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The Elusive Science of the Meme

The idea of memetics was floated by Richard Dawkins in his semipopular writings on evolution. He points out that much of the information underlying human behaviour is not encoded genetically but passed to us in units of culture, socially learned. These units he labels “memes,” and, critically, he suggests that they may function as evolutionary replicators themselves, with the fittest memes proliferating and the less fit disappearing. Thus a particular belief about God may not so much reflect the interests of the members of the group that holds it as indicate that it has been better than its competitors in infecting their minds. Memetics, then, asks us to shift perspective from the genes or people as the evolving entities to the units of cultural information themselves. Memetics has produced a flurry of publications in recent years, and Darwinizing Culture, edited by Robert Aunger, attempts a critical assessment of the conceptual basis and prospects of the enterprise. There is no space here to review individually the eleven essays, which range from the evangelical to the dubious via the most interesting middle ground of constructive criticism. Instead, I merely note some of the main themes which recur and which, perhaps despite the authors’ intentions in some cases, made this generally sympathetic reader more dubious about the very idea of memetics. The first of these themes is the extent to which memetics contains nothing new, despite several popular books proclaiming a “new science of culture” (bad news for those of us still working on the old ones!). The idea of a separate system of inherited information, involving descent with modification and having a momentum of its own, has of course been commonplace in anthropology for a century, as Adam Kuper and Maurice Booch wryly note. It is unclear that the card-carrying memeticists have paid any attention to this literature, which is both data-rich and conceptually iterated. There is also, as David Hull points out, the whole body of historical and sociolinguistics, which has been concerned with cultural diffusion and phylogeny since before evolutionary