The Meme Machine

112 THE MEME MACHINE
artificial intelligence has proved that it could not be so, because an all-purpose
general perception machine just cannot get around in the world. To live and
feed and reproduce at all it is essential to be able to see objects, track them,
grasp them, identify individuals, discriminate between the sexes, and so on.
None of this can be done at all without mechanisms for dividing up the world in
relevant ways. The world itself can potentially be divided up in an infinite
number of ways. Our brains must have, and do have, ways of limiting this
potential. They have object-recognition modules, colour-perception systems,
grammar modules, and so on (Pinker 1997). The way we experience the world
is not ‘the way it really is’ but the way that has proved useful to natural selection
for us to perceive it.
Similarly, learning is not some all-purpose general ability that starts from
scratch. Even where imitation is concerned this has proved to be true. In the
1940s and 1950s, when learning theory was being applied to almost every aspect
of behaviour, psychologists assumed that imitation itself must be learned by
being rewarded. They strongly denied any claims of an ‘imitation instinct’ and
poked fun at older theories of human instinctive behaviour (Miller and Dollard
1941). This was, in the circumstances, understandable. These early theories had
included instincts such as a girl’s instinct to pat and tidy her hair or, when
thrown a ball while sitting, to part her legs and catch it in her skirt.
Nevertheless, they were wrong about imitation. Recent research shows that
babies begin to imitate facial expressions and gestures from an early age whether
they are rewarded or not. Babies are able to mimic facial expressions they see
and sounds they hear when they are too young to have learned by practice or by
looking in mirrors (Meltzoff 1990). Successfully imitating something seems to
be rewarding in itself. We can see now, as the behaviourists could not, why so
much of our behaviour has to be instinctive. The world is too complicated to
cope with if we have to learn everything from scratch. Indeed, learning itself
cannot get off the ground without inbuilt competencies. We humans have more
instincts than other species, not fewer. As Steven Pinker puts it ‘complexity in
the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the
mind’ (1994, p. 125).
The old SSSM is clearly being overthrown by the evidence, as some
delightful examples can show. One concerns the naming of colours.
Anthropologists, working in the old SSSM mode, had long taken colour naming
to be a perfect example of cultural relativism. Lots of languages had been
studied and wide variation found in the words used to describe colours. In the
early 1950s, for example, Verne Ray gave colour samples to sixty native