The Meme Machine

104 THE MEME MACHINE
competition to get copied, the successful ones will be those of high fidelity, high
fecundity, and longevity. This is the selection pressure that produced
grammatical language.
The development of language was thus an evolutionary process like any
other, creating complex design apparently out of nowhere. The early products of
human sound copying changed the environment of memetic selection so that
more complex sounds could find a niche. Just as multicellular organisms could
arise only when single cells were already common, just as animals could appear
only when plants were already producing oxygen, just as large predators could
evolve only when there was plenty of small game about, so complex
grammatically structured utterances could appear only when simpler ones were
already common. A language with lots of words and well-defined structures
would seem to be the natural result of memetic selection.
The next step is to understand how language itself was able to restructure the
human brain and vocal system for its own propagation. This is meme-gene
coevolution again and works as follows. I have assumed that people will both
preferentially copy and preferentially mate with the people with the best memes
– in this case the best language. These people then pass on genetically whatever
it was about their brains that made them good at copying these particularly
successful sounds. In this way, brains gradually become better and better able to
make just these sounds. Grammatical language is not the direct result of any
biological necessity, but of the way the memes changed the environment of
genetic selection by increasing their own fidelity, fecundity, and longevity.
Note that this whole process is self-sustaining. Once language evolution
begins, both the language itself and the brain on which it runs will continue to
evolve under the combined pressure of memetic and genetic selection. This is
not the only theory to treat language as ‘its own prime mover’, or as a selfsustaining
process, but others have trouble with explaining how it ever began or
why it takes the form it does. Deacon, for example, had to find a reason for
crossing the ‘symbolic threshold’ in the first place. There is no such problem
with the memetic theory of language origins. The critical step was the beginning
of imitation – and there is no mystery about why natural selection would have
favoured imitation. It is an obvious, if difficult to find, ‘good trick’, and one that
is especially likely to arise in a species that already has good memory and
problem-solving skills, reciprocal altruism, Machiavellian Intelligence and a
complex social life. Once found, it sets in motion the evolution of a new
replicator and its coevolution with the old.