Memes

The study of Memes is the study of 'cultural evolution', the spread of ideas, tunes, fashions, engineering methods etc. and the failure of some to propagate and the eventual death of others, analogously to the study of biological evolution and the prospering of some genes within the gene pool and the failure of others.

You may have noticed that I've located this discussion of Memes under the heading of 'Introductory models and basic concepts'. I have to confess that that is simply because I can't think of anywhere else to put it. It may perhaps more obviously belong with the discussion of social influence and hence under 'psychology of communication' or perhaps even under 'propaganda'. It may even not belong in this 'infobase' at all. However, a lot of far cleverer people than I seem currently to be banging on about Memes, 'memetic theory' or 'memetics' being a new paradigm promising to revolutionize the study of human communication and culture, so I thought I ought to include at least a mention somewhere. Mind you, ever since Kuhn alerted us to paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions, I guess just about any scientist who's to stand a chance in the competition for research grants is bound to claim her sphere is a revolutionary new paradigm. Or am I being unduly cynical here? Anyway, what follows is sketchy and unfocused yet. I'll get back to this if and when I understand more. In the meantime here goes:

I think it was Richard Dawkins who first introduced the term 'meme' in his book The Selfish Gene, so we'll begin by looking at what he has to say about genes. Since researchers in memetics are concerned to seek out parallels between biological evolution and cultural evolution, we'll then take a look at some of the fundamental principles of evolutionary theory.

The selfish gene

In that book, he proposed that our genes are selfish replicators, whose sole function is to make copies of themselves, manipulating us, influencing our behaviour in the attempt. Thus, a human being, putting it very baldly, is just a human genes' machine for making more human genes. Although many have felt that Dawkins turns things upside-down and back-to-front with his suggestion, the idea of the 'selfish gene' has turned out to be quite fruitful. For example, if we could all agree on being doves, then we would all benefit. Group selection theory would therefore suggest that we should all evolve into doves. Clearly, though, we don't. As Dawkins points out, "unfortunately, in conspiracies of doves, a single hawk does so extremely well that nothing could stop the evolution of hawks. The conspiracy is therefore bound to be broken by treachery from within." If you think of the need to survive as being one of human beings' primary drives (as suggested, for example, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs), then the self-sacrifice which parents are known to display to enable their offspring to survive is hard to explain. However, if you think of a gene (rather than the 'human being') as motivating behaviour, then, clearly, the gene's chances of survival are increased if the old parent is allowed to pop off in favour of the young bearer of the gene who stands a better chance of passing healthy copies of the gene to a new generation:

individuals can be thought of as life-insurance underwriters. An individual can be expected to invest or risk a certain proportion of his own assets in the life of another individual. He takes into account his relatedness to the other individual, and also whether the individual is a 'good risk' in terms of his life expectancy compared with the insurer's own. Strictly we should say 'reproduction expectancy' rather than 'life expectancy', or to be even more strict, 'general capacity to benefit own genes in the future expectancy'.

Perhaps the classic example in the animal kingdom is the 'reciprocal altruism' of blood-sharing bats. Those who find some blood will often share it with an unlucky bat who didn't find anything to eat. They tend to form bonds with others and the members of the partnership will feed one another when others don't find any blood. However, if a bat cheats, i.e. accepts blood when he has none, but doesn't share when he has some, he will be abandoned by his partner. Thus, the bats' apparently altruistic behaviour turns out on closer inspection to be a mutually beneficial bargain. Almost exactly parallel behaviour is found amongst human beings. Commenting on the egalitarian generosity of the Ache tribe of Paraguay, Matt Ridley concludes:

The sharing of meat [amongst humans] represents a sort of reciprocity in which one man trades his good luck for an insurance against his future bad luck - in exactly the way that vampire bats do when granting their neighbors a share of their blood meals or that bond traders do when they swap fixed for variable interest rates.

Ridley (1997)

Evolutionary theory

Lamarck

In the early nineteenth century, the French biologist, de Lamarck, proposed that beings could pass acquired traits on to their descendants. In principle, that seems fair enough. I know how to speak French, so I can teach my two sons to speak French (well, I tried anyway!). For any English person, who has milk delivered to their door, though, it is tempting to think that an acquired characteristic must be passed to the next generation through some mechanism other than learning. Every winter, we go to our door to find that the tits have ripped the aluminium foil tops off the milk bottles and have slurped up all the delicious cream we were looking forward to pouring on our cornflakes. We don't seem to catch older tits giving younger tits instructions on how to do this, so it's tempting to think that the ability, once acquired, now forms part of the pesky creatures' genetic make-up. That was indeed what Lamarck proposed, though of course he wouldn't have been able to use the term 'genetic make-up' at the time. Lamarck proposed that the skills acquired by a generation and which conferred upon that generation some advantage in coping with its environment were passed to the next generation through direct inheritance, not through imitative learning:

...Lamarckians generally believe that only essential characteristics which have been acquired in response to intense and persistent challenges of the environment over several generations become eventually inherited. ..... the essence of Lamarckism is the belief that the efforts of the parents are not entirely wasted, that some of the benefits derived from them are transmitted to their offspring; and that this is the principal active cause of evolution from amoeba to man. Therein lies the great philosophical attraction of this view, which can be traced back as far as Hippocrates.

Koestler (1971)

Attractive though it may be, it is now generally recognized that Lamarckism is, simply, wrong. Forgive me for having spent the last couple of paragraphs explaining an idea which is 'wrong', but I hope you will see later that Lamarckism may turn out to be of more relevance to memetic evolution than to biological evolution.

Darwin and after

The one who got it right is of course Charles Darwin, who some fifty years later rejected Lamarck's views and proposed that the evolution of species occurs through a mixture of variation, selection and reproduction. It might be worth pointing out in passing that, since Mendel's investigation of the laws of inheritance was only just underway when Darwin published his findings. Without Mendel's work (which did not become widely known until this century), Darwin was a bit stumped for an explanation as to where the random variations originated from and so he actually had to accept that it must be possible to inherit acquired characteristics. Still, in the meantime it's generally accepted that he got the basic mechanisms pretty well spot on.

Evolutionary theory has been substantially developed since Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Although it's still the subject of heated debate within the scientific community and new refinements are still being added, some of them very major, I think we can safely say that there is a core which is generally agreed upon. In what follows I shall outline what I believe to be generally agreed, and trust you readers to e-mail me if I'm wrong: 

Characteristics of evolution

	Genetic variation	Genetic variation is a necessary prerequisite of evolution. No variation, no evolution. An example of evolution which has actually been observed is the English moth. In the early nineteenth century most such moths were light coloured and a very small number were dark. By the end of the century, nearly all the moths in Manchester were dark, but dark ones were far less common in the countryside. The moth's colour is determined by a single gene, so the change in the ratio of dark to light moths reflects a change in the gene pool. Without the existence of dark moths in the first place, the population could not have evolved into mostly dark moths. The existence of the two types is an example of genetic variation. If genetic variation came to a halt, so would evolution.
		Factors decreasing genetic variation
		natural selection	The moth population evolved by a process of natural selection. Manchester during the nineteenth century was a centre of the industrial revolution and therefore mostly covered in soot, including the birch trees favoured by the moths. Pretty obviously, light coloured moths on sooty trees were sitting ducks for hungry birds and the dark coloured ones therefore had a greater chance of reaching maturity and producing dark offspring. Such a process is also referred to as the survival of the fittest, the unfit white moths being weeded out by the birds. [Note that the term is neutral when applied to biological evolution, but is pregnant with very unpleasant consequences (Nazism, laissez-faire capitalism) when applied to human society.] If natural selection proceeded without the operation of other factors which tend to increase genetic variation (enumerated below), it would clearly bring evolution grinding to a halt.
		Sexual selection	Some characteristics of animals or insects are plainly daft from a survival point of view. Examples which are often quoted are the high visibility of fireflies or the ostentation of a peacock's tail. The one allows predators to home in even in the middle of the night and the other both advertizes presence and prevents flight from a predator. However, it is evident that such displays increase the male's attractiveness to the female. There are various theories as to why it should be attractive, but it is generally accepted that part of the function of the display is to show that the creature has 'good genes', i.e. it is fit and healthy. Paying for screwing around by dying young doesn't strike me as much of a bargain, frankly. Think, however, of the selfish gene, rather than the peacock. Form the 'point of view' of the peacock's genes, being propagated quite liberally is a good thing and the peacock's death at an early age is immaterial. It is also possible for things to get stuck in a positive feedback loop. Males who have long tail feathers are preferred by the females, so the next generation of males has a high proportion of males with long tail feathers. Some random mutations will produce even longer tail feathers which are even more attractive to females - and so on. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached because the tail feathers are so absurdly long that the birds can't move out of danger at all and so get eaten up before they have a chance to pass their genes on to the next generation. I wonder if the same might happen with human males' current preference for skinny females? Eventually they get so skinny they fall apart before they can breed?
		genetic drift
		factors increasing genetic variation
		mutation	The machinery that copies DNA sometimes screws up. As a result, the sequence of a gene is altered. Such an alteration is known as a mutation. Most mutations are believed to be neutral or deleterious as far as fitness is concerned, with only a very small number being beneficial. That's pretty much what you'd expect if you bear in mind that natural selection has weeded out the unfit. Thus the organisms fit for the given environment are the ones still sticking around. You've got to be pretty lucky for a mutation to increase your fitness for your particular environment. And even then your chances of passing on that mutation to the next generation remain slim.
		recombination	We are a mix of the genes from our father and from our mother. Consequently, new mixes are constantly being created, some more fit, others less.
		gene flow	New organisms can enter a population from another population, generally from closely related species.
	Speciation	Speciation occurs when one species splits into two or more. This may happen for example when a species becomes divided and one group evolves independently of the other to the extent that, if they were brought back together they could not interbreed.
	Extinction	This is our fate, as well as that of all other species. A species might become extinct if its environment changes rapidly (dinosaurs for example) or if it is pushed out by competition from a closely related species.
	Punctuated equilibrium	Darwin considered, as we have seen above, that small mutations would occasionally give an organism a survival advantage. The process of selective reproduction would give the genes of such an organism a better chance of being inherited. Later, there would be other small mutations and so on. This implied a gradual process of evolution. So he was a bit stumped by the fact that the fossil record did not appear to support such gradualism. He explained the paradox by the incompleteness of the fossil record. In 1972, however, the two palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge suggested an alternative: the theory of punctuated equilibrium. According to their theory evolution shows long periods of stability (equilibrium) punctuated by short bursts (in terms of geological time) of new species creation.

Cultural evolution

Memetics is not the first attempt to draw parallels between biological evolution and apparently similar processes in human culture. Here's a quick overview of what's gone before:

Social Darwinism

In the nineteenth century several views developed regarding the evolution of human culture. The British economist Walter Bagehot saw the best organized groups as having killed off the least well organized groups, Tylor considered that 'civilized' societies had evolved from 'savage' societies, but perhaps the best known proponent of social Darwinism was the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, who considered that all societies underwent the same process of evolution from the savage to industrial society, principally driven to evolve by population growth. He placed great emphasis on the principle of the survival of the fittest in society, a principle which led him to oppose any kind of social policies specially developed to aid the weak and poor. This opposition arose in part from his conviction that evolution was necessarily progress and, together with his belief in the importance of the survival of the fittest, led him to support a general principle of competitive individualism. He argued that such individualism did not necessarily result in egocentric behaviour and indeed could result in altruism since a person who wants the best for herself will also necessarily want the best for society. This may sound very similar to Thatcher's claim that 'There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.'' (Woman's Own, 31 October 1987.) Quite contemporary also were the conclusions drawn from the use of the word 'natural' in Darwin's 'natural selection'. Because evolution was taken to be always progressive and the 'fittest' always the 'best', the outcome of the free operation of nature must always be positive. Nature reigns supreme, nobody questions the desirability of natural selection or attempts to challenge the order of nature

For us now still undergoing the appalling devastation of Thatcherism/Reaganomics social Darwinism has a depressingly familiar ring (or, I suppose, 'comfortingly familiar' if you happen to be one of 'the fittest') and indeed the term 'social Darwinism' was coined by its opponents to apply to any philosophy of society based on Darwinism, particularly one in which (as with Spencer) 'fittest' is taken to mean 'best', thus a philosophy which has been used to lend intellectual legitimacy to Nazism, Aryanism, imperialism and all kinds of other unspeakable -isms. The latest of these -isms is neo-liberalism. The market has its own natural laws which must reign supreme. The least fit companies will become extinct and the fittest will prosper, 'lame ducks' will no longer be subsidized by the state whatever the cost in unemployment, mental illness, poverty and social disintegration. Individualism is fostered and greed encouraged. Perhaps the most telling difference between modern times and the post-war social consensus is Thatcher's reworking of the parable of the Good Samaritan, who, she commented, could not have helped the thieves' victim if he had not amassed a personal fortune. The possibility that the victim might have been better served by a positive programme of alleviation of poverty and education amongst the thieves and public investment in public transport and ambulances on the roads of Judaea would no doubt strike her as contrary to 'human nature' and the 'laws of the market'.

Neo-evolutionism

There wasn't, as far as I can see, much very Neo about the Neo-evolutionism which flourished in the 60s. It did, however, differ considerably from social Darwinsim in that a clear distinction was drawn before biological evolution and cultural evolution and it was recognized that, although cultural evolution appeared to display parallels with biological evolution, there were very significant differences. Perhaps most significantly it was recognized that, whereas biological evolution depends on a parent-child relationship, cultural evolution can travel in all directions. Hence they placed much emphasis on diffusion of ideas and argued that societies tended to converge as a result of such diffusion which communicated to them ideas and innovations which were advantageous to their development.

Sociobiology

Sociobiology emerged in the 1970s. It is principally associated with E O Wilson, whose book on the subject, entitled Sociobiology, provoked a furore by suggesting that we behave the way we do in order to maximize our reproductive fitness. Like the earlier behaviourist psychology and Dawkins' later The Selfish Gene, its 'scientific' approach to human behaviour and cultural development appeared to many of a humanist bent to undermine the humanist approach to sociology. Sociobiologists often argued that cultural evolution was controlled by genetic evolution, which was anathema to many sociologists, who considered the biological reductionism of sociobiology offensive to their humanistic values, as well as overly simplistic. Out of sociobiology arose evolutionary psychology, which proposes that, since genetic evolution is so slow, much of the human mind must have developed in response to evolutionary pressures of the Pleistocene period.

This endeavour to explain much of our culture and of our psychology from the study of evolution poses a fundamental challenge to what Stephen Pinker refers to as the Standard Social Science Model, which places so much emphasis on society's influences on our behaviour. Indeed it is essentially that model which underlies many of the perspectives discussed on this website. For example, the distinction established largely by feminists between sex and gender relies on that model: your sex is what you are born into, but your gender (what constitutes 'typical' or 'appropriate' feminine behaviour) is constructed by society (hence the term 'social constructionism' to refer to this perspective). Since it is constructed by society and is not a law of nature, it can be challenged and changed. One way that it can be challenged and changed is, for example, via the development of non-sexist (or 'politically correct') language, since language, the social construction par excellence, embodies society's notions of what is 'feminine' and legitimizes such notions as the norm. Small wonder, then, that sociobiologists and  'evolutionary psychologists' have been so virulently attacked. Indeed since the publication of Wilson's book, the vilification has grown consistently, sociobiologists being attacked as 'fascists', being prevented from speaking in public and being deluged with hate mail. Stephen Jay Gould has dismissed evolutionary psychology as 'pure guesswork in the cocktail party mode' and has attacked its proponents for their 'penchant for narrow and often barren speculaton'. The protest reached a crescendo in early 2000 when two scientists,  Randy Thornhill (an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico) and Craig Palmer (an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Colorado) wrote in a magazine trailer for their forthcoming book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Cases of Sexual Coercion:

As bizarre as some of these facts may seem, they all make sense when rape is viewed as a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage. We fervently believe that, just as the leopard's spots and the giraffe's elongated neck are the results of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so is rape.

(quoted in The Guardian Jan 25 2000)

Susan Brownmiller, whose 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape has been one of the most influential in presenting rape as an abuse of male power, an exercise in degradation and humiliation, rather than a merely sexual act, asked how, then, the two scientists would explain homosexual rape in prison or the rape of women over childbearing age and predicted that the book would be used by the defence in rape cases.

Although much of the protest against evolutionary psychology comes from the left of the political spectrum, Pinker argues passionately that it is the Standard Social Science Model which is more likely to lay the foundations for totalitarianism and the claim that we share a common, universal  human nature is most likely to protect us against it:

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate, which justifies the dismissal of people's stated wants as an artefact of a particular time and place and thereby licenses the top-down redesign of society, is a totalitarian's dream.

(quoted in The Guardian Nov 6 1999)

This is no empty academic theory, as the history of the twentieth century's attempts at constructing 'new model orders' of left or right reminds us.

Having taken a brief look at evolutionary theory and some of the influence it has had on approaches to sociology, let us now turn our attention to memes: