The Meme Machine

‘AN ORGASM SAVED MY LIFE’ 129
genes from elsewhere. As Matt Ridley (1993, p. 216) puts it ‘marry a nice guy
but have an affair with your boss’.
We can probably all think of examples, but can such behaviour be
biologically effective in modern humans? Evidence that it can comes from
controversial research by British biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis (1994;
Baker 1996). In a surrey of nearly four thousand British women they found that
women who were having extramarital affairs tended to have sex with their lovers
more often when they were ovulating – and this was not true for sex with their
husbands. In addition, they had more sperm-retaining orgasms (i.e. orgasms
between one minute before and forty-five minutes after the man’s) with their
lovers than with their husbands. In other words, if they were not using
contraception they might still be more likely to get pregnant by the lover even
though they had sex with him less often.
These are just some of the ways in which modern sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology are coming to understand human sexual behaviour and
mate choice. Some of the details may prove to be wrong and new theories will
come along, but there is no doubt how effective this approach has been.
However, there are many things about human sexual life that just do not seem
explicable this way and will not, I suggest, succumb to a sociobiological
account.
Memes and mates
There are two main ways in which memetic theory differs from a purely
sociobiological account of sex. First, memes have been around for at least 2.5
million years; coevolving with genes and influencing sexual behaviour and mate
choice. Second, memes are now well off the leash and during the last century
sexual memes have influenced our lives in ways that have little or nothing to do
with genes.
Let us begin with mate choice. The main difference between the two theories
is this. According to sociobiology our choice of mates, and whom we find
attractive, should ultimately come back to the question of genetic advantage.
Our modern life may complicate things, but essentially we should choose to
mate with people who would, in the environment of our evolutionary past, have
helped to increase our genetic legacy.
According to (my version of) memetics, mate choice is influenced not only
by genetic advantage but also by memetic advantage. One of my key
assumptions has been that, once memes arose in our far past, natural selection
would have begun to favour people who chose to mate with the best imitators or