MEMES
In The Extended Phenotype, a work written for the specialist audience a few years after The Selfish Gene, Dawkins concedes (1999:109) that he had been:
insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its ‘phenotypic effects’ or ‘meme products’ on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain... The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques. They are the outward…manifestations of the memes within the brain.
Dawkins confesses (1999: 112) that differences between memes and genes “may prove sufficient to render the analogy with genetic natural selection worthless or even positively misleading.”
Memes may partially blend with each other in a way that genes do not. New ‘mutations’ may be ‘directed’ rather than random with respect to evolutionary trends… [T]here may be ‘Lamarckian’ causal arrows leading from phenotype to replicator, as well as the other way around.
Dawkins, Richard (1999) The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. [First published in 1982] Oxford University Press.
Richard Dawkins introduced the meme concept in the final chapter of his landmark book, The Selfish Gene (1976). A meme is “unit of cultural transmission”:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation… When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
In a self-referential endnote in the 1989 Edition, Dawkins happily reports that:
The word meme seems to be turning out to be a good meme. It is now quite widely used and in 1988 it joined the official list of words being considered for future editions of Oxford English Dictionaries.
Dawkins, Richard (1989) The Selfish Gene. [First published 1976] Oxford University Press.
Philosopher of Mind, Daniel Dennett (1991: 202) champions Dawkins’ meme concept but cautions that “at the outset the perspective it provides is distinctly unsettling, even appalling”:
I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who’s in charge, according to this vision – we or our memes? There is, of course, no simple answer, and this fact is at the heart of the confusions that surround the idea of a self. Human consciousness is to a very great degree a product not just of natural selection, but of cultural evolution as well.
British Evolutionary Biologist [1941- ]
If we adopt a Selfish Meme approach our usual perspective is inverted. Initially this proves very disorientating. Dennett whimsically offers the following slogan:
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
Our interests and intentions can be various and we are ready to act upon them. We can envisage many different kinds of life projects. Dennett’s implicit question (1995: 328) is what will we choose to put on life’s metaphoric pedestal?
You can do something for your own sake, or for the sake of the children, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of democracy, or for the sake of... the well being and flourishing of peanut butter above all else, but peanut butter can be put on the pedestal just as readily as art or the children can.
The absurdity of the peanut butter example is standard fare for a philosopher; but is “the well being and flourishing of peanut butter above all else” anymore obscure or arbitrary than cultural fads (like foot binding, or cultivating black tulips) or some of the more obsessive, arcane hobbies of individual?. In similar vein, Dennett recognizes (1995: 330) that “bearing and raising offspring is just one of life’s possible projects, and by no means the most important.” He provides another example (1995: 362) that seems even more counterintuitive to the notion of reproductive fitness.
A suicidal meme can spread, as when a dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply loved cause…
Dennet, Daniel C. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Touchstone, New York.