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

354 THE CRANES OF CULTURE Could There Be a Science of Memetics? 355
Hon—in a media-neutral, language-neutral sense. Thus the meme is primarily
a semantic classification, not a syntactic classification that might be
directly observable in "brain language" or natural language.
In the case of genes, we are blessed by a gratifyingly strong alignment of
semantic and syntactic identity: there is a single genetic language, in which
meaning is (roughly) preserved across all species. Still, it is important to
distinguish semantic types from syntactic types. In the Library of Babel we
identify a set of syntactic text-variants as all falling into the Moby Dick
galaxy by virtue of what they tell us about, not their syntactic similarity.
(Think of all the different translations of Moby Dick into other languages, and
also the English abridgments, outlines, and study aids—to say nothing of the
versions in film and other media!) Our interest in identifying and reidentifying
genes over the evolutionary ages is similarly primarily because of
the uniformity of the phenotypic effects—what they are "about" (such as
making hemoglobin, or eyes). Our ability to rely on their syntactic identifiability
in DNA is a recent advance, and even when we cannot conceivably
avail ourselves of it (for instance, in deducing facts about genetic changes
from what we can observe in the fossil record of species that have left no
DNA for us to "read"), we can still confidently speak of the genes—the
information—that must have been preserved or transmitted.
It is conceivable, but hardly likely and certainly not necessary, that we will
someday discover a striking identity between brain structures storing the
same information, allowing us to identify memes syntactically. Even if we
encountered such an unlikely blessing, however, we should cling to the more
abstract and fundamental concept of memes, since we already know that
meme transmission and storage can proceed indefinitely in noncerebral
forms—in artifacts of every kind—that do not depend on a shared language
of description. If ever there was "multimedia" transmission and transformation
of information, it is cultural transmission and transformation. So some of
the varieties of reductionistic triumph we have come to expect in biology—
discovering exactly how many different ways hemoglobin is "spelled" in all
the species in the world, for instance—are almost certainly ruled out in any
science of culture, notwithstanding the prophecies of a golden age of mindreading
one sometimes hears these days from the ideologues of neuroscience.
This would thwart only some kinds of memetic science, but isn't the
situation actually worse than that? Darwinian evolution, as we have seen,
depends on very high-fidelity copying—almost but not quite perfect copying,
thanks to the exquisite proofreading and duplication machinery of the DNAreaders
that accompany the DNA texts. Raise the mutation rate just a bit too
high and evolution goes haywire; natural selection can no longer work to
guarantee fitness over the long run. Minds (or brains), on the other hand,
aren't much like photocopying machines at all. On the contrary,
instead of just dutifully passing on their messages, correcting most of the
typos as they go, brains seem to be designed to do just the opposite: to
transform, invent, interpolate, censor, and generally mix up the "input" before
yielding any "output." Isn't one of the hallmarks of cultural evolution and
transmission the extraordinarily high rate of mutation and recombination? We
seldom pass on a meme unaltered, it seems, unless we are particularly literalminded
rote learners. (Are walking encyclopedias hidebound?) Moreover, as
Steven Pinker has stressed (personal communication), much of the mutation
that happens to memes—how much is not clear—is manifestly directed
mutation: "Memes such as the theory of relativity are not the cumulative
product of millions of random (undirected) mutations of some original idea,
but each brain in the chain of production added huge dollops of value to the
product in a nonrandom way." Indeed, the whole power of minds as meme
nests comes from what a biologist would call lineage-crossing or
anastomosis (the coming back together of separating gene-pools). As Gould
(1991a, p. 65) points out, "The basic topologies of biological and cultural
change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant
divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct,
are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is,
perhaps, the major source of cultural change."
Moreover, when memes come into contact with each other in a mind, they
have a marvelous capacity to become adjusted to each other, swiftly changing
their phenotypic effects to fit the circumstances—and it is the recipe for the
new phenotype that then gets replicated when the mind broadcasts or
publishes the results of this mixing. For instance, my three-year-old
grandson, who loves construction machinery, recently blurted out a fine
mutation on a nursery rhyme: "Pop! goes the diesel." He didn't even notice
what he had done, but I, to whom the phrase would never have occurred,
have now seen to it that this mutant meme gets replicated. As in the case of
jokes discussed earlier, this modest moment of creativity is a mixture of
serendipity and appreciation, distributed over several minds, no one of which
gets to claim the authorship of special creation. It is a sort of Lamarckian
replication of acquired characteristics, as Gould and others have suggested. 6
The very creativity and activity of human minds as temporary homes for
memes seems to guarantee that lines of descent are hopelessly muddled, and
that phenotypes (the "body designs" of memes) change so fast that there's no
keeping track of the "natural kinds." Recall, from chapter
6. Usually, the "charge" that cultural evolution is Lamarckian is a deep confusion, as Hull
(1982) carefully points out, but in this version it is undeniable—though also not a
"charge." In particular, the entity that exhibits the Lamarckian talent of passing on an
acquired characteristic is not the human agent, but the meme itself.