The trouble with the Trouble with Memetics

Massimo Pigliucci's objections to memetics ("The Trouble with Memetics," September/ October 2007) mostly misconstrue the basic idea of memes. So I'd like to explain where I think he has gone wrong and why memetics really could have a bright future.

Several of his arguments take the following form:

  Memes are not like genes in
  respect of X.
  Therefore the analogy between
  memes and genes is False.
  Therefore memetics is false.

But analogies between memes and genes need not be close. To see why, we must go back to the origin of the term meme. As Pigliucci himself explains, Dawkins invented the term to refer to a cultural replicator; that is, to information that is copied from person to person or person to artifact. This information (whether ideas, skills, habits, or stories) varies, and the variant forms are subject to selection, so this counts as a replicator. Genes and memes are both replicators and therefore should have much in common, but they are very different kinds of replicators, so we should expect many differences too. This means that analogies may help us in deriving hypotheses about the way the new replicator works but could also lead us astray if we expect them to be too close.

Pigliucci's first "X" is "there doesn't seem to be any distinction between memes themselves and the phenotypes they produce." Agreed--in many cases but not all. More interestingly, I think that memes are actually evolving this distinction right before our eyes. Think about it this way: genes have been evolving for about four billion years. Starting from very simple self-replicating molecules, they have ended up packaged inside elaborate vehicles with fabulously high fidelity, effective copying machinery involving accurate transcription, random variation, and a separation between the germ line (which is copied) and its phenotypic expression (which is not). Memes have been around for two million years at most, but now they are catching up very quickly indeed and are rediscovering such "good tricks" as separating out the replicator itself from the products it makes possible; a trick that, among other advantages, avoids the accumulation of errors and allows for easier redesign of phenotypes.

Changes in this direction can be seen all around us. Suppose someone sings a song and someone else copies it--in this case the song itself is copied and errors accumulate with multiple copying. Compare this with the modern process of writing the song down in musical notation and then printing lots of perfect copies. In this case the printed music is copied, not the song, so errors do not accumulate. Also the number of copies made depends on the popularity of the song, just as (in biology) the number of genes passed on depends on the success of a phenotype. The same can be said of learning to make pumpkin soup by watching someone do it as opposed to working from a printed recipe. Other examples include cars produccd in factories, books printed in presses, and clothes Fashions that spread by competition between factory produced items. In each cause the instructions for making something are copied--not the thing itself. The same split occurs with software, such as Microsoft Word. This is copied with perfect fidelity in billions of computers around the world, but its success depends not on anyone seeing the code, but on the success of the documents it produces--this is a germ line/phenotype split if ever there was one.

Memes are already overtaking genes in their evolutionary innovations. Until now human brains (the original, slow and imperfect meme machines) have done most of the copying, varying, and selecting of memes, but now this is changing. Already, computers, especially via the lnternet, do much of the copying, and they are beginning to take on the task of producing variants and even of doing the selecting (think viruses, crawlers, automated essays, but especially search engines). I believe that we can only understand what is going on here by taking a meme's eye view and being realistic about our own, diminishing, role in the process.

Among Pigliucci's other "X"s is that memes have no obvious physical basis, but this is simply wrong. They are information that is copied--whether as variations in the airwaves of human speech or as something hard to pin down like a dance or a vague idea or (increasingly) as digital information stored in physical systems.

I won't pretend that memetics is easy, but Pigliucci's objections will not do. I think we'll find that memetics' greatest strength lies in its vision of culture as a vast parasitic system evolving increasingly quickly and using us human meme machines as a resource for its own inevitable expansion. The way it devours the planet's resources without regard for the consequences is now our greatest challenge.

Susan Blackmore is a PhD psychologist, writer, CSI Fellow, and researcher on consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences. Her book The Meme Machine (1999) has been translated into twelve, other languages. More recent books include the textbooks Consciousness: An Introduction (2003) and Conversations on Consciousness (2005).

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