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

360 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Philosophical Importance ofMemes 361
arresting and duly convicting the spy ring, and yet still be in the dark about
the medium of communication used. Was it radio? Microdots glued to documents?
Semaphore flags? Did the agent memorize the blueprint and simply
walk naked across the border, or did he have a verbal description in Morse
code hidden on a floppy disk in his computer?
In the end, we want to know the answers to all these questions, but in the
meantime there is a lot we can do in the substrate-neutral domain of pure
information transfer. In cognitive science, for example, the linguist Ray
Jackendoflf (1987, 1993) shows the surprising power of this method in his
ingenious deductions about the number of representational levels, and their
powers, that must go into such tasks as getting information from the light that
strikes our eyes all the way to places where we can talk about what we see.
He doesn't have to know the details of neurophysiology (though he's
interested, unlike many other linguists) in order to reach confident and
reliable conclusions about the structure of the processes, and the representations
they transform.
What we learn at this abstract level is scientifically important in its own
right. It is, indeed, the basis of everything important. Nobody has ever put it
better than the physicist Richard Feynman:
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of
science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song
or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how
to read the music. For instance, the scientific article may say, "The radioactive
phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half
in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine,
and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means
the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there
before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness?
Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my
mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced.
To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance,
that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms
of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain,
dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always
doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. [Feynman
1988, p. 244.]
4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF MEMES
Cultural 'evolution' is not really evolution at all if we are being fussy
and purist about our use of words, but there may be enough in common
between them to justify some comparison of principles.
—RICHARD DAWKINS 1986a, p. 216
There is no more reason to expect a cultural practice transmitted
between churchgoers to increase churchgoers' fitness than there is to
expect a similarly transmitted flu virus to increase fitness.
—GEORGE WILLIAMS 1992, p. 15
When Dawkins introduced memes in 1976, he described his innovation as
a literal extension of the classical Darwinian theory. He has since drawn in
his horns slightly. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986a, p. 196), he spoke of an
analogy "which I find inspiring but which can be taken too far if we are not
careful.'' Why did he retreat like this? Why, indeed, is the meme meme so
little discussed eighteen years after The Selfish Gene appeared?
In The Extended Phenotype (1982, p. 112), Dawkins replied forcefully to
the storm of criticism from sociobiologists and others, while conceding some
interesting disanalogies between genes and memes:
... memes are not strung out along linear chromosomes, and it is not clear
that they occupy and compete for discrete 'loci', or that they have identifiable
alleles'.... The copying process is probably much less precise than
in the case of genes.... Memes may partially blend with each other in a
way that genes do not.
But then (p. 112 ) he retreated further, apparently in the face of unnamed
and unquoted adversaries:
My own feeling is that its (the meme meme's) main value may lie not so
much in helping us to understand human culture as in sharpening our
perception of genetic natural selection. This is the only reason I am presumptuous
enough to discuss it, for I do not know enough about the
existing literature on human culture to make an authoritative contribution
to it.
I suggest that the meme's-eye view of what happened to the meme meme
is quite obvious: "humanist" minds have set up a particularly aggressive set
of filters against memes coming from "sociobiology," and once Dawkins was
identified as a sociobiologist, this almost guaranteed rejection of whatever