The Meme Machine

142 THE MEME MACHINE
changing and feeding? They decide, on balance, not to have children.
What has happened here? You could say that these two people have
rationally made the choice to devote their energies to work rather than having
children. And in one sense you would be right. But another way of looking at it
is from the meme’s eye view. From this perspective the memes have done
rather well. They have, as it were, persuaded the couple to devote their energies
to memes rather than genes. They did not do this by conscious design or
foresight, but simply because they are replicators. From this perspective, the
couple’s thoughts, emotions, desire for success, and willingness to work hard,
are all aspects of the replicating machinery that is, or is not, devoted to spreading
the memes – as are the printing presses that reproduce the magazines and the
factories that build the computers. The buyers of the magazines and the users of
the management advice are all part of the environment in which all these memes
thrive, and these memes use us for their own propagation.
There are many people like this. As our environment becomes more and
more rich in memes and meme-copying devices, we may expect more and more
people to become infected with memes that drive them to spend their lives
propagating those memes. That is what memes do.
The overworked scientist is frantic to read all those latest research reports.
The exhausted doctor cannot keep up with the latest change in health care advice
and works longer and longer hours. The advertising executive has a mountain of
new ideas to deal with. The check-out worker at the supermarket has to learn
the latest technology or lose the job. With the advent of the Internet more and
more people are getting connected and there is scope for them to spend
inordinate amounts of time playing with the new memes. The computer nerd is
more in the thrall of the memes he plays with than of the genes he is carrying.
The natural end point of all this might appear to be a childless society, but the
genes have given us a powerful desire to have and care for children. I would
guess that birth rates in modern meme-driven societies will stabilise at some
level that balances the genetically created desire for children against the
memetically created desire to spread memes more than genes.
Adoption
Finally, there is the question of adoption. Sociobiologists can reasonably argue
that childless couples are driven by their genetically created desires to want to