The Meme Machine

98 THE MEME MACHINE
So how and why did this happen? For marriage, he says. According to
Deacon, early hominids could only take advantage of a hunting-provisioning
subsistence strategy if they could regulate their reproductive relationships by
symbolic means. ‘Symbolic culture was a response to a reproductive problem
that only symbols could solve: the imperative of representing a social contract’
(Deacon 1997, p. 401). On this theory, then, symbolic communication began
because it was needed to regulate marriage, and then was gradually improved
because of the myriad advantages it provided for other forms of communication.
If I have understood him correctly, Deacon sometimes comes close to a
memetic theory. For example, he notes that language is its own prime mover
and language evolution a kind of bootstrapping. He even likens one’s own
language to a personal symbiotic organism. But he does not consider the
possibility of a second replicator. For him ‘the transmission of genes is the
bottom line’ (p. 380). Thus, he is stuck with finding the selective advantage for
tile genes of using symbols.
The Canadian psychologist, Merlin Donald, also puts symbolic
representation at the heart of his theory (1991, 1993). He suggests that human
brains, culture, and cognition all coevolved, passing through three major
transitions: memetic skill, lexical invention (i.e. the creation of words, spoken
language and story telling), and finally the externalisation of memory (symbolic
art and the technology of writing allowed humans to overcome the limitations of
biological memory). His first transition – the development of memetic skills –
sounds as though it might be similar to memetics, but it is not (it is perhaps
closer to ‘mime’ than to ‘meme’). Donald clearly distinguishes mimesis from
imitation, stressing that mimesis includes representing an event to oneself and is
not tied to external communication. He explains: ‘mimesis rests on the ability to
produce conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but
not linguistic’ (1991, p. 168).
Donald’s evolutionary theory, unlike many others, stresses the unique
cognitive development of human beings, the importance of their culture, and the
consequences of their inventiveness, but he does not invoke the concept of a
second replicator. For him, the function of language is part of the wider function
of symbolic representation, whose advantage is ultimately to the genes.
I have considered several popular theories of the function of language. All
their authors realise there are serious problems, and have tried to explain why
language would have given early hominids a selective advantage. I am not
convinced that any of them really solves the mystery of human language origins.
They need to explain why there is just one species capable of communicating