The Meme Machine

102 THE MEME MACHINE
copying machine of the brain, began to make copies – copies of actions, copies
of behaviours, copies of gestures and facial expressions, and copies of sounds.
This world of early memes is the memetic equivalent of the primeval soup.
Which of these potentially copyable actions will be more successful as a
replicator? The answer is those with high fidelity, high fecundity, and longevity.
Now we can see the relevance of language. Language certainly improves
meme fecundity. How many copies of an action can you spread at once? As
many copies as there are people watching. But not many people can watch one
person perform at once, and also the people nearby may just not be looking, or
may get bored and look at something else. On the other hand, if you make a
sound, many people can potentially hear it at once and they do not need to be
looking – they can even hear it in the dark. This advantage is obvious in the
difference between sign languages and speech. They may both be effective for
private conversations but you cannot shout to the masses ‘Hey, you must listen
to this’ in sign language. The masses have to be looking first. Also, sound can
travel over fairly long distances and round corners. A lot more copies can be
made by shouting out your news than by demonstrating it with hand signs, facial
expressions, bodily movements or any of the other available signals.
This means that vocalisation is a good candidate for increasing fecundity, and
thereby winning the battle to become the better replicator. How, then, could the
fidelity of the copies of the sounds be increased? One obvious strategy is to
make the sounds digital. As we have seen, digital copying is far more accurate
than analogue, and genes have certainly adopted the ‘get digital’ strategy. I
suggest that language has done the same. By making discrete words instead of a
continuum of sound, copying becomes more accurate.
We might imagine many versions of early verbal language going on
simultaneously as people began imitating each other. Any which divided speech
up into discrete, easily copyable sounds would have higher fidelity and hence
outperform the others in the race to get copied. The problem with copying
always lies in deciding which aspects of the stimulus are the important ones to
copy. Language is a system that makes these decisions clear by, for example,
breaking up the sounds, and adopting norms of pronunciation, while ignoring
overall pitch. Note that other forms of communication, such as the warning
cries of monkeys, can become gradually more and more distinct by genetic
selection, but the process described here works much faster because it spreads
from person to person within one generation. Because higher fidelity copies
spread more effectively, they tend to predominate, and the language improves.