The Meme Machine

118 THE MEME MACHINE
is killed off rather than their whole body. If something they do is rewarded they
can do it again, and if not they won’t. This is much faster because one creature
can try many many different behaviours in a lifetime.
On the third floor are the ‘Popperian creatures’. They can evolve behaviours
even faster because they can imagine the outcomes in their heads and solve
problems by thinking about them. They are named after Sir Karl Popper who
once explained that this ability to imagine outcomes ‘permits our hypotheses to
die in our stead’ (Dennett 1995, p. 375). Many mammals and birds have
reached this third floor.
Finally, on the fourth floor, are the ‘Gregorian creatures’, named after the
British psychologist Richard Gregory (1981) who first pointed out that cultural
artefacts not only require intelligence to produce them in the first place but also
enhance their owner’s intelligence. A person with a pair of scissors can do more
than one without; a person with a pen can exhibit more intelligence than one
without. In other words, memes are intelligence enhancers. Among such
memes are what Dennett calls ‘mind tools’ and the most important mind tools
are words. Equipped with an environment full of tools that other people have
made, and with a rich and expressive language, Gregorian creatures can find
good moves and evolve new behaviours very much faster than without. As far
as we know, we humans are alone on this top floor of the Tower of Generate and
Test.
The importance of the Baldwin effect should now be clear. The Baldwin
effect is like the escalator that lifts creatures from one floor to the next. If the
necessary good trick is stumbled upon by evolution, and if the costs are not too
high, then the creatures who have it are more likely to survive. At each step,
they change the environment in which they live so that it becomes ever more
important to be good at learning, or whatever. And at each step the creatures
who are better at learning are, genetically, at an advantage. Although the
Baldwin effect is normally discussed just in the context of learning (stepping up
to the Second floor), it can equally be applied to the evolution of imagination
(getting to the third floor) and of imitation (getting to the fourth floor). Indeed,
Baldwin himself explicitly includes imitation in his list of capacities that would
help a creature to survive.
But all this is in the service of the genes because the behaviours that are
learned, and the solutions that are found by imagining problems, are the ones
that help with survival and reproduction. The Baldwin effect is essentially a
form of Darwinian evolution acting in the interests of the survival and
replication of genes. Several theories of coevolution use the Baldwin effect
(Such as Deacon’s, for example), but the theory of gene-meme coevolution I am