, its variation under conditions of restricted resources would lead to a form of evolution. There is a process at work here, whose function should in theory be unaffected by the medium upon which it is based. Just as the same sum can be performed by hand, on a calculator or on one of any number of computer spreadsheet programs, so Dawkins wonders whether the same evolutionary algorithm might be able to operate on a range of different units of selection.

His suggestion is attractive because it seems to strike a happy balance between the extremists who would bring everything under a pattern of development that mimics biological evolution, and those who prefer to restrict the concept purely to biology. Dawkins rejects such a restriction as artificial, but nor does he tie himself to a particular pattern of development; rather, he extracts the significant features of evolutionary theory, and extends their domain of influence.

In particular he turns his attention to culture, which he sees as the distinctive feature of the human species. Cultural transmission does occur in species other than man, but not to the same vast extent. In humans alone, Dawkins hypothesizes another example of the process that Darwinism illustrates, in this case involving cultural replicators. These replicators he calls "memes", and he postulates a new form of selection such that "once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over."⁴ Dawkins defines a meme as "a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as naturally selected in virtue of its phenotypic consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment".⁵

As examples of memes, he suggests ideas, catch-phrases, tunes (or snatches of tunes), fashions and skills.² As with genes, the constituents of success will be long life, fecundity and accuracy of replication; for individual copies, fecundity is the most important factor. The element of competition necessary for any selection to take place is introduced by the brain's limited attention: in order to dominate, a meme must distract the brain's attention from other memes. Success in this matter will depend upon the structure of the brain, as well as on the stability of the meme and its "penetrance in the cultural environment".⁷ The latter will depend on psychological appeal, and according to Dawkins this means (as for genes) that coadapted complexes - that is, evolutionarily stable sets of memes - will occur. Selection will favour those memes capable of exploiting the current cultural environment, which obviously includes other memes also trying to be selected. As sets of memes cooperate, new ones will find it more difficult to penetrate the environment later: the complex provides protection against invasion. The compatibility rule will apply particularly in areas such as theories of science. For other types of memes different criteria will apply - "catchiness" for tunes, for example.

Dawkins emphasizes that their success will not depend on the (dis)advantages they produce for the genotypes that produced the brains they inhabit. Memes, like genes, are selfish: their success depends on the advantages they confer on themselves. In the struggle for brains' attention they must in some way be "better" than their rivals, but this need have nothing to do with the effects they have on the genetic success of their possessors. Although the needs of genes and memes may often coincide (a meme will not last long if it causes its possessor to die before she can transmit it, for example), they may sometimes be in complete opposition: Dawkins uses the example of a meme for celibacy to illustrate this possibility.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. The meme hypothesis; 3. Cultural DNA; 4. The replication of complex culture; 5. Variation; 6. Selection; 7. The story so far; 8. The human mind: meme-complex with a virus?; 9. The meme's eye view; 10. Early cultural evolution; 11. Memetic DNA; 12. Memes and the mind; 13. Science, religion and society: what can memes tell us?; 14. Conclusions.

Editorial Reviews

'Distin's discussion is even-handed and informative for those wishing to update themselves on the current state of play in the field.' Scientific and Medical Network Review

'A model of clarity, the book's appeal is wide - from philosophers to sociologists, anyone interested in how cultures change will benefit from reading The Selfish Meme. Her rigorous approach makes her theory more palatable than other theories of cultural evolution.' Philosophy Today

The Selfish Meme is a very readable and thought provoking book, and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to open-minded students and scholars in any biological, anthropological or sociological field.' Cambridge (the Magazine of the Cambridge Society)

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