Darwin's Dangerous Idea (68 page)

Romeo and Juliet,
but if they had been carefully secretive about this, we The anthropologist Dan Sperber, who has thought a great deal about might well have thought they had simply

cultural evolution, thinks there is a problem with any use of abstract, intentional objects as the anchors for a scientific project. Such abstract objects, he claims,

7. Cf. the parallel point about the welcome—indeed, indispensable—power of adopting the intentional stance as a scientific tactic in
heteropbenomenology,
the objective sci-do not directly enter into causal relations. What caused your indigestion ence of consciousness (Dennett 1991a).

was not the Mornay sauce recipe in the abstract, but your host having read 358 THE CRANES OF CULTURE

Could There Be a Science of Memetics?
359

a public representation, having formed a mental representation, and having It looks trivial at first, but consider how we can apply it. We can use the followed it with greater or lesser success. What caused the child's enjoy-existence of a particular sort of cultural representation endemic to oral able fear was not the story of Little Red Riding Hood in the abstract, but traditions to shed light on how human memory works, by asking what it is her understanding of her mother's words. More to the present point, what about
this
sort of representation that makes it more memorable than others.

caused the Mornay sauce recipe or the story of Little Red Riding Hood to Sperber points out that people are better at remembering a story than thev become cultural representations is not, or rather is not directly, their are at remembering a text—at least today, now that the oral tradition is formal properties, it is the construction of millions of mental representa-waning.8 But even today we sometimes remember—involuntarily—an tions causally linked by millions of public representations. [Sperber 1985, advertising jingle, including its precise rhythmic properties, its "tone of pp. 77-78.]

voice," and many other "low-level" features. When scientists decide on acronyms or cute slogans for their theories, they are hoping thereby to make What Sperber says about the indirectness of the role of the abstract features is them more memorable, more vivid and attractive memes. And hence the certainly true, but, far from this being an obstacle to science, it is the best sort actual details of the representing are sometimes just as much a candidate for of invitation to science: an invitation to cut through the Gordian knot of memehood as the content represented. Using acronyms is itself a meme—a tangled causation with an abstract formulation that is predictive precisely meta-meme, of course—which caught on because of its demonstrated power
because
it ignores all those complications. For instance, genes are selected in furthering the content memes whose name memes it helped to design.

because of their indirect and only statistically visible phenotypic effects.

What is it about acronyms, or about rhymes or "snappy" slogans, that makes Consider the following prediction: wherever you find moths with camouflage them fare so well in the competitions that rage through a human mind?

on their wings, you will find that they have keen-sighted predators, and This sort of question exploits a fundamental strategy both of evolutionary wherever you find moths that are heavily predated by echo-locating bats, you theory and of cognitive science, as we have seen many times. Where evo-will find that they have traded in wing camouflage for jamming devices or a lutionary theory considers information transmitted through genetic channels, particular talent for creating evasive flight patterns. Of course, our ultimate whatever they are, cognitive science considers information transmitted goal is to explain whatever features we find in the moths and their through the channels of the nervous system, whatever they are—plus the surroundings all the way down to the molecular or atomic mechanisms adjacent media, such as the translucent air, which transmits sound and light responsible, but there is no reason to demand that such a reduction be so well. You can finesse your ignorance of the gory mechanical details of uniform or generalizable across the board. It is the glory of science that it can how the information got from A to B, at least temporarily, and just concen-find the patterns in spite of the noise (Dennett 1991b).

trate on the implications of the fact that some information
did
get there— and The peculiarities of human psychology (and human digestion, for that some other information didn't.

matter, as the Mornay-sauce example shows ) are important
eventually,
but Suppose you were given the task of catching a spy, or a whole spy ring, in they don't stand in the way of a scientific analysis of the phenomenon in the Pentagon. Suppose what was known was that information about, say, question. In fact, as Sperber himself has persuasively argued, we can use nuclear submarines was somehow getting into the hands of the wrong people.

higher-level principles as levers to pry open lower-level secrets. Sperber One way of catching the spy would be to insert various tidbits of false (but points to the importance of the invention of writing, which initiated major credible) information at various places within the Pentagon and see which changes in cultural evolution. He shows how to reason from facts about ones surfaced, in which order, in Geneva or Beirut or wherever the preliterate culture to facts about human psychology. ( He prefers to think of marketplace for secrets is. Varying the conditions and circumstances, you cultural transmission along the lines of
epidemiology
rather than
genetics,
but might gradually build up an elaborate diagram of the route—the various way the direction of his theory is very much the same as Dawkins'—to the point stations and transfers and compounding places—even to the point of of near-indistinguishability when you think of what the Darwinian treatment of epidemiology looks like; see Williams and Nesse 1991) Here is Sperber's

"Law of the Epidemiology of Representations": 8. For an analysis of the astonishing mnemonic powers of the oral tradition, see Albert In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are easily remembered Lord's classic,
The Singer of Tales
(1960), about the technology of verse memorization ones; hard to remember representations are forgotten, or transformed into developed by bards from Homer's day to modern times in the Balkan countries and more easily remembered ones, before reaching a cultural level of distri-elsewhere.

bution. [Sperber 1985, p. 86.]

360 THE CRANES OF CULTURE

The Philosophical Importance ofMemes
361

arresting and duly convicting the spy ring, and yet still be in the dark about 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF MEMES

the medium of communication used. Was it radio? Microdots glued to documents? Semaphore flags? Did the agent memorize the blueprint and simply
Cultural 'evolution' is not really evolution at all if we are being fussy
walk naked across the border, or did he have a verbal description in Morse
and purist about our use of words, but there may be enough in common
code hidden on a floppy disk in his computer?

between them to justify some comparison of principles.

In the end, we want to know the answers to all these questions, but in the

—R

meantime there is a lot we can do in the substrate-neutral domain of pure ICHARD DAWKINS 1986a, p. 216

information transfer. In cognitive science, for example, the linguist Ray Jackendoflf (1987, 1993) shows the surprising power of this method in his
There is no more reason to expect a cultural practice transmitted
ingenious deductions about the number of representational levels, and their
between churchgoers to increase churchgoers' fitness than there is to
powers, that
must
go into such tasks as getting information from the light that
expect a similarly transmitted flu virus to increase fitness.

strikes our eyes all the way to places where we can talk about what we see.

—GEORGE WILLIAMS 1992, p. 15

He doesn't have to know the details of neurophysiology (though he's interested, unlike many other linguists) in order to reach confident and When Dawkins introduced memes in 1976, he described his innovation as reliable conclusions about the structure of the processes, and the represen-a literal extension of the classical Darwinian theory. He has since drawn in tations they transform.

his horns slightly. In
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986a, p. 196), he spoke of an What we learn at this abstract level is scientifically important in its own analogy "which I find inspiring but which can be taken too far if we are not right. It is, indeed, the basis of everything important. Nobody has ever put it careful.'' Why did he retreat like this? Why, indeed, is the meme meme so better than the physicist Richard Feynman:

little discussed eighteen years after
The Selfish Gene
appeared?

In
The Extended Phenotype
(1982, p. 112), Dawkins replied forcefully to Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of the storm of criticism from sociobiologists and others, while conceding some science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song interesting disanalogies between genes and memes:

or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how

... memes are not strung out along linear chromosomes, and it is not clear to read the music. For instance, the scientific article may say, "The radio-that they occupy and compete for discrete 'loci', or that they have iden-active phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half tifiable alleles'.... The copying process is probably much less precise than in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?

in the case of genes.... Memes may partially blend with each other in a It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, way that genes do not.

and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there But then (p. 112 ) he retreated further, apparently in the face of unnamed before have gone away.

and unquoted adversaries:

So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness?

Last week's potatoes! They now can
remember
what was going on in my My own feeling is that its (the meme meme's) main value may lie not so mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced.

much in helping us to understand human culture as in sharpening our To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, perception of genetic natural selection. This is the only reason I am pre-that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms sumptuous enough to discuss it, for I do not know enough about the of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, existing literature on human culture to make an authoritative contribution dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always to it.

doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. [Feynman 1988, p. 244.]

I suggest that the meme's-eye view of what happened to the meme meme is quite obvious: "humanist" minds have set up a particularly aggressive set of filters against memes coming from "sociobiology," and once Dawkins was identified as a sociobiologist, this almost guaranteed rejection of whatever 362 THE CRANES OF CULTURE

The Philosophical Importance of Memes
363

this interloper had to say about culture—not for good reasons, but just in a Ship. Suppose Jones encounters or dreams up a truly compelling argument in sort of immunological rejection.9

favor of suicide—so compelling it leads him to kill himself. If he doesn't One can see why. The meme's-eye perspective challenges one of the leave a note explaining why he has done this, the meme in question—at least central axioms of the humanities. Dawkins (1976, p. 214) points out that in the Jonesian lineage of it—is not going to spread.

our explanations we tend to overlook the fundamental fact that "a cultural The most important point Dawkins makes, then, is that there is no
nec-trait may have evolved in the way it has simply because it is
advantageous to
essary
connection between a meme's replicative power, its "fitness" from
its
itself."
This is a new way of thinking about ideas, but is it a good way? When point of view, and its contribution to
our
fitness (by whatever standard we we have answered this question, we will know whether or not the meme judge that). This is an unsettling observation, but the situation is not totally meme is one we should exploit and replicate.

desperate. Although some memes definitely manipulate us into collaborating The first rules of memes, as for genes, is that replication is not necessarily on their replication
in spite
o/our judging them useless or ugly or even for the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at ... replicating—

dangerous to our health and welfare, many—most, if we are lucky—of the for whatever reason!

memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings but
because of
our esteem for them. I think there can be little controversy that the A meme that made its bodies run over cliffs would have a fate like that of following memes are, all things considered, good from our perspective, and a gene for making bodies run over cliffs. It would tend to be eliminated not just from their own perspective as selfish self-replicators: such very from the meme-pool.... But this does not mean that the ultimate criterion general memes as cooperation, music, writing, calendars, education, for success in meme selection is gene survival.... Obviously a meme that environmental awareness, arms reduction; and such particular memes as the causes individuals bearing it to kill themselves has a grave disadvantage, Prisoner's Dilemma,
The Marriage of Figaro, Moby Dick,
returnable bottles, but not necessarily a fatal one.... A suicidal meme can spread, as when a the SALT agreements. Other memes are more con-troversial; we can see why dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply they spread, and why, all things considered, we should tolerate them, in spite loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on. [Dawkins of the problems they cause for us: colorization of classic films, advertising on 1982, pp. 110-11.)