The Meme Machine

MEME–GENE COEVOLUTION 103
What about longevity? No individual behaviour has much longevity in itself,
but longevity inside the brain is important. Some actions are hard to remember
and therefore hard to copy, especially after a delay. We would expect the
successful memes to depend on behaviours that are easily remembered so that
they can be reproduced even after long delays. Language has very efficiently
improved memorability, remembering dance steps can be troublesome, but
remembering ‘slow, slow, quick-quick slow’ is easy. We find it impossible to
reproduce a long series of meaningless noises, but easy to repeat back a sentence
of a few dozen words. Without too much trouble we can repeat whole stories
and conversations. Indeed, many cultures have depended entirely on rote
learning of long stories and myths to pass on their history. By structuring the
meanings of sounds, language makes them far more memorable.
We can look to technology for another kind of longevity – as when the
invention of pots creates long-lasting models for new pots and more potmaking
behaviour, or when the building of bridges spreads the idea of a bridge to
everyone who crosses one. The longevity of language took a dramatic turn with
the invention of writing – committing words to clay, papyrus or floppy disk –
but I shall consider these further steps in longevity later.
I have described the appearance of words as a process of digitising. The real
problem for understanding language origins is not so much the words, which at
least in principle can be learned by simple associative learning, but the grammar.
However, grammar also improves replication. How many things can you say
with a given set of words? Not very many, unless you have some way of
specifying different meanings if you combine the words in different ways.
Adding prefixes and suffixes, inflecting them in different ways, and specifying
word order would all increase the number of possible separate utterances that
could be produced and copied. In this sense, grammar might be seen as a new
way of increasing fecundity as well as fidelity. The more precisely the copies
are made, the more effective they will be. Then, as more and more possible
things can be said, more memes can be created to continue driving the process.
Remember that all that is going on here is selection, with no need for
conscious foresight or deliberate design on the part of either the memes
themselves or the people who are copying them. We need only imagine groups
of people who all tend to copy each other, and they copy some sounds more than
others. Whether a particular sound is copied because it is easy to remember,
easy to produce, conveys a pleasant emotion, or provides useful information,
does not matter as much as the general principle, that when lots of sounds are in