The Meme Machine

144 THE MEME MACHINE
politician into bed as a plot, for obtaining information. Many a young actress
has succumbed to sex on the casting-couch in the hope that she will get on to the
wide screen and so be seen and possibly emulated by millions. Power is a
powerful aphrodisiac and today’s power is all about spreading memes.
Politicians are renowned for using sex as a weapon, as a device to gain
influence, and as a way of cementing alliances – and these alliances are all about
spreading political memes. Sex is a wonderful world for the proliferation,
control, and manipulation of memes.
I have contrasted the sociobiological view of sex (it is all for the genes) with
a memetic view (it is for memes as well as genes). These two approaches make
rather different predictions for the long-term future of any memetic species. If
sociobiologists are right (at least those who agree with their founding father, E.
O. Wilson) then the genes must ultimately pull in the leash again. If the genes
were fundamentally in charge they would find a way to correct the mistake and
redress the balance. As time goes on, unless the mistake proved fatal, human
beings would change genetically so that they were no longer lured away by
magazines, high- powered jobs, or the Internet, and were prepared to concentrate
on the proper business of creating more human beings.
There is no room for such a leash on the memetic view. If memes are
replicators in their own right then they will spread and spread entirely selfishly.
They will also spread faster and faster, and the number of memes will go on
increasing. If the genes ever could track the memes there must come a point at
which they can no longer do so, and the speed of memetic evolution leaves the
genes far behind.
In today’s world a very few people still live as hunter-gatherers; many live as
farmers or industrial workers in rapidly changing countries; and some live as
advanced spreaders of memes in societies with computers, mobile phones, and
television. Birth rates are highest in the developing countries and lowest in the
technologically advanced ones, so at the moment, memetic pressures favour the
genes of people living in undeveloped countries. Since their genes differ very
slightly from the genes of people in developed countries, this will have some
effect on the overall gene pool. However, for this to have a big effect, the
selection pressure would have to remain stable for many generations and, given
the rate of cultural change, this now seems unlikely. So what might we expect
to happen now?
For most of the past two or three million years memes have evolved slowly.
Their main effect on the genes occurred because people tended to mate with
good imitators, but beyond that they did not affect sexual behaviour very much.
Our sexual behaviour was largely driven by the genes for their own replication,