The Meme Machine (22 page)

These few examples show how genes (without foresight or intention, and just because they may either be successfully copied or not) can compete with each other, exploit each other, or cooperate with each other for mutual benefit. We can see not only the complexity of gene–gene interactions, but why it is helpful to look at the world from a gene’s eye view. None of this makes as much sense if you concentrate only on the individual organisms, even though they are the vehicles that ultimately live or die. The whole complex system is better viewed as driven by the interplay between selfish replicators – in this case genes.

I am going to apply exactly the same principles to meme–meme interactions later – and these will prove to be just as intricately complex. Meme–meme interactions are the stuff of today’s society; of religion, politics, and sex; of big business, the global economy, and the Internet. But that comes later. First, we need to clarify the interactions between genes and memes – that is, meme–gene coevolution.

Meme–gene interactions

When memes interact with genes we might expect to find both competition and cooperation, and every gradation in between. As we have seen, several theorists have likened memes to symbionts, mutualists, commensals or parasites. The first was Cloak who said that at best we are in symbiosis with our cultural instructions. ‘At worst, we are their slaves’ (Cloak 1975, p. 172). Delius (1989) suggests it started out the other way around. The memes were originally the slaves of the genes but, as he says, slaves have a well–known bent towards independence and now our memes may be anything from helpful mutualists to destructive parasites (see also Ball 1984). And Dawkins famously treats religions as viruses of the mind. All this raises the question of whether the memes are the friends of the genes or their enemies.

The answer is, of course, both. But for the sake of sorting out meme–gene interactions I want to divide the interactions into two categories:
those in which the genes drive the memes and those in which the memes drive the genes. This is an oversimplification in many ways. You can imagine cases in which the two help each other equally and no driving really takes place, but more commonly, I suggest, there is at least some imbalance and one replicator or the other predominates.

The reason for this crude distinction is this. When the genes are doing the driving (and the dog is safely on its leash) we have all the familiar results of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The interests of the genes predominate and people behave in ways which, somehow or other, give them (or would have given their ancestors) a biological advantage. Men are sexually attracted to women who appear to be fertile; women are attracted to strong, high–status men; we like sweet foods and dislike snakes; and so on (see e.g. Pinker 1997). These effects are very powerful in our lives, and we should not underestimate them, but they are the stuff of biology, ethology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – not memetics.

When the memes are doing the driving (and the dog is in charge) power shifts towards the interests of the memes and the results are rather different. These are results that cannot be predicted on the basis of biological advantage alone, and they are therefore critical for memetics. They are what distinguishes memetic theories from all others and are likely, therefore, to be a major testing ground of the value and power of memetics as a science.

I have given two examples of memetic driving so far: the big brain and the origins of language. I shall return to those and add more later, but first let us briefly consider the claim of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to be able to account for human behaviour and human culture.

Overthrowing the Standard Social Science Model

The argument is exemplified by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, from the University of California, who plead for a new approach to the psychological foundations of culture (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). They describe the old approach as the Standard Social Science Model, a model that treats the human mind as an infinitely flexible blank slate that is capable of learning any kind of culture at all and is almost entirely independent of biology and genes. Quite rightly (in my opinion) they, and others, have undermined the central assumption of the SSSM.

First, the human mind is simply not a blank slate. In particular, work
in artificial intelligence has proved that it could not be so, because an all–purpose general perception machine just cannot get around in the world. To live and feed and reproduce at all it is essential to be able to see objects, track them, grasp them, identify individuals, discriminate between the sexes, and so on. None of this can be done at all without mechanisms for dividing up the world in relevant ways. The world itself can potentially be divided up in an infinite number of ways. Our brains must have, and do have, ways of limiting this potential. They have object–recognition modules, colour–perception systems, grammar modules, and so on (Pinker 1997). The way we experience the world is not ‘the way it really is’ but the way that has proved useful to natural selection for us to perceive it.

Similarly, learning is not some all–purpose general ability that starts from scratch. Even where imitation is concerned this has proved to be true. In the 1940s and 1950s, when learning theory was being applied to almost every aspect of behaviour, psychologists assumed that imitation itself must be learned by being rewarded. They strongly denied any claims of an ‘imitation instinct’ and poked fun at older theories of human instinctive behaviour (Miller and Dollard 1941). This was, in the circumstances, understandable. These early theories had included instincts such as a girl’s instinct to pat and tidy her hair or, when thrown a ball while sitting, to part her legs and catch it in her skirt. Nevertheless, they were wrong about imitation. Recent research shows that babies begin to imitate facial expressions and gestures from an early age whether they are rewarded or not. Babies are able to mimic facial expressions they see and sounds they hear when they are too young to have learned by practice or by looking in mirrors (Meltzoff 1990). Successfully imitating something seems to be rewarding in itself. We can see now, as the behaviourists could not, why so much of our behaviour has to be instinctive. The world is too complicated to cope with if we have to learn everything from scratch. Indeed, learning itself cannot get off the ground without inbuilt competencies. We humans have more instincts than other species, not fewer. As Steven Pinker puts it ‘complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind’ (1994, p. 125).

The old SSSM is clearly being overthrown by the evidence, as some delightful examples can show. One concerns the naming of colours. Anthropologists, working in the old SSSM mode, had long taken colour naming to be a perfect example of cultural relativity. Lots of languages had been studied and wide variation found in the words used to describe colours. In the early 1950s, for example, Verne Ray gave colour samples
to sixty native American Indian groups and asked them to name them. He concluded that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division of the spectrum but that each culture has taken the spectral continuum and has divided it on a completely arbitrary basis. In other words, all the colours we call green might be divided into two or more other categories in a second language, combined with some other colour in a third, overlap with different ones in a fourth and so on. This is a strange thought. For us, the experience of seeing red is quite different from that of yellow. We know, when we look at the spectrum, that yellow forms only a thin band between the red and green parts, and this yellow really stands out as being different. It is hard to imagine that another culture would divide this obvious looking spectrum in a totally different way. Yet, this is what the relativity hypothesis implied – that our experience of colour is determined by the language we have learned – either that, or there must be a lot of people in the world who experience sharp divisions between the colours they see but have learned to use names based on quite different divisions.

This view was accepted more or less without question until, many years later, two other anthropologists set out to extend and reconfirm the findings. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) used a wider range of languages and a more systematic set of colour samples – and they failed. What they found instead was an extraordinarily systematic use of colour names in language after language, and moreover, one that makes sense in terms of the physiology of colour vision. In the visual system, information about brightness is coded separately from colour information. Colour information from three kinds of receptor in the eye is fed into an opponent system that codes colours on one red–green dimension and another yellow–blue dimension. Berlin and Kay found that all languages contain terms for black and white. If a language only has three terms then the third is for red. If it has four terms then the next one is either green or yellow and if it has five then it has both green and yellow. If a language has six colour terms then it includes blue and if seven it includes brown. Languages with more terms then add purple, pink, orange, grey, and so on. Colour naming is not arbitrary and relative, it reflects very well the way our eyes and visual systems have evolved to make use of relevant information in the world around us.

Colour naming has been a favourite for stories of this kind. Have you ever heard that the Eskimos have fifty words for snow? You might even have read that it is more than a hundred, or two hundred or four hundred. None of these is true. Indeed, the ‘Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax’ is a kind of urban myth, an extremely successful meme that has
been printed, reprinted, broadcast and spread in numerous other ways, despite being false. Apparently, in 1911 the famous anthropologist Franz Boas noted that Eskimos used four unrelated words for snow. Somehow this idea appealed and was inflated again and again until it became hundreds. Modern estimates suggest that Eskimos use at most a dozen snow words but then this is not many more than there are in English, and is not a bit surprising since Eskimos spend their lives in the snow. Even in English, we have hail, sleet, slush and wintry showers, and people who work in snow, or ski, use extra words as required, such as corn, spring, or sugar snow, powder or (as my dad used to call the wet heavy stuff) puddin’.

The legacy of Boas and extreme cultural relativism stretches far beyond the small matter of the number of words for frozen rain. According to the relativists just about every aspect of human behaviour was learned, was variable, and could be entirely different in different cultures – even sexual behaviour.

Many people seem to hate the idea that human sexuality can be explained in terms of genetic advantage, and early sociobiologists were pilloried for suggesting it. The popular view had long been that familiar sex differences, such as female choosiness and male promiscuity, were purely cultural creations, and in another culture things might be totally different. Superficially, this is certainly true in that some cultures prize huge feather headdresses and others pinstripe suits; some cultures admire naked pendulous breasts and others uplift bras. But what about the more basic differences? The view that all sexual behaviour is culturally determined was central to the work of Franz Boas, and in the 1920s a young student of his, Margaret Mead, set out for Samoa to study a society that he and she believed would be totally different from their own. In her famous book
Coming of Age in Samoa,
Mead (1928) described an apparently idyllic and peaceful life in which there were no sexual inhibitions, and adolescent girls were free to have sex with whomever they liked. Culture, it seemed, was to blame for our own inhibitions and unfair disparities between the sexes. Biology was irrelevant.

This view apparently fitted with what people wished to believe about their own sexual nature, and was accepted as valid evidence that in other cultures almost anything goes. It was a set of successful memes that endured for nearly sixty years even though it was based on only a brief study by a young student. The principle was barely questioned and almost nobody bothered to check. That is until the early 1980s when an Australian anthropologist, Derek Freeman, painstakingly took the story to pieces.

Freeman (1996) spent six years in Samoa and, unlike Mead who was there only four months, he lived with Samoans and had time to learn their language. What he found could hardly have been more at variance with Mead’s descriptions of Samoan life. He found aggressive behaviour and frequent warfare, severe forms of punishment for misdemeanours, high rates of delinquency among adolescents and, most important for Mead’s thesis, that the Samoans placed great value on virginity. They even had a virginity test and ceremonial defloration of girls at their wedding.

How could Mead have got it so wrong? Freeman was able to track down some of her original informants and found out. One woman, by then aged 86, explained that Mead didn’t realise they were ‘just joking’ when they said they went out at nights with boys. Another confirmed that they had dreamed up the stories for fun – and just imagine the fun of inventing wild and crazy stories about your sex life for an ignorant young visitor who is anxiously writing it all down. As is so often the case, it took a lot more time and hard work to unmake the myth than to make it in the first place. It also took a lot of courage. Freeman’s discoveries were scorned by people who had almost made Mead into a guru, and he was vilified for daring to suggest she was completely wrong.

Looking back with the benefit of modern evolutionary psychology we can see how and why the original theories were completely wrong. Cosmides and Tooby are right to reject them. However, their version of evolutiontary psychology seems to me to go too far in the opposite direction. They leave no room for any true evolution of culture. As far as they are concerned ‘Human minds, human behavior, human artefacts, and human culture are all biological phenomena’ (Tooby and Cosmides 1992, p. 21). In other words, the world of ideas, technology and toys, philosophy and science are all to be explained as the products of biology – of evolution by the natural selection of genes.