The Meme Machine

A MEMETIC THEORY OF ALTRUISM 155
(few) friends are in trouble he always has something more important to worry
about. Now the question is – who will spread more memes?
Other things being equal, Kevin will. He has more friends and spends more
time talking to them; they like him and they listen to him. The memes he
spreads might include the stories he tells, the music he likes, the clothes he
wears, and the fashions he follows. They might be the scientific ideas he likes to
discuss, the economic theories he espouses, and his political views. Most
important, they will also include all those memes that make him the way he is –
memes for giving good parties, for sending out lots of cards, for helping people
in need and for buying them drinks. Psychological experiments confirm that
people are more likely to be influenced and persuaded by people they like
(Cialdini 19949 Eagly and Chaiken 1984). So his friends will imitate his
popular behaviour and thus his altruism will spread. And the more friends he
has, the more people can potentially pick up his ways of making himself
popular. We could call Kevin a meme-fountain (Dennett 1998).
Meanwhile, Gavin has few friends. He makes few opportunities for talking
to the ones he does have, and he rarely finds himself chatting over a drink or
passing the time of day with a neighbour. His memes have few chances to
replicate because the few people who could potentially imitate him rarely do so.
Whatever he thinks about the state of the nation or the best way of making apple
pie, his ideas are unlikely to spread far because people do not listen to him, and
if they do they do not adopt his ideas because they do not like him. We might
call Gavin a meme-sink.
This difference forms the basis of a memetic theory of altruism. The
essential memetic point is this – if people are altruistic they become popular,
because they are popular they are copied, and because they are copied their
memes spread more widely than the memes of not-so-altruistic people, including
the altruistic memes themselves. This provides a mechanism for spreading
altruistic behaviour.
Note that I am not the first to treat altruistic acts as memes. As we shall see,
Allison (1992) proposes quite a different mechanism, and Du Preez (1996)
considers selfish and altruistic discourses to be evolving memes, though without
explaining exactly why altruism should spread in spite of its cost. There are
many ways of being altruistic and I have lumped them all together here, but they
include generosity, kindness, caring behaviour, and so on – anything that makes
it more likely that others will want to spend time with those people, and emulate
them, and so will pick up their memes. Note that for this kind of memetic
altruism to work two things must be true. First, that people are capable of
imitation, and second, that they more often imitate altruists. If both these are