The Meme Machine

MEME–GENE COEVOLUTION 105
I have done a lot of speculating and imagining here. Am I just making
another equivalent of the ‘bow-wow’ or ‘heave-ho’ theories? Should I be
reminded of the ban made by the Société de Linguistique de Paris?
I hope not. The difference here is that I am not suggesting that words arose
because people heaving on heavy rocks made ‘heave-ho’ noises and began to
speak – though I suppose the odd word might have come about that way. I am
suggesting that verbal language is almost an inevitable consequence of memetic
selection. First, sounds are a good candidate for high-fecundity transmission of
behaviour. Second, words are an obvious way to digitise the process and so
increase its fidelity. Third, grammar is a next step for increasing fidelity and
fecundity yet again, and all of these will aid memorability and hence longevity.
Once the second replicator arose, language was more or less inevitable.
The theory depends on a few basic assumptions, and these could be tested.
One is that people preferentially copy the most articulate people. Socialpsychological
experiments show that people are more easily persuaded by ‘good
talkers’ and ‘fast talkers’, but this needs more systematic research using tests of
imitation.
Meme-gene coevolution assumes that people preferentially mated with the
best meme-spreaders, in this case the most articulate people. We should
remember that past selection for ‘good talkers’ may have used up most of the
original variation, leaving most of us fairly articulate today. However, the
preference may still be there, so that being highly articulate makes you sexually
attractive. The history of love poems and love songs suggests as much, as does
the sexual behaviour of politicians, writers and television stars (Miller 1993).
If the theory is right then human grammar should show signs of having been
designed for transmitting memes with high fecundity, fidelity, and longevity,
rather than to convey information about some particular topic such as hunting,
foraging or the symbolic representation of social contracts. This is the memetic
equivalent of adaptationist thinking in biology and I might be criticised for
assuming that memetic evolution must always have found the best solution and
for a kind of circular reasoning. Nevertheless, adaptationist thinking has been
extremely effective in biology and may prove so in memetics.
Language continually evolves, and new words or expressions compete to be
adopted, or co-opted from other languages. Again, we should expect the
winners to be those of high fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Wright (1998) has
used memetics to study the translation of chemical terms such as acid, alcohol,
or various elements, into Chinese, showing that alternative terms underwent
intense competition for survival, with the winners depending both on properties