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

356 THE CRANES OF CULTURE Could There Be a Science ofMemetics? 357
10 (p. 293), that species are invisible without a modicum of stasis, but
remember, too, that this is an epistemological, not a metaphysical, point: if
species weren't rather static, we couldn't find out and organize the facts
needed to do certain kinds of science; that wouldn't show, however, that the
phenomena weren't governed by natural selection. Similarly, the conclusion
here would be a pessimistic epistemological conclusion: even if memes do
originate by a process of "descent with modification," our chances of
cranking out a science that charts that descent are slim.
Once the worry is put in that form, it points to what may seem to be a
partial solution. One of the most striking features of cultural evolution is the
ease, reliability, and confidence with which we can identify commonalities in
spite of the vast differences in underlying media. What do Romeo and Juliet
and (the film, let's say, of) West Side Story have in common (Dennett 1987b)?
Not a string of English characters, not even a sequence of propositions (in
English or French or German... translation). What is in common, of course, is
not a syntactic property or system of properties but a semantic property or
system of properties: the story, not the text; the characters and their
personalities, not their names and speeches. What we so readily identify as the
same thing in both cases is the predicament that both William Shakespeare
and Arthur Laurents (who wrote the book for West Side Story) want us to
think about. So it is only at the level of intentional objects, once we have
adopted the intentional stance, that we can describe these common
properties. 7 When we do adopt the stance, the sought-for common features
often stick out like sore thumbs.
Does this help? Yes, but we must be careful about a problem we have
already identified in several different guises: the problem of how to tell
plagiarism (or respectful borrowing) from convergent evolution. As Hull
(1982, p. 300) points out, we do not want to consider two identical cultural
items as instances of the same meme unless they are related by descent. (The
genes for octopus eyes are not the same genes as those for dolphin eyes,
however similar the eyes may appear.) This is apt to create a host of illusions,
or just undecidability, for cultural evolutionists whenever they attempt to
trace the memes for Good Tricks. The more abstract the level at which we
identify the memes, the harder it is to tell convergent evolution from descent.
We happen to know, because they told us, that the creators of West Side Story
(Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Leonard Bernstein) got the idea from
Romeo and Juliet, but if they had been carefully secretive about this, we
might well have thought they had simply
7. Cf. the parallel point about the welcome—indeed, indispensable—power of adopting
the intentional stance as a scientific tactic in heteropbenomenology, the objective science
of consciousness (Dennett 1991a).
reinvented a wheel, rediscovered a cultural "universal" that will appear, on its
own, in almost any cultural evolution. The more purely semantic our
principles of identification are—or, in other words, the less bound they are to
particular forms of expression—the harder it is to trace descent with
confidence. (Remember that it was peculiarities in the particular form of
expression that gave Otto Neugebauer his crucial clue in deciphering the
mystery of the Greek translation of the Babylonian ephemeris in chapter 6.)
This is the same epistemological problem, in the science of culture, that
taxonomists confront when they try to sort out homology from analogy,
ancestral from derived characters, in cladistic analysis (Mark Ridley 1985).
Ideally, in the imagined field of cultural cladistics, one would want to find
"characters"—literally, alphabetic characters—that are functionally optional
choices within a huge class of possible alternatives. If we found whole
speeches by Tony and Maria that suspiciously replicated the words and
phrases of Romeo and Juliet, we wouldn't need autobiographical clues from
Laurents, Robbins, or Bernstein. We wouldn't hesitate to declare that the
coincidence of the words was no coincidence; Design Space is too Vast to
make that credible.
In general, however, we can't count on such discoveries in our attempts at a
science of cultural evolution. Suppose, for instance, we want to argue that
such institutions as agriculture or monarchy, or even such particular practices
as tattooing or shaking hands, descend from a common cultural ancestor
instead of having been independently reinvented. There is a tradeoff. To the
extent that we have to go to quite abstract functional (or semantic) levels to
find our common features, we lose the capacity to tell homology from
analog)', descent from convergent evolution. This has always been tacitly
appreciated by students of culture, of course, quite independently of
Darwinian thinking. Consider what you can deduce from potsherds, for
instance. Anthropologists looking for evidence of shared culture are, quite
properly, more impressed by common idiosyncrasies of decorative style than
by common functional shapes. Or consider the fact that two widely separated
cultures both used boats; this is no evidence at all of a shared cultural
heritage. If both cultures were to paint eyes on the bows of their boats, it
would be much more interesting, but still a rather obvious move in the game
of design. If both cultures were to paint, say, blue hexagons on the bows of
their boats, this would be telling indeed.
The anthropologist Dan Sperber, who has thought a great deal about
cultural evolution, thinks there is a problem with any use of abstract, intentional
objects as the anchors for a scientific project. Such abstract objects,
he claims,
do not directly enter into causal relations. What caused your indigestion
was not the Mornay sauce recipe in the abstract, but your host having read