The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 8
Meme–gene coevolution
The mystery of language origins has apparently presented us with an unpleasant
choice – abandon hopes of a Darwinian explanation or find a function for
language. But this is only a forced choice if the function has to be for the genes.
If there is a second replicator this is no longer the only option. I shall argue that
once imitation evolved and memes appeared, the memes changed the
environment in which genes were selected and so forced them to provide better
and better meme-spreading apparatus. In other words, the human language
capacity has been meme-driven, and the function of language is to spread
memes.
What is language for?
If we want to understand the evolution of language, a Darwinian explanation is
the obvious starting point. However, it has been argued that language shows no
genetic variation, could not exist in intermediate forms, and would require more
evolutionary time, and more space in the genome, than could possibly have been
available – quite aside from the fact that its selective advantage is not obvious
(Pinker and Bloom 1990). All of these arguments have been forcefully opposed.
Nevertheless, they keep reappearing in various guises.
Oddly enough, the two major opponents of a traditional Darwinian approach
to language origins are one of the world’s most famous evolutionary theorists,
Stephen Jay Gould, and the world’s best-known linguist, Noam Chomsky.
In the 1950s, the prevailing behaviourist paradigm treated language as just
another aspect of human beings’ general ability to learn. It denied any innate
restrictions on what could be learned or any universal properties of language
structure. Chomsky went right against this view. He pointed out that the logical
structure of languages is far more complex than anyone had thought before, even
though it is easily picked up by children without explicit training, and that vastly
different languages actually share a common ‘deep structure’. He proposed the
now familiar idea of an innate Universal Grammar. However, he has
subsequently argued that natural selection cannot explain the origin of this