The Meme Machine

134 THE MEME MACHINE
genes, and those in which they are transmitted horizontally and do not.
First, let us consider vertical transmission. There are many memes that ride
on the back of biologically determined behaviours. They include all the memes
that exploit biologically-determined tendencies for mate choice and other
aspects of sexual behaviour. From the examples given in the previous chapter
we can easily guess at a lot of them: pictures of beautiful women with slim
waists, long fair hair, bright eyes and symmetrical faces; films and videos of
other people having sex, or of stories about other things with plenty of sex
thrown in. Because people want to see these images, money can be made from
them. Stories about jealous husbands and abandoned women will sell, as will
love stories about pretty young nurses and clever, successful doctors (if you
think these are a thing of the past go and look in the romance section of your
local bookshop!).
Memes concerned with marriage are another obvious example. From fluffy
white dresses and bunches of flowers, to defloration ceremonies and horrible
punishments for adultery, we can understand many of the memes that surround
marriage as being grounded in biological advantage. The American memeticist
Aaron Lynch (1996) has provided many examples of marriage traditions that
track biological advantage, including gender roles and patrilineal inheritance.
The mechanism here is simple. People who practise a certain kind of marriage
system will produce more children than those practising another, and so will
pass on that system to their own, more numerous, children – so spreading that
practice more effectively.
Moreover, the system that works best may vary with the environment.
Socio-ecologists have provided many examples of unusual marriage
arrangements, and of the varieties of bride prices and dowries, that actually seem
to track the environment and enhance genetic fitness for the people who practise
them. Polygyny (one man having several wives) is a common system, as is
monogamy. But in extreme environments other systems can prevail. For
example, the marginal, cold, and infertile valleys of the high Himalayas are one
of the very few places in the world where fraternal polyandry occurs, that is, one
woman marries two or more brothers who inherit the family land. Many men
and women remain celibate; women usually helping on the estate, and unmarried
men becoming monks. The British socio-ecologist John Crook (1989) has
studied these people in detail and argued that their system does, in fact,
maximise their genetic fitness. Grandmothers with polyandrous daughters were
found to have more surviving offspring than those with monogamous daughters
(Crook 1995).