The Meme Machine

106 THE MEME MACHINE
of the terms themselves and on the meme products already in existence at the
time.
Whole languages also compete with one another for survival. Where
languages have coexisted in the past we would expect the survivor to be the
better replicator, and that languages with especially low-quality replication
would most easily be destroyed. Now that so many languages are threatened
with extinction this memetic approach might help us to understand what is
happening. There is also a battle waging between the major world languages for
dominance (or just survival) in industry, finance, transport, and information
technology. Historical accidents have made some better placed than others, but
we might usefully look at the evolution, competition, and extinction of
languages with three things in mind – the fidelity, fecundity, and longevity, of
the memes they convey.
Finally, we should be able to predict how artificial languages could arise.
There have been many attempts to get robots, or virtual robots, to use language.
These usually begin by teaching the artificial systems a lot about natural
languages, or by getting them to make associations between sounds and objects.
The theory I have proposed suggests an entirely different approach that assumes
no knowledge of any prior language, and no concept of symbolic reference.
Let’s imagine a group of simple robots, ambling about in some kind of
relatively interesting and changing environment. We can call them copybots.
Each copybot has a sensory system, a system for making variable sounds
(perhaps dependent on its own position or some aspect of its sensory input), and
a memory for the sounds it hears. Most importantly, it can imitate (though
imperfectly) the sounds it hears. Now, imagine that all the copybots start
roaming around squeaking and bleeping, and copying each other’s squeaks and
bleeps.
The environment will soon become full of noise and the copybots will be
unable to copy every sound they hear. Depending on how their perception and
imitation systems work, they will inevitably ignore some sounds and imitate
others. Everything is then in place for the evolutionary algorithm to run – there
is heredity, variation, and selection – the sounds (or the stored instructions for
making the sounds) are the replicator. What will happen now? ‘Will there just
be an awful cacophony, or will something interesting emerge? If the theory is
correct then some sounds will have higher fidelity, longevity, and fecundity
(depending on characteristics of the copybots) and these should be copied more
and more accurately, and patterns begin to appear. Some sounds would be made
more often, depending on events in the environment and the positions of the
copybots themselves. I think this could be called language. If so, it would not