Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

352 THE CRANES OF CULTURE Could There Be a Science of Memetics? 353
A related phenomenon in the competition of memes for our attention is
positive feedback. In biology, this is manifested in such phenomena as the
"runaway sexual selection" that explains the long and cumbersome tail of the
bird of paradise or the peacock (for the details, see Dawkins 1986a, pp. 195-
220; Cronin 1991; Matt Ridley 1993). Dawkins (1986a, p. 219) provides an
example from the world of publishing: "Best-seller lists of books are published
weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies
to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue
of that fact. Publishers speak of a book 'taking off', and those publishers with
some knowledge of science even speak of a 'critical mass for take-off'."
Meme vehicles inhabit our world alongside all the fauna and flora, large
and small. By and large they are "visible" only to the human species, however.
Consider the environment of the average New York City pigeon, whose
eyes and ears are assaulted every day by approximately as many words,
pictures, and other signs and symbols as assault each human New Yorker.
These physical meme vehicles may impinge importantly on the pigeon's
welfare, but not by virtue of the memes they carry—it means nothing to the
pigeon that it is under a page of The National Enquirer, not The New York
Times, that it finds a crumb. To human beings, on the other hand, each meme
vehicle is a potential friend or foe, bearing a gift that will enhance our powers
or a gift horse that will distract us, burden our memories, derange our
judgment.
3. COULD THERE BE A SCIENCE OF MEMETICS?
The scope of the undertaking strikes me as staggering. But more than
this, if one accepts the evolutionary perspective, attempts to discuss
science (or any other sort of conceptual activity) become much more
difficult, so difficult as to produce total paralysis.
—DAVID HULL 1982, p. 299
Memes are capable of instructing, not protein synthesis as genes do, but
behaviour. However, genes can do that too indirectly through protein
synthesis. On the other hand meme replication, by involving
neurostructural modifications, is invariably associated with the induction
of protein synthesis.
—JUAN DELIUS 1991, p. 84
This is all very enticing, but we have been glossing over a host of complications.
I can hear a chorus of skepticism building in the wings. Remem-
ber the story near the end of chapter 4 about Francis Crick's jaundiced view
of population genetics as science? If population genetics just barely qualifies
as science—and obsolete science at that—what chance is there for a true
science of memetics? Philosophers, some will say, may appreciate the (apparent)
insight to be found in a striking new perspective, but if you can't turn
it into actual science, with testable hypotheses, reliable formalizations, and
quantifiable results, what good is it, really? Dawkins himself has never
claimed to be founding a new scientific discipline of memetics. Is this
because there is something wrong with the concept of a meme?
What stands to a meme as DNA stands to a gene? Several commentators
(see, e.g., Delius 1991) have argued for the identification of memes with
complex brain-structures, parallel to the identification of genes with complex
structures of DNA. But as we have already seen, it is a mistake to identify
genes with their vehicles in DNA. The idea that evolution is an algorithmic
process is the idea that it must have a useful description in substrate-neutral
terms. As George Williams proposed many years ago (1966, p. 25): "In
evolutionary theory, a gene could be defined as any hereditary information
[emphasis added] for which there is favorable or unfavorable selection bias
equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change." The
importance of the separation between information and vehicle is even easier
to discern in the case of memes. 5 The obvious problem noted by all is that it
is very unlikely—but not quite impossible—that there is a uniform "brain
language" in which information is stored in different human brains, and this
makes brains very different from chromosomes. Geneticists have recently
identified a chromosomal structure they call the homeobox; in spite of
differences, this structure is identifiable in widely separated species of
animals—perhaps in them all—so it is very ancient, and it plays a central role
in embryological development. We may be startled at first to learn that a gene
identified as playing a major role in eye development in the homeobox of
mice has almost the same codon spelling as a gene dubbed (for its phenotypic
effect) eyeless when it was identified in the homeobox of the fruitfly,
Drosophila. But we would be even more flabbergasted were we to discover
that the brain-cell complex that stored the original meme for bifocals in
Benjamin Franklin's brain was the same as, or very similar to, the brain-cell
complex that is called upon today to store the meme for bifocals whenever
any child in Asia, Africa, or Europe first learns about them—by reading
about them, seeing them on television, or noticing them on a parent's nose.
What this reflection makes vivid is the fact that what is preserved and
transmitted in cultural evolution is informa-
5 For a good discussion of the embattled relation between gene talk and molecule talk, see Waters
1990.