The Meme Machine

SEX IN THE MODERN WORLD 137
break dozen, and indeed this is exactly what is happening. As remote
Himalayan villages come into contact with the rest of the world, young men are
increasingly choosing not to share a wife with their brother but to opt for city
life instead (Crook 1989).
The taboos also are no longer as effective as they once were. We may
imagine a ‘masturbation taboo’ meme competing with a ‘masturbation is fun’
meme. The question of how many children the carriers of such memes produce
is now completely irrelevant. People will pick up their memes from films, radio,
books and television long before they have even produced any children, let alone
persuaded their children to copy their own habits. So we should expect the
power of all these sexual taboos to be reduced as horizontal transmission
increases – as indeed appears to be the case.
The taboo against homosexuality is especially interesting. There is no
generally accepted biological explanation of homosexuality and superficially it
does not appear to be adaptive. Nevertheless, evidence is accumulating that
there is an inherited predisposition for homosexuality. Assuming this is the
case, the taboos of the past would, paradoxically, have favoured the survival of
these genes by forcing the people who carried them, against their wishes, to
marry and have children.
This suggests an interesting prediction for the future. As horizontal
transmission increases the taboo should lose its power and so can be expected to
disappear, as indeed it is doing in many societies. Homosexuals are then free to
have sex with other homosexuals, to have long-term relationships with their own
sex, and not to have children at all. The short-term effect is much more overt
homosexual behaviour and acceptance of that behaviour by everyone, but the
long-term effect may be fewer genes for homosexuality.
This analysis suggests that ancient sexual taboos should disappear, not as a
function of wealth or industrialisation per se but with increasing horizontal
transmission. Thus, we would expect cultures with the least horizontal
transmission to have the strongest taboos and vice versa. There are many
indirect measures of horizontal transmission such as literacy rates, or the
availability of telephones, radios and computers. More direct measures would
be estimates of the average social group size, or the number of contacts that
people make with others outside their immediate family. I would expect
negative correlations between all these measures and the prevalence of sexual
taboos. In this case, memetics provides predictions that do not make obvious
sense within any other framework.