The Meme Machine

THE LIMITS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY 113
American Indian groups and asked them to name them. He concluded that there
is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division of the spectrum but that each culture has
taken the spectral continuum and has divided it on a completely arbitrary basis.
In other words, all the colours we call green might be divided into two or more
other categories in a second language, combined with some other colour in a
third, overlap with different ones in a fourth and so on. This is a strange
thought. For us, the experience of seeing red is quite different from that of
yellow. We know, when we look at the spectrum, that yellow forms only a thin
band between the red and green parts, and this yellow really stands out as being
different. It is hard to imagine that another culture would divide this obvious
looking spectrum in a totally different way. Yet, this is what the relativity
hypothesis implied – that our experience of colour is determined by the language
we have learned – either that, or there must be a lot of people in the world who
experience sharp divisions between the colours they see but have learned to use
names based on quite different divisions.
This view was accepted more or less without question until, many years later,
two other anthropologists set out to extend and reconfirm the endings. Brent
Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) used a wider range of languages and a more
systematic set of colour samples – and they failed. What they found instead was
an extraordinarily systematic use of colour names in language after language,
and moreover, one that makes sense in terms of the physiology of colour vision.
In the visual system, information about brightness is coded separately from
colour information. Colour information from three kinds of receptor in the eye
is fed into an opponent system that codes colours on one red-green dimension
and another yellow-blue dimension. Berlin and Kay found that all languages
contain terms for black and white. If a language only has three terms then the
third is for red. If it has four terms then the next one is either green or yellow
and if it has five then it has both green and yellow. If a language has six colour
terms then it includes blue and if seven it includes brown. Languages with more
terms then add purple, pink, orange, grey, and so on. Colour naming is not
arbitrary and relative, it reflects very well the way our eyes and unusual systems
have evolved to make use of relevant information in the world around us.
Colour naming has been a favourite for stories of this kind. Have you ever
heard that the Eskimos have fifty words for snow? You might even have read
that it is more than a hundred, or two hundred or four hundred. None of these is
true. Indeed, the (Great Eskimo ‘Vocabulary Hoax’ is a kind of urban mirth, an
extremely successful meme that has been printed, reprinted, broadcast and