WHY do humans behave the way they do? Ask a group of biologists and you’ll probably be told that evolution has shaped our thoughts, actions and institutions. Not so, the social scientist will argue: we are uniquely moulded by the culture in which we grow up. Nature? Nurture? It’s the same tired old debate. You’d think that people would be pleased to have an alternative, a third way that combines both biology and the social sciences. So how come the idea of memes has mostly been met with indifference or outright hostility?
The word “meme” was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to describe units of culture such as fashions, customs, technologies and ideas, which, he argues, evolve in much the same way as genes. Only the fittest memes survive, while the rest go to the wall as selection weeds them out. The notion that natural selection acts on elements of culture has a respectable pedigree that goes back to Darwin. In making the case for the evolution of language, for example, he wrote: “A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.”
Over the past century, Darwin’s intuition has proved correct – natural selection is a general law for the way that many systems change, including even the antibodies in our immune systems. So why, in an age when Darwin’s patronage lends an idea an almost instant authority, is the meme not the centrepiece of a scientific theory of culture?
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One possible reason is that there is something about memes that people find deeply disturbing. Certainly, Dawkins’ memes have a sinister quality. His nefarious “mind viruses” seem to take control of us, stripping us of the ability to choose our own beliefs, values and ways of living. Psychologist Susan Blackmore sums it up most clearly in her book The Meme Machine, when she challenges us to “imagine a world full of hosts for memes (e.g. brains) and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Now ask, which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?” The answer Blackmore gives is the eye-catching or high-profile memes, which aren’t necessarily the ones we might objectively judge to be in our interests, or worthy of attention. We may be under the impression that our thoughts and beliefs are carefully selected or constructed by ourselves, according to our particular dispositions and powers of reasoning, but we have been hoodwinked. The human mind is just a “dungheap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves”, as Daniel Dennett put it in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
This unsavoury message is a source of both excitement and disquiet. People’s first reaction to the idea of infection by meme viruses is usually negative. We are used to thinking in a self-centred way, and initially either fail to get it or else deny that it could be correct. More considered responses range from exhilaration at the insights gained from this altered state of consciousness, to a paranoid aversive reaction, often marked by an irrational refusal to take seriously any sentence with the word “meme” in it. But take a more balanced view, and you’ll find that although the theory has some fundamental problems, it also has considerable potential as a scientific approach to understanding human culture.
Even critics must accept that one reason why memetics hasn’t died without a trace is that it can generate explanations for the way things are that people find compelling. This has been brought home to us while teaching a course on animal behaviour to undergraduate students, in which we introduce evolutionary theories of human behaviour. As an exercise in taking the meme’s-eye view, we challenge the class to conjure up the qualities that the “ultimate” religion would need to give it the best possible chance of spreading.
Before long the hands go up, and the students start making suggestions. “The religion would have to be easy to sign up to but difficult, even dangerous, to leave,” says one. “It should encourage having lots of children if these children are likely to adopt the religion too,” adds another. “People following the religion may be encouraged to convert others through evangelism, preaching or missionary work.” “Challenging the religion should be treated severely, with death sentences to rebels and war with societies of non-believers.” And so on. Most students are struck with the similarities between this “ultimate”, meme-based religion and some contemporary religions and cults. Of course, there is clearly more to religion — even to a scientific theory of religion — than memes, but the notion that components of religious doctrine could exist merely because they are good at propagating themselves is intriguing.
Squaring circular arguments
But could memes offer more than just an interesting alternative viewpoint? Could there be a science of memetics? Harsh critics, such as David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University in New York, dismiss memetics as relying on circular arguments. This criticism is entirely justified if enthusiasts merely concoct stories about how only the fittest memes survive, and then assume that memes are fit because they have survived. But there is a way to escape the circularity.
If you levelled the same charge at biological evolution, supporters would respond by pointing out that natural selection has been clearly demonstrated in countless natural populations using a variety of experimental methods. Memeticists should be able to back up their claims in a similar way. If anything, it should be easier to demonstrate natural selection among memes than it is for genes. Cultural traits tend to change much more rapidly than biological ones, so there’s more to go on. To date, however, meme enthusiasts have been far more concerned with conjuring up elaborate hypotheses than doing scientific research. How might they go about getting the evidence to support their idea?
One way of detecting natural selection is to search for what evolutionary biologists call “character displacement”. Wherever two populations of organisms live together and compete for resources, natural selection tends to make them become less like each other, so that there is less competition between them. For instance, imagine two populations of birds competing for seeds. Selection might favour individuals in one population that are slightly larger than average, say, because they can feed on larger seeds that are left by most of the other birds. Eventually the two populations evolve until they exploit seeds of different sizes. Population geneticists studying natural selection examine whether competing populations are diverging, or compare competing and non-competing populations to look for character displacement.
To translate this into the world of memetics, imagine two religions, Judaism and Islam, competing to recruit followers at a particular locality. If selection does shape cultural elements then we should see character displacement in the two religions, with their characteristics becoming more extreme in places such as Jerusalem than in regions where there is little direct competition. A glance at the news headlines suggests this is indeed what happens. Could once source of the violence that we are seeing in the Middle East be cultural selection that has left the doctrines of competing religious communities so different that they can no longer get along?
Back in the biological sphere, another way to catch Darwinian evolution in action is to look for “convergence” — the evolution of similar traits in unrelated populations that have been exposed to comparable environments. Prime examples include the similarly shaped bodies and fins of ichthyosaurs and fishes, and the resemblance between placental and marsupial wolves. As for memes, researchers could compare unrelated meme complexes exposed to similar selective environments, and look for convergence. Mickey Mouse, the Michelin man and teddy bears, for example, appear to have changed independently over time to acquire juvenile characteristics that appeal to humans, such as large eyes and small noses. And there are probably many examples of convergent evolution in technology, in which separate groups of people faced with the same problem independently came up with similar solutions. Bows and arrows, arches, money, and writing might fit the bill.
A third test for genetic evolution exploits the fact that any sudden disturbance, such as a population crash, tends to disturb the equilibrium of a population’s gene pool. After such a crisis, large changes in gene frequencies in a consistent direction imply that natural selection is acting, with the population evolving towards a new equilibrium. In the same way, a dramatic cultural shift in the aftermath of some disturbance would be evidence for cultural evolution. Researchers could investigate whether and how food sales recover from a food hygiene scare, how tourism rejuvenates after a foot-and-mouth outbreak, or which luxury goods come back into fashion following a recession.
Studies like this might well reveal real parallels between the evolution of genes and memes. But even that might not be enough to persuade those who resist memetics as a scientific theory of culture. They point to “fatal flaws” in memetic reasoning. One common criticism is that memes have ill-defined boundaries. Take communism, for example: is it a meme? If so, then how do we explain the fact that Maoists and Marxists have quite different beliefs? And is dialectical materialism the same meme as communism, or a part of it?
At first glance this criticism seems damning. But it looks far less damaging when you realise that biologists have faced essentially the same problem and surmounted it. Genes are not quite as clean and discrete as most people imagine. Geneticists have uncovered many complications that leave the boundaries of genes quite messy, including regulatory genes, mitochondrial DNA, junk DNA, transposable elements and retroviruses. And species are equally mercurial. They are typically defined as populations of organisms that interbreed or could potentially do so, yet not all species are sexual, not all sexual species have two sexes, not all mating is within species, and not all hybrids are sterile. Memetic units only appear fuzzy in comparison with simplistic concepts of genes and species.
The evolution of an idea
Another much-cited problem is that memes merge together, with collections of ideas constantly aggregating and breaking up. How could we trace the historical lineage of a meme such as altruism, when the many ways of being good to others change from one individual to the next, and borrow from different cultures? Once again, the same is true in biology. Genetic lineages have repeatedly come together over evolutionary time. Introgression — the merging of two distinct biological species into one — occurs naturally, if rarely. Much more common is horizontal transfer of genetic material between species by viruses and plasmids. More frequent still are symbiotic associations between species. What are lichens if not the union of algae (or cyanobacteria) and fungi into a single identity? Many of the major transitions in evolution, such as the origin of eukaryotic cells or multicellular organisms, are now thought to have resulted from simple entities ganging together into more complex ones. Uncertainty about the boundaries of genes and species, and the coming together of groups of genes, has not stopped people studying biological evolution. So why should similar complications paralyse research into memetics?
Having said that, memetics does have some failings that undermine it as a serious science. Most notably, it has yet to consider the role of human minds in selecting memes. Minds are not like vacant apartments to be let, idly awaiting memes to take up residence. The ideas, knowledge and skills that we acquire from others reflect the predispositions, capabilities and beliefs that we already have. Accounting for this needn’t mean dropping the analogy between memes and viruses, but it does mean we have to extend it. Meme enthusiasts have concentrated exclusively on the characteristics that make memes infectious, but the success of a virus depends not only on its infectiousness but also on the susceptibility of its hosts. Our susceptibility to different memes depends in part on our genetic make-up, and memeticists should take this into account. Indeed, a rival school of researchers studying “gene-culture co-evolution” is already incorporating susceptibility into its mathematical models by allowing the probability of adopting a meme to depend on an individual’s genetic make-up.
The most fundamental challenge facing memetics is that the current fashion in the social sciences is for a more qualitative, holistic description of cultural phenomena. Social scientists say culture cannot usefully be broken down into bits and pieces, or treated like a collection of beans in a bag, as memetics implies. Once again, the same debate took place within evolutionary biology in the 1960s. Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr criticised the assumptions of theoretical models as “beanbag genetics”, and British evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane responded with a vigorous defence.
Mayr argued that genes cannot be treated independently, but are tied into integrated and coherent gene-complexes. Haldane didn’t deny this, but countered with numerous examples where simplified models had allowed striking advances in evolutionary biology and population genetics. Haldane won the debate. Today geneticists know far more about the complex interactions between genes, but most still agree that the best way to understand what’s going on is to treat genes as discrete units. Eminent geneticist James Crow from the University of Wisconsin recently pointed this out in the journal Nature(vol 409, p 771).
Here is the crux of the matter. Memes are not central to our study of culture primarily because of a fundamental difference between the ways in which biological and social scientists deal with complexity. Who would argue that human culture is more complex than the human brain? Yet while students of culture try unsuccessfully to grapple with the whole, neuroscientists are forging ahead bit by bit, making phenomenal progress in understanding brain function, often using extremely crude methods such as brain lesions or neurotransmitter-blocking drugs. The intricacies of the big picture are laid bare one small step at a time by breaking down the complex whole into analysable chunks. Memes are the relevant chunks of culture, but they won’t be taken seriously until more social scientists learn a fundamental lesson from other areas of science: patient chipping away at perplexing problems yields dividends in the long run.
- Their book, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press