Darwin's Dangerous Idea (66 page)

and buildings and other inventions are also metnc vehicles (Campbell 1979).

appear into landfills and incinerators every day? The day may come when A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to nonhuman meme-evaluators suffice to select and arrange for the preservation place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind of particular memes, but for the time being, memes still depend at least to mind. A meme's existence depends on a physical embodiment in some indirectly on one or more of their vehicles' spending at least a brief, pupal medium; if all such physical embodiments are destroyed, that meme is stage in a remarkable sort of meme nest: a human mind.

extinguished. It may, of course, make a subsequent, independent reap-Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for pearance, just as dinosaur genes could, in principle, get together again in memes, and hence there is a considerable competition among memes for some distant future, but the dinosaurs they created and inhabited would not entrv into as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective be descendants of the original dinosaurs—or at least not any more directly force in the infosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been than we are. The fate of memes is similarly determined by whether copies met with great ingenuity. "Whose ingenuity?" you may want to ask, but by and copies of copies of them persist and multiply, and this depends on the now you should know that this is not always a good question; the ingenuity selective forces that act directly on the various physical vehicles that embody is
there
to appreciate, whatever its source. Like a mindless virus, a meme's them.

prospects depend on its design—not its "internal" design, whatever that Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend might be, but the design it shows the world, its phenotype, the way it affects on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in the things in its environment. The things in its environment are minds and other face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively permanent, memes.

and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but unless these are For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes under the protection of human conservators, they tend to dissolve in time.

have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions Manfred Eigen makes the same point about genes, though driving the anal-that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or pre-ogy in the other direction:

empting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for
faith,
which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical Consider, for instance, one of Mozart's compositions, one that is retained judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered, a stably in our concert repertoire. The reason for its retention is not that the dangerous idea (Dawkins 1976, p. 212); the memes for
tolerance, or free
notes of this work are printed in a particularly durable ink. The persistence
speech;
the meme for including a
warning in a chain letter
about the terrible with which a Mozart symphony reappears in our concert programmes is fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the
conspiracy-theory
solely a consequence of its high selection value. In order for this to retain meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good its effect, the work must be played again and again, the public must take evidence of the conspiracy: "Of course not—that's how powerful the note of it, and it must be continually re-evaluated in competition with conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good," and others "bad"; what other compositions. Stability of genetic information has similar causes.

they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to

[Eigen 1992, p. 15.]

disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, memetics predicts that conspiracy-theory memes will persist quite As with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than of the independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own longevity of individual vehicles. As we saw in note 4 of chapter 6, the survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even preservation of the Platonic memes, via a series of copies of copies, is a the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits particularly striking case of this. Although a few papyrus fragments of Plato's
frequency-dependent fitness:
it flourishes particularly in the company of texts roughly contemporaneous with the man himself still exist, the survival rationalistic memes. In a skeptic-poor world, the meme for faith does not of his memes owes almost nothing to the chemical stability of these frag-attract much attention, and hence tends to go dormant in minds, and hence is ments. Today's libraries contain thousands if not millions of physical copies seldom reintroduced into the infosphere. (Can we demonstrate classic (and translations) of Plato's
Republic,
and the key ancestors in the trans-predator-prey population boom-and-bust cycles between memes for faith and mission of this text turned to dust centuries ago.

memes for reason? Probably not, but it might be instructive to look, and ask Brute physical replication of vehicles is not enough to ensure meme why not.)

longevity. A few thousand hardbound copies of a new book can disappear Other concepts from population genetics transfer quite smoothly. Here is a with scarcely a trace in a few years, and who knows how many brilliant case of what a geneticist would call
linked loci;
two memes that happen to be letters to the editor, reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies, dis-physically tied together so that they tend always to replicate together, 350 THE CRANES OF CULTURE

ln vasion of the Body-Snatchers
3 51

a tendency that affects their chances. There is a magnificent ceremonial viduals and libraries. But imagine what would happen if poets could put their march, familiar to many of us, and generally beloved. It is stirring and bright poems on an international network, where anybody could read them or copy and grand—just the thing, you would think, to use for commencements, them for a penny, electronically transferred to the poet's royalty account. This weddings, and other festive occasions, perhaps driving "Pomp and Circum-could provide a steady source of income for many poets, he surmised. Quite stance" and the Wedding March from
Lohengrin
to near-extinction, were it independently of any aesthetic objections poets and poetry-lovers might have not for the fact that its musical meme is too tightly linked to its title meme, to poems embodied in electronic media, the obvious counterhypothesis arises which we all tend to think of as soon as we hear the music: Sir Arthur from population memetics. If such a network were established, no poetry-Sullivan's unusable masterpiece, "Behold the Lord High Executioner." If this lover would be willing to wade through thousands of electronic files filled march had no lyrics and were titled, say, "Koko's March," it would not be with doggerel, looking for the good poems; there would be a niche created for disqualified from use. But the actual title, comprising the first five words of various memes for poetry filters. One could subscribe, for a few pennies, to the lyrics, which are tightly locked to the melody, virtually guarantees
a
an editorial service that scanned the infosphere for good poems. Different
chain of thought
in most listeners that would be undesirable on almost any services, with different critical standards, would flourish, as would services festive occasion. This is the phenotypic effect that prevents the greater for reviewing all the different services— and services that screened, replication of this meme. If performances of
The Mikado
waned over the collected, formatted, and presented the works of the best poets in slender years, so that a time came when few if any people knew the lyrics of the electronic volumes which only a few would purchase. In other words, the march, let alone the silly story, the march might come back into its own as a memes for editing and criticism will find niches in any environment in the piece of ceremonial music without words—except for the darn title at the infosphere; they flourish because of the short supply and limited capacity of head of the score! It wouldn't look good on the program, would it, just before minds, whatever the transmission media between minds. Do you doubt this the Vice-Chancellor's address to the graduates?

prediction? If so, I'd like to discuss framing a suitable wager with you. Here This is actually just a vivid case of one of the most important phenomena once again, as we have seen so often in evolutionary thinking, explanation in the infosphere: the misfiltering of memes due to such linkages. There is proceeds by an assumption that the processes—whatever their media, and even a meme that names the phenomenon:
throwing out the baby with the
whatever the contingent zigs and zags of their particular trajectories—will
bathwater.
This book is largely intended to undo the unfortunate effects of home in on the forced moves and other Good Tricks in the relevant space.

misfiltering the Darwinian memes, a process that has been going on ever The structure of filters is complex and quick to respond to new challenges, since Darwin himself got confused about which were his best ideas (even but of course it doesn't always "work." The competition among memes to though some of his enemies agreed with them ) and which were his worst (

break through the filters leads to an "arms race" of ploy and counterploy, even though they seemed to perform yeoman service against certain per-with ever more elaborate "advertising" raised against ever more layers of nicious doctrines). (R. Richards 1987 provides a particularly fascinating selective filters. In the dignified ecology of academia, we don't call it history of the evolution of the ideas of evolution.) We all have filters of the advertising, but the same arms race is manifested in department letterheads, following sort:

"blind refereeing," the proliferation of specialized journals, book reviews, reviews of book reviews, and anthologies of "classic works." These filters are Ignore everything that appears in
X.

not even always intended to preserve the best. Philosophers might care to ask themselves, for instance, how often they are accomplices in increasing the For some people,
X
is the
National Geographic
or
Pravda;
for others, it is audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course
The New York Review of Books;
we all take our chances, counting on the needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even the freshmen can

"good" ideas to make it eventually through the stacks of filters of others into refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century the limelight of our attention.

philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody This structure of filters is itself a meme construction of considerable can see what is wrong with them.

robustness. John McCarthy, one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence (

and the coiner of its name, a meme with its own, independent base in the infosphere) once suggested to a humanist audience that electronic-mail 4. The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes networks could revolutionize the ecology of the poet. Only a handful of poets that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the can make their living by selling their poems, McCarthy noted, because poetry laws of libel.

books are slender, expensive volumes purchased by very few indi-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 ber the story near the end of chapter 4 about Francis Crick's jaundiced view positive feedback. In biology, this is manifested in such phenomena as the of population genetics as science? If population genetics just barely qualifies

"runaway sexual selection" that explains the long and cumbersome tail of the as science—and obsolete science at that—what chance is there for a true bird of paradise or the peacock (for the details, see Dawkins 1986a, pp. 195-science of memetics? Philosophers, some will say, may appreciate the (ap-220; Cronin 1991; Matt Ridley 1993). Dawkins (1986a, p. 219) provides an parent) insight to be found in a striking new perspective, but if you can't turn example from the world of publishing: "Best-seller lists of books are published it into actual science, with testable hypotheses, reliable formalizations, and weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies quantifiable results, what good is it, really? Dawkins himself has never to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue claimed to be founding a new scientific discipline of memetics. Is this of that fact. Publishers speak of a book 'taking off', and those publishers with because there is something wrong with the concept of a meme?

some knowledge of science even speak of a 'critical mass for take-off'."

What stands to a meme as DNA stands to a gene? Several commentators Meme vehicles inhabit our world alongside all the fauna and flora, large (see, e.g., Delius 1991) have argued for the identification of memes with and small. By and large they are "visible" only to the human species, how-complex brain-structures, parallel to the identification of genes with complex ever. Consider the environment of the average New York City pigeon, whose structures of DNA. But as we have already seen, it is a mistake to
identify
eyes and ears are assaulted every day by approximately as many words, genes with their vehicles in DNA. The idea that evolution is an algorithmic pictures, and other signs and symbols as assault each human New Yorker.

process is the idea that it must have a useful description in substrate-neutral These physical meme vehicles may impinge importantly on the pigeon's terms. As George Williams proposed many years ago (1966, p. 25): "In welfare, but not by virtue of the memes they carry—it means nothing to the evolutionary theory, a gene could be defined as any hereditary
information
pigeon that it is under a page of
The National Enquirer,
not
The New York