The Meme Machine

120 THE MEME MACHINE
and humans have colonised almost the whole planet. But need this have been
the case? Might not the memes have actually forced the genes into extinction by
pushing for ever bigger and bigger brains and extracting too high a price? We
cannot know – though it is an odd fact that we are the only surviving hominids.
Could the others have gone extinct this way? The ill-fated Neanderthals did,
after all, have somewhat larger brains than modern humans. This is wild
speculation indeed, but the more serious point is that on this theory we need not
take it for granted that big brains, intelligence and all that goes with them are
necessarily a good thing for the genes. We could follow Richerson and Boyd
(1992, p. 70) in asking, ‘What is so wrong with culture that it should be really
conspicuous in only one species?’
Maybe the genes have only just managed to carry the burden and fight back
in time to produce a species that manages a symbiotic relationship between its
two replicators. Maybe we should not assume that when an intelligent, memeusing
species evolves it necessarily has a long life ahead.