May the best meme win

May the best meme win

Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1775) by Joshua Reynolds, which has become an internet meme centuries later

Originally published 28 July 1997

We’ve all received those chain let­ters that describe won­der­ful things that have hap­pened to peo­ple who kept the chain going. Make two copies of the let­ter, send them to friends, and you too might sud­den­ly win Megabucks, avoid an acci­dent, or be cured of a dis­ease. Break the chain and you court disaster.

The chain let­ter’s sto­ry of faith and for­tune car­ries the incen­tive for its own trans­mis­sion. The sto­ry in the let­ter prop­a­gates like — well, like a bio­log­i­cal or com­put­er virus, ensur­ing copies of itself, until it infects a large pop­u­la­tion of hosts.

In 1976, biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins pro­posed that many ideas prop­a­gate through soci­ety like genes or virus­es, becom­ing embed­ded in the brains of their hosts. Dawkins even coined a name for these self-repli­cat­ing ideas — memes.

Memes can be as var­i­ous as a pop tune, the fad for bell bot­tom trousers, New­ton­ian grav­i­ty, Jef­fer­son­ian democ­ra­cy, Aryan supe­ri­or­i­ty, “love your neigh­bor as your­self,” the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease — or even the idea of memes them­selves. Cul­ture, sug­gest­ed Dawkins, is a Dar­win­ian com­pe­ti­tion between memes. Those memes that suc­cess­ful­ly repli­cate and sur­vive, spread widely.

For exam­ple, the Roman Catholic taboo against arti­fi­cial con­tra­cep­tion is a meme that car­ries the con­di­tion of its own suc­cess, along with the suc­cess of a suite of oth­er memes asso­ci­at­ed with the Roman Catholic faith. Peo­ple who car­ry the anti-con­tra­cep­tion meme are like­ly to have more chil­dren, who will prob­a­bly share the anti-con­tra­cep­tion meme with their parents.

Accord­ing to Dawkins, a suc­cess­ful meme pos­sess­es longevi­ty, fecun­di­ty, and copying-fidelity.

Some memes spread fast but do not last long, such as the fad for hula-hoops. Oth­er memes have real stay­ing pow­er, such as the idea that an alien space­ship crashed fifty years ago near Roswell, N.M. The lat­ter meme pre­sum­ably taps into some deep human need to believe in high­er powers.

Fecun­di­ty can be mea­sured by how wide­ly a meme becomes dis­persed in a pop­u­la­tion; the idea of per­son­al immor­tal­i­ty is an immense­ly fecund meme.

Copy­ing-fideli­ty is impor­tant if an meme is to be sta­ble over the long haul; Jew­ish reli­gious laws are memes (accord­ing to Dawkins) that have sur­vived intact for thou­sands of years, at least part­ly because of the great per­ma­nence of writ­ten records.

Occa­sion­al muta­tions of memes lead to nov­el­ty and the evo­lu­tion of culture.

Dawkins pro­posed the idea of memes in the last chap­ter of his book The Self­ish Gene, almost as an after­thought. His point was to illus­trate that bio­log­i­cal genes are not the only things that evolve. Any­thing that self-repli­cates, not always per­fect­ly, and is sub­ject to some sort of selec­tion, will evolve in a Dar­win­ian sense.

Ideas can sat­is­fy these con­di­tions, said Dawkins, and are there­fore sub­ject to the Dar­win­ian dynamic.

The idea of memes, dropped by Dawkins into the cul­tur­al meme pool, has been spread­ing for two decades, find­ing more and more host brains through­out the world. Many fine sci­en­tif­ic minds have weighed in with books or arti­cles on the sub­ject. There is now a Jour­nal of Memet­ics. The Inter­net hums with meme talk. Recent­ly, memes have been giv­en a full-blown pop­u­lar expo­si­tion in Aaron Lynch’s Thought Con­ta­gion: How Belief Spreads Through Soci­ety: The New Sci­ence of Memes, pub­lished by Basic Books (1996).

Lynch applies the log­ic of memet­ic Dar­win­ism to ideas about fam­i­ly, sex, reli­gion, health, war, and peace. He quotes the Russ­ian writer Chekhov: “Man is what he believes.” Man believes what­ev­er memes suc­cess­ful­ly infect his brain, says Lynch.

He lists a half-dozen or so advan­tages that can accrue to com­pet­ing memes, includ­ing sim­ply, fun­da­men­tal­ly, “cog­ni­tive advan­tage.” For exam­ple, Franklin’s light­ning rod (meme B) replaced light­ning as God’s pun­ish­ment (meme A) because those who adopt­ed it lost few­er hous­es and barns to fire. Mod­ern sci­ence might be said to have suc­ceed­ed at least part­ly because of the cog­ni­tive advan­tages it con­fers on believ­ers through med­i­cine and technology.

So far, the so-called “new sci­ence” of memes is more fad than sci­ence, and not with­out its oppo­nents. The idea of apply­ing Dar­win­ian nat­ur­al selec­tion to ideas, par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious ideas, dri­ves many folks to apoplexy. The Inter­net — that meme- trans­mit­ter par excel­lence — is red in tooth and claw with controversy.

We will have to wait and see how the bat­tle works itself out. Per­son­al­ly, I’m wait­ing for Dawkins to weigh in with his own book on the sub­ject. I’m sur­prised he let Lynch and oth­ers get the drop on him.

Mean­while, the meme meme is spread­ing with impres­sive vir­u­lence. For some, its suc­cess is a fur­ther tri­umph of nat­u­ral­is­tic Dar­win­ism. For oth­ers, it is one more invid­i­ous attempt on the part of evo­lu­tion­ists to dimin­ish humanity.

Of course, nei­ther Dawkins, Lynch, nor oth­er meme enthu­si­asts claim that Dar­win­ism pro­vides a com­plete or exhaus­tive account of human cul­ture, only that it is a use­ful tool for under­stand­ing why we believe some of the things we do. Our minds are not pris­on­ers of our memes, any more than our behav­iors are behold­en to our bio­log­i­cal genes.

Dawkins writes: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyran­ny of the self­ish replicators.”

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