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.”
