The Meme Machine

MEME–GENE COEVOLUTION 107
be the same as any language currently used by any natural or artificial systems.
If this worked, interesting questions would arise. Are the copybots really
communicating? Are they talking about something? If so, symbolic reference
would have arisen out of simply providing the robots with the capacity to
imitate. In other words, the capacity to imitate is fundamental, not the capacity
for symbolic reference. That is exactly what I would expect. The final question
is, could we ever understand them?
To summarise, there is a memetic solution to the mystery of human language
origins. Once imitation evolved, something like two and a half or three million
years ago, a second replicator, the meme, was born. As people began to copy
each other the highest-quality memes did the best – that is those with high
fidelity, fecundity and longevity. A spoken grammatical language resulted from
the success of copyable sounds that were high in all three. The early speakers of
this language not only copied the best speakers in their society but also mated
with them, creating natural selection pressures on the genes to produce brains
that were ever better and better at spreading the new memes. In this way, the
memes and genes coevolved to produce just one species with the extraordinary
properties of a large brain and language. The only essential step to starting this
process was the beginning of imitation. The general principles of evolution are
enough to account for the rest.
The answers to two difficult questions are now obvious, and the same. What
is the big brain for? What is the function of language? – To spread memes.