susan blackmore: memes
If memes are replicators, then they, like genes, compete to get copied for their own sake. Memes are best thought about not by analogy with genes but as new replicators, with their own ways of surviving and getting copied. 2019 Out with Folk Psychology, In with What? Without Darwin and neo-Darwinism, you cannot answer questions like “Why do … The genes, then, essentially compete against one another, and those that are most proficient at being passed to the next generation gradually prosper.Few scientists would want to abandon Darwinian theory. We are different from all other animals because we alone, at some time in our far past, became capable of widespread generalized imitation. As with the evolution of that sophisticated gene-copying apparatus, we might expect better meme-copying machinery to have appeared—and it has. All these are memes (or conglomerations of memes), because they are copied from person to person and vie for survival in the limited space of human memories and culture.Thinking memetically gives rise to a new vision of the world, one that, when you “get” it, transforms everything. By choosing the best imitator for a mate, women help propagate the genes needed to copy religious rituals, colorful clothes, singing, dancing, painting and so on. Memes, like genes, are replicators. Newly arisen memes can spread through a population by imitation in a single generation, faster than genetic evolution can respond. Fidelity of spoken memes is higher for those built from discrete units of sound (phonemes) and divided into words—a kind of digitization that reduces errors in copying. By this process, the legacy of past memetic evolution becomes embedded in the structures of our brains and we become musical, artistic and religious creatures.
Can it lead to testable predictions or do any real scientific work? The memes take hold of the leash.In a final twist, it would pay for people to mate with the most proficient imitators, because by and large, good imitators have the best survival skills. Questions about the origins and function of language have been so contentious that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any more speculation on the issue. In this view, memes would be slaves to the genes that built the brains that copy them, prospering only by helping those genes to proliferate. Unlike religions, the great meme-complex of science includes methods for throwing out ideas that are vacuous, nonsensical or plain wrong. In addition, the idea that language could spontaneously emerge in a population of imitating creatures could be tested with simulations of noisy imitating robots.Memetics is a new science, struggling to find its place and with many critics. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. This is how we got our big brains, our language and all our other peculiar “surplus” abilities.Memetics neatly resolves the mystery of the human brain’s vastness. www.sciam.comHuman beings are strange animals. I call the process by which memes control gene selection “memetic drive”: memes compete among themselves and evolve rapidly in some direction, and genes must respond by improving selective imitation—increasing brain size and power along the way.
Through this effect, sexual selection, guided by memes, could have played _a role in creating our big brains. See Website maintained by Sue Blackmore. Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford coined the word in 1976, in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene. Our big brains are selective imitation devices built by and for the memes as much as for the genes.Language could have been another exquisite creation of this same process of meme-gene coevolution.
Instead we are part of a vast evolutionary process in which memes are the evolving replicators and we are the meme machines.This new vision is stunning and scary: stunning because now one simple theory encompasses all of human culture and creativity as well as biological evolution; scary because it seems to reduce great swathes of our humanity, of our activities and our intellectual lives, to a mindless phenomenon. If it cannot, memetics is worthless.I believe that the idea of the meme as replicator is what has been missing from our theories of human evolution and that memetics will prove immensely useful for explaining our unique attributes and the rise of our elaborate cultures and societies.
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