The Meme Machine (3 page)
I would have been content, then, if the meme had done its work of simply persuading my readers that the gene was only a special case: that its role in the play of Universal Darwinism could be filled by any entity in the universe answering to the definition of Replicator. The original didactic purpose of the meme was the negative one of cutting the selfish gene down to size. I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right – either to criticise it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.
But I was always open to the possibility that the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind, and I did not know how ambitious such a thesis might turn out to be. Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme. I do not know whether she will be judged too ambitious in this enterprise, and I would even fear for her if I did not know her redoubtable qualities as a fighter. Redoubtable she is, and hard-nosed too, but at the same time her style is light and personable. Her thesis undermines our most cherished illusions (as she would see them)
of individual identity and personhood, yet she comes across as the kind of individual person you would wish to know. As one reader I am grateful for the courage, dedication and skill she has put into her difficult task of memetic engineering, and I am delighted to recommend her book.
Preface
This book owes its existence to an illness. In September 1995 I caught a nasty virus, and struggled to keep working until I was finally forced to give up and take to my bed. I stayed there for many months, unable to walk more than a few steps, unable to talk for more than a few minutes, unable to use my computer – in fact unable to do anything but read and think.
During this time I began on my pile of ‘urgent books I must read this week’ which had long been oppressing me. One of them was Dan Dennett’s latest book
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
At about the same time one of my PhD students, Nick Rose, wrote me an essay on ‘Memes and Consciousness’. Somehow the meme meme got to me. I had read Dawkins’s
The Selfish Gene
many years before but, I suppose, had dismissed the idea of memes as nothing more than a bit of fun. Suddenly I realised that here was a powerful idea, capable of transforming our understanding of the human mind – and I hadn’t even noticed it. I then read everything I could find on memes. Since I had to refuse all invitations to give lectures, take part in television programmes, go to conferences, or write papers, I could devote myself properly to the study of memes.
Most of the ideas in this book came to me while I was lying in bed during those months, especially between January and March 1996. As I gradually got better I began to make extensive notes. Some two years after I first became ill I was well enough to work again, and decided to keep on saying no to all those invitations, and to write this book instead.
I would like to thank the illness for making it possible, and my children Emily and Jolyon for not, apparently, minding that their mother was uselessly lying in bed all the time. I would like to thank my partner Adam Hart–Davis for not only looking after me when I was ill, but for encouraging my enthusiasm for memes in every way possible and for putting ‘the book’ first.
Dan Dennett was one of the first to hear my ideas and I thank him for his ‘avuncular advice’. Several people helped greatly by reading earlier drafts of all or part of the book. They are Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett,
Derek Gatherer, Adam Hart–Davis, Euan MacPhail, Nick Rose, and my editor Michael Rodgers who has given me much sound advice and encouragement. Helena Cronin helped enormously by inviting me to lecture on memes and putting me in touch with many helpful critics. Finally I would like to thank the Perrott–Warrick Fund for their financial support for the research on sleep paralysis and the paranormal discussed in
Chapter 14
. Without all this help, these particular memes would never have come together.
SJB
Bristol
October1998
Contents
12 A memetic theory of altruism
CHAPTER 1
Strange creatures
We humans are strange creatures. There is no doubt that our bodies evolved by natural selection just as other animals’ did. Yet we differ from all other creatures in many ways. For a start we speak. We believe ourselves to be the most intelligent species on the planet. We are extraordinarily widespread and extremely versatile in our ways of making a living. We wage wars, believe in religions, bury our dead and get embarrassed about sex. We watch television, drive cars and eat ice cream. We have had such a devastating impact upon the ecosystems of our planet that we appear to be in danger of destroying everything on which our lives depend. One of the problems of being a human is that it is rather hard to look at humans with an unprejudiced eye.
On the one hand, we are obviously animals comparable with any others. We have lungs, hearts and brains made of living cells; we eat and breathe and reproduce. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can successfully explain how we, along with the rest of life on this planet, came to be here, and why we all share so many characteristics. On the other hand, we behave quite differently from other animals. Now that biology has so successfully explained much of our similarity with other creatures we need to ask the opposite question. What makes us so different? Could it be our superior intelligence, our consciousness, our language, or what?
A common answer is that we are simply more intelligent than any other species. Yet the notion of intelligence is extremely slippery, with interminable arguments about how to define it, how to measure it, and to what extent it is inherited. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has provided some nice surprises for those who thought they knew what makes human intelligence so special.
In the early days of AI, researchers thought that if they could teach a computer to play chess they would have reproduced one of the highest forms of human intelligence. In those days the idea that a computer could ever play well, let alone beat a Grand Master, was unthinkable. Yet now most home computers come with passable chess programmes already installed, and in 1997 the program
Deep Blue
beat World Champion Garry Kasparov, ending unquestioned human supremacy at the game.
Computers may not play chess in the same way as humans, but their success shows how wrong we can be about intelligence. Clearly, what we thought were human beings’ most special capabilities may not be.
Quite the opposite goes for some apparently quite unintelligent things like cleaning the house, digging the garden or making a cup of tea. Time and again AI researchers have tried to build robots to carry out such tasks and been defeated. The first problem is that the tasks all require vision. There is a popular (though possibly apocryphal) story about Marvin Minsky at
MIT
(the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that he once gave his graduate students the problem of vision as a summer project. Decades later the problem of computer vision is still just that – a problem. We humans can see so effortlessly that we cannot begin to imagine how complex the process has to be. And in any case, this kind of intelligence cannot distinguish us from other animals because they can see too.
If intelligence does not provide simple answers perhaps consciousness might. Many people believe that human consciousness is unique and is responsible for making us human. Yet scientists cannot even define the term ‘consciousness’. Everyone knows what their own consciousness is like but they cannot share that knowledge with anyone else. This troublesome fact – the subjectivity of consciousness – may explain why for most of this century the whole topic of consciousness was more or less banned from scientific discussion. Now at last it has become fashionable again, but scientists and philosophers cannot even agree on what an explanation of consciousness would look like. Some say that the ‘Hard Problem’ of subjectivity is quite different from any other scientific problem and needs a totally new kind of solution, while others are sure that when we fully understand brain function and behaviour the problem of consciousness will have disappeared.
Some people believe in the existence of a human soul or spirit that transcends the physical brain and explains human uniqueness. With the decline in religious belief fewer and fewer people intellectually accept that view, yet most of us continue to think of ourselves as a little conscious ‘me’ inside our brain; a ‘me’ who sees the world, makes the decisions, directs the actions and has responsibility for them.
As we shall see later, this view has to be wrong. Whatever the brain is doing it does not seem to need help from an extra, magical self. Various parts of the brain carry on their tasks independently of each other and countless different things are always going on at once. We may feel as though there is a central place inside our heads in to which the sensations come and from which we consciously make the decisions. Yet this place simply does not exist. Clearly, something is very wrong with our ordinary
view of our conscious selves. From this confused viewpoint we cannot say with certainty that other animals are not conscious, nor that consciousness is what makes us unique. So what does?
What makes us different?
The thesis of this book is that what makes us different is our ability to imitate.
Imitation comes naturally to us humans. Have you ever sat and blinked, or waved, or ‘goo gooed’, or even just smiled, at a baby? What happens? Very often they blink too, or wave, or smile back at you. We do it so easily, even as an infant. We copy each other all the time. Like seeing, it comes so effortlessly that we hardly think about it. We certainly do not think of it as being something very clever. Yet, as we shall see, it is fantastically clever.
Certainly, other animals do not take naturally to it. Blink, or wave, or smile at your dog or cat and what happens? She might purr, wag her tail, twitch, or walk away, but you can be pretty sure she will not imitate you. You can teach a cat, or rat, to beg neatly for its food by progressively rewarding it, but you cannot teach it by demonstrating the trick yourself – nor can another cat or rat. Years of detailed research on animal imitation has led to the conclusion that it is extremely rare (I shall return to this in
Chapter 4
). Though we may think of mother cats as teaching their kittens to hunt, or groom, or use the cat door, they do not do it by demonstration or imitation. Parent birds ‘teach’ their babies to fly more by pushing them out of the nest and giving them the chance to try it than by demonstrating the required skills for them to copy.
There is a special appeal to stories of animals copying human behaviour, and pet owners are fond of such tales. I read on the Internet about a cat who learned to flush the toilet and soon taught a second cat the same trick. Now the two of them sit together on the cistern flushing away. A more reliable anecdote was told by Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Rutgers University. She works with bottlenose dolphins, who are known to be able to copy vocal sounds and artificial whistles, as well as simple actions (Bauer and Johnson 1994; Reiss and McCowan 1993). She trained the dolphins by giving them fish as a reward and also by a ‘time out’ procedure for punishment. If they did the wrong thing she would walk away from the water’s edge and wait for one minute before returning to the pool. One day she threw a fish to one of the dolphins but had
accidentally left on some spiky bits of fin. Immediately the dolphin turned, swam away, and waited for a minute at the other side of the pool.
That story touched me because I could not help thinking of the dolphins as
understanding
the action, as having intelligence and consciousness and intentionality like ours. But we cannot even define these things, let alone be sure that the dolphin was using them in this apparent act of reciprocation. What we can see is that it
imitated
Dr Reiss in an appropriate way. We are so oblivious to the cleverness of imitation that we do not even notice how rare it is in other animals and how often we do it ourselves.
Perhaps more telling is that we do not have separate words for radically different kinds of learning. We use the same word ‘learning’ for simple association or ‘classical conditioning’ (which almost all animals can do), for learning by trial and error or ‘operant conditioning’ (which many animals can do), and for learning by imitation (which almost none can do). I want to argue that the supreme ease with which we are capable of imitation, has blinded us to this simple fact – that
imitation
is what makes us special.
Imitation and the meme
When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own. We might call this thing an idea, an instruction, a behaviour, a piece of information … but if we are going to study it we shall need to give it a name.
Fortunately, there is a name. It is the ‘meme’.
The term ‘meme’ first appeared in 1976, in Richard Dawkins’s best–selling book
The Selfish Gene.
In that book Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist, popularised the increasingly influential view that evolution is best understood in terms of the competition between genes. Earlier in the twentieth century, biologists had blithely talked about evolution occurring for the ‘good of the species’ without worrying about the exact mechanisms involved, but in the 1960s serious problems with this view began to be recognised (Williams 1966). For example, if a group of organisms all act for the good of the group then one individual who does not can easily exploit the rest. He will then leave more descendants who in turn do not act for the group, and the group benefit will be lost. On the more modern ‘gene’s eye view’, evolution may
appear
to proceed in the interests of the individual, or for the good of the species, but in fact it is all driven by the
competition between genes. This new viewpoint provided a much more powerful understanding of evolution and has come to be known as ‘selfish–gene theory’.