The Meme Machine

110 THE MEME MACHINE
thickness of a snail’s shell is a trade-off between growing a thick shell to protect
it from birds, and saving the resources to make more baby snails. The fluke
genes will not benefit from more baby snails, but they will benefit from a safe
snail to live in – so fluke genes for making snails grow thicker shells are good
replicators. This illustrates the important point that although the interests of a
gene and the interests of the organism it sits in usually coincide, they do not
always do so.
These few examples show how genes (without foresight or intention, and just
because they may either be successfully copied or not) can compete with each
other, exploit each other, or cooperate with each other for mutual benefit. ‘We
can see not only the complexity of gene-gene interactions, but why it is helpful
to look at the world from a gene’s eye view. None of this makes as much sense
if you concentrate only on the individual organisms, even though they are the
vehicles that ultimately live or die. The whole complex system is better viewed
as driven by the interplay between selfish replicators – in this case genes.
I am going to apply exactly the same principles to meme-meme interactions
later – and these will prove to be just as intricately complex. Meme-meme
interactions are the stuff of today’s society; of religion, politics, and sex; of big
business, the global economy, and the Internet. But that comes later. First, we
need to clarify the interactions between genes and memes – that is, meme-gene
coevolution.
Meme–gene interactions
When memes interact with genes we might expect to find both competition and
cooperation, and every gradation in between. As we have seen, several theorists
have likened memes to symbionts, mutualists, commensals or parasites. The
first was Cloak who said that at best we are in symbiosis with our cultural
instructions. ‘At worst, we are their slaves’ (Cloak 1975, p. 172). Delius (1989)
suggests it started out the other way around. The memes were originally the
slaves of the genes but, as he says, slaves have a well-known bent towards
independence and now our memes may be anything from helpful mutualists to
destructive parasites (see also Ball 1984). And Dawkins famously treats
religions as viruses of the mind. All this raises the question of whether the
memes are the friends of the genes or their enemies.
The answer is, of course, both. But for the sake of sorting out meme-gene
interactions I want to divide the interactions into two categories: those in which