The Meme Machine

MEME–GENE COEVOLUTION 99
with complex grammatical language, why this one species has a brain so very
much bigger than its nearest relatives, and why this one species goes around
talking not only about sex, food, and fights, but also about mathematics, the
advantages of Macintosh over Windows, and evolutionary biology. There are
obviously some advantages to being able to communicate complicated things.
When the environment changes, a species that can speak, and pass on new ways
of copying, can adapt faster than one that can adapt only by genetic change.
Could this be reason enough for all the expensive changes that evolution has
brought about in order to give us speech? I do not know, I can only conclude,
after this necessarily brief review of the existing theories, that there is no real
consensus over the issue.
The situation can be summarised like this, Darwinian accounts of the
evolution of human language have assumed that language provided a selective
advantage to the genes, but despite many suggestions there is no unanimous
agreement on what this selective advantage was. However, this argument
assumes that Darwinian explanations must rest entirely on genetic advantage. If
we add a second replicator the argument changes completely.
Language spreads memes
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we
apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic
selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language. In
summary, the theory is this. The human language faculty primarily provided a
selective advantage to memes, not genes. The memes then changed the
environment in which the genes were selected, and so forced them to build better
and better meme-spreading apparatus. In other words, the function of language
is to spread memes.
This is a strong claim and I shall therefore take the argument slowly, building
on our understanding of coevolution.
I have already explained how meme-gene coevolution could have produced
the big brain. To summarise – once imitation has evolved, a second replicator
comes into being which spreads much faster than the first. Because the skills
that are initially copied are biologically useful, it pays individuals both to copy
and to mate with the best imitators. This conjunction means that successful
memes begin to dictate which genes are most successful: the genes responsible
for improving the spread of those memes. The genes could not have predicted
the effect of creating a second replicator and cannot, as it were, take it back.