The Meme Machine

THE LIMITS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY 115
Freeman (1996) spent six years in Samoa and, unlike Mead who was there
only four months, he lived with Samoans and had time to learn their language.
‘What he found could hardly have been more at variance with Mead’s
descriptions of Samoan life. He found aggressive behaviour and frequent
warfare, severe forms of punishment for misdemeanours, high rates of
delinquency among adolescents and, most important for Mead’s thesis, that the
Samoans placed great value on virginity. They even had a virginity test and
ceremonial defloration of girls at their wedding.
How could Mead have got it so wrong? Freeman was able to track down
some of her original informants and found out. One woman, by then aged 86,
explained that Mead didn’t realise they were ‘just joking’ when they said they
went out at nights with boys. Another confirmed that they had dreamed up the
stories for fun – and just imagine the fun of inventing wild and crazy stories
about your sex life for an ignorant young visitor who is anxiously writing it all
down. As is so often the case, it took a lot more time and hard work to unmake
the myth than to make it in the first place. It also took a lot of courage.
Freeman’s discoveries were scorned by people who had almost made Mead into
a guru, and he was vilified for daring to suggest she was completely wrong.
Looking back with the benefit of modern evolutionary psychology we can
see how and why the original theories were completely wrong. Cosmides and
Tooby are right to reject them. However, their version of evolutionary
psychology seems to me to go too far in the opposite direction. They leave no
room for any true evolution of culture. As far as they are concerned ‘Human
minds, human behaviour, human artefacts, and human culture are all biological
phenomena’ (Tooby and Cosmides 1992, p. 21). In other words, the world of
ideas, technology and toys, philosophy and science are all to be explained as the
products of biology – of evolution by the natural selection of genes.
I do not wish to underestimate the importance of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology. In the next chapter I will consider some of their
greatest successes in explaining human sexuality. But they are looking at only
part of the picture. Certainly much of our behaviour has been selected because it
effectively propagates the genes on which it depends. But behaviour is also
driven by memetic selection and has been selected because it effectively
propagates the memes on which it depends.
I like to look at it this way. There are two replicators driving the evolution
and design of our bodies, brains and behaviour. For some aspects of our lives
the genes do most of the driving, and the role of the memes can be safely
ignored. In these cases the gene-based approach of sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology is a good approximation (though still only an