The Meme Machine

THE LIMITS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY 111
the genes drive the memes and those in which the memes drive the genes. This
is an oversimplification in many ways. You can imagine cases in which the two
help each other equally and no driving really takes place, but more commonly, I
suggest, there is at least some imbalance and one replicator or the other
predominates.
The reason for this crude distinction is this. When the genes are doing the
driving (and the dog is safely on its leash) we have all the familiar results of
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The interests of the genes
predominate and people behave in ways which, somehow or other, give them (or
would have given their ancestors) a biological advantage. Men are sexually
attracted to women who appear to be fertile; women are attracted to strong, highstatus
men; we like sweet foods and dislike snakes; and so on (see e.g. Pinker
1997). These effects are very powerful in our lives, and we should not
underestimate them, but they are the stuff of biology, ethology, sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology – not memetics.
When the memes are doing the driving (and the dog is in charge) power
shifts towards the interests of the memes and the results are rather different.
These are results that cannot be predicted on the basis of biological advantage
alone, and they are therefore critical for memetics. They are what distinguishes
memetic theories from all others and are likely, therefore, to be a major testing
ground of the value and power of memetics as a science.
I have given two examples of memetic driving so far: the big brain and the
origins of language. I shall return to those and add more later, but first let us
briefly consider the claim of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to be
able to account for human behaviour and human culture.
Overthrowing the Standard Social Science Model
The argument is exemplified by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, from the
University of California, who plead for a new approach to the psychological
foundations of culture (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). They describe the old
approach as the Standard Social Science Model, a model that treats the human
mind as an infinitely flexible blank slate that is capable of learning any kind of
culture at all and is almost entirely independent of biology and genes. Quite
rightly (in my opinion) they, and others, have undermined the central
assumption of the SSSM.
First, the human mind is simply not a blank slate. In particular, work in