The Meme Machine

The Meme Machine

SUSAN BLACKMORE

About the Author

Susan Blackmore
is a Reader in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where she lectures on the psychology of consciousness. Dr Blackmore’s research interests include near–death experiences, the effects of meditation, why people believe in the paranormal, evolutionary psychology, and the theory of memetics. She is the current Perrott–Warrick Researcher, studying psychic phenomena in borderline states of consciousness, and has received the Distinguished Skeptic’s Award from CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Susan Blackmore writes for several magazines, has an occasional column in the
Independent
newspaper, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television.

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Copyright © Susan Blackmore, 1999
Foreword copyright © Richard Dawkins, 1999
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First published 1999
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 2000
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ISBN-13: 978-0192862129
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For Adam

Foreword

by Richard Dawkins

As an undergraduate I was chatting to a friend in the Balliol College lunch queue. He regarded me with increasingly quizzical amusement, then asked: ‘Have you just been with Peter Brunet?’ I had indeed, though I couldn’t guess how he knew. Peter Brunet was our much loved tutor, and I had come hotfoot from a tutorial hour with him. ‘I thought so’, my friend laughed. ‘You are talking just like him; your voice sounds exactly like his.’ I had, if only briefly, ‘inherited’ intonations and manners of speech from an admired, and now greatly missed, teacher. Years later, when I became a tutor myself, I taught a young woman who affected an unusual habit. When asked a question which required deep thought, she would screw her eyes tight shut, jerk her head down to her chest and then freeze for up to half a minute before looking up, opening her eyes, and answering the question with fluency and intelligence. I was amused by this, and did an imitation of it to divert my colleagues after dinner. Among them was a distinguished Oxford philosopher. As soon as he saw my imitation, he immediately said: ‘That’s Wittgenstein! Is her surname _____ by any chance?’ Taken aback, I said that it was. ‘I thought so’, said my colleague. ‘Both her parents are professional philosophers and devoted followers of Wittgenstein.’ The gesture had passed from the great philosopher, via one or both of her parents to my pupil. I suppose that, although my further imitation was done in jest, I must count myself a fourth-generation transmitter of the gesture. And who knows where Wittgenstein got it?

The fact that we unconsciously imitate others, especially our parents, those in quasi-parental roles, or those we admire, is familiar enough. But is it really credible that imitation could become the basis of a major theory of the evolution of the human mind and the explosive inflation of the human brain, even of what it means to be a conscious self? Could imitation have been the key to what set our ancestors apart from all other animals? I would never have thought so, but Susan Blackmore in this book makes a tantalisingly strong case.

Imitation is how a child learns its particular language rather than some
other language. It is why people speak more like their own parents than like other people’s parents. It is why regional accents, and on a longer timescale separate languages, exist. It is why religions persist along family lines rather than being chosen afresh in every generation. There is at least a superficial analogy to the longitudinal transmission of genes down generations, and to the horizontal transmission of genes in viruses. Without prejudging the issue of whether the analogy is a fruitful one, if we want even to talk about it we had better have a name for the entity that might play the role of gene in the transmission of words, ideas, faiths, mannerisms and fashions. Since 1976, when the word was coined, increasing numbers of people have adopted the name ‘meme’ for the postulated gene analogue.

The compilers of the
Oxford English Dictionary
operate a sensible criterion for deciding whether a new word shall be canonised by inclusion. The aspirant word must be commonly used without needing to be defined and without its coinage being attributed whenever it is used. To ask the metamemetic question, how widespread is ‘meme’? A far from ideal, but nevertheless easy and convenient method of sampling the meme pool, is provided by the World Wide Web and the ease with which it may be searched. I did a quick search of the Web on the day of writing this, which happened to be 29 August 1998. ‘Meme’ is mentioned about half a million times, but that is a ridiculously high figure, obviously confounded by various acronyms and the French
même.
The adjectival form ‘memetic’, however, is genuinely exclusive, and it clocked up 5042 mentions. To put this number into perspective, I compared a few other recently coined words or fashionable expressions. Spin doctor (or spin-doctor) gets 1412 mentions, dumbing down 3905, docudrama (or docu-drama) 2848, sociobiology 6679, catastrophe theory 1472, edge of chaos 2673, wannabee 2650, zippergate 1752, studmuffin 776, post-structural (or poststructural) 577, extended phenotype 515, exaptation 307. Of the 5042 mentions of memetic, more than 90 per cent make no mention of the origin of the word, which suggests that it does indeed meet the
OED’s
criterion. And, as Susan Blackmore tells us, the
Oxford English Dictionary
now does contain the following definition:

meme An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.

Further searching of the Internet reveals a newsgroup talking shop, ‘alt.memetics’, which has received about 12000 postings during the past year. There are on-line articles on, among many other things, ‘The New Meme’, ‘Meme, Counter-meme’, ‘Memetics: a Systems Metabiology’,
‘Memes, and Grinning Idiot Press’, ‘Memes, Metamemes and Politics’, ‘Cryonics, religions and memes’, ‘Selfish Memes and the evolution of cooperation’, and ‘Running down the Meme’. There are separate Web pages on ‘Memetics’, ‘Memes’, ‘The C Memetic Nexus’, ‘Meme theorists on the Web’, ‘Meme of the week’, ‘Meme Central’, ‘Arkuat’s Meme Workshop’, ‘Some pointers and a short introduction to memetics’, ‘Memetics Index’ and ‘Meme Gardening Page’. There is even a new religion (tongue-in-cheek, I
think),
called the ‘Church of Virus’, complete with its own list of Sins and Virtues, and its own patron saint (Saint Charles Darwin, canonised as ‘perhaps the most influential memetic engineer of the modern era’) and I was alarmed to discover a passing reference to ‘St Dawkin’.

Susan Blackmore’s book is preceded by two others entirely devoted to the subject of memes and both good in their different ways: Richard Brodie’s
Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme,
and Aaron Lynch’s
Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society.
Most significant of all, the distinguished philosopher Daniel Dennett has adopted the idea of the meme, building it in as a cornerstone of his theory of mind, as developed in his two great books
Consciousness Explained,
and
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Memes travel longitudinally down generations, but they travel horizontally too, like viruses in an epidemic. Indeed, it is largely horizontal epidemiology that we are studying when we measure the spread of words like ‘memetic’, ‘docudrama’ or ‘studmuffin’ over the Internet. Crazes among schoolchildren provide particularly tidy examples. When I was about nine, my father taught me to fold a square of paper to make an origami Chinese junk. It was a remarkable feat of artificial embryology, passing through a distinctive series of intermediate stages: catamaran with two hulls, cupboard with doors, picture in a frame, and finally the junk itself, fully seaworthy or at least bathworthy, complete with deep hold, and two flat decks each surmounted by a large, square-rigged sail. The point of the story is that I went back to school and infected my friends with the skill, and it then spread around the school with the speed of the measles and pretty much the same epidemiological time-course. I do not know whether the epidemic subsequently jumped to other schools (a boarding school is a somewhat isolated backwater of the meme pool). But I do know that my father himself originally picked up the Chinese Junk meme during an almost identical epidemic at the same school 25 years earlier. The earlier virus was launched by the school matron. Long after the old matron’s departure, I had reintroduced her meme to a new cohort of small boys.

Before leaving the Chinese Junk, let me use it to make one more point. A favourite objection to the meme/gene analogy is that memes, if they exist at all, are transmitted with too low fidelity to perform a gene-like role in any realistically Darwinian selection process. The difference between high-fidelity genes and low-fidelity memes is assumed to follow from the fact that genes, but not memes, are digital. I am sure that the details of Wittgenstein’s mannerism were far from faithfully reproduced when I imitated my pupil’s imitation of her parents’ imitation of Wittgenstein. The form and timing of the tic undoubtedly mutated over the generations, as in the childhood game of Chinese Whispers (Americans call it Telephone).

Suppose we assemble a line of children. A picture of, say, a Chinese junk is shown to the first child, who is asked to draw it. The drawing, but not the original picture, is then shown to the second child, who is asked to make her own drawing of it. The second child’s drawing is shown to the third child, who draws it again, and so the series proceeds until the twentieth child, whose drawing is revealed to everyone and compared with the first. Without even doing the experiment, we know what the result will be. The twentieth drawing will be so unlike the first as to be unrecognisable. Presumably, if we lay the drawings out in order, we shall note some resemblance between each one and its immediate predecessor and successor, but the mutation rate will be so high as to destroy all semblance after a few generations. A trend will be visible as we walk from one end of the series of drawings to the other, and the direction of the trend will be degeneration. Evolutionary geneticists have long understood that natural selection cannot work unless the mutation rate is low. Indeed, the initial problem of overcoming the fidelity barrier has been described as the Catch-22 of the Origin of Life. Darwinism depends on high-fidelity gene replication. How then can the meme, with its apparently dismal lack of fidelity, serve as quasi-gene in any quasi-Darwinian process?