The Meme Machine

156 THE MEME MACHINE
true we should expect people just to find themselves being helpful and altruistic,
without necessarily knowing why.
I am going to speculate about the origins of such behaviour in our
evolutionary past. (In the next chapter I will deal with altruism in today’s world
where it is easier to test the consequences and to find out whether a memetic
theory is really needed.) We begin with reciprocal altruism. People are nice to
each other to get kindness in return, and their emotions are designed
appropriately – that is, people want to be generous to those who might repay
them, and they want to be liked. Now, add the capacity to imitate, and the
strategy ‘copy-the-altruist’, and two consequences follow. First, kind and
generous behaviours will spread by imitation. Second, behaviours that look like
kind and generous ones, or are prevalent in kind and generous people, will also
spread by imitation.
I speculated previously about how human imitation ever came about, and it is
interesting to realise that Tit-for-tat entails a kind of imitation – it is essentially a
strategy of ‘imitate the other guy’. So perhaps the selection pressures favouring
cooperative behaviour also played a part in the evolution of imitation itself. In
any case, once imitation had arisen, people could begin copying each other, and
ways of doing things could spread through whole populations. Among these
ways of doing things would be acts of generosity, such as sharing food, giving
presents, and looking after the sick – all of which could arise from sound genetic
principles such as those we have already considered, kinship patterns, mating
systems, and reciprocal altruism.
Once imitation has arisen, this process only works if people are more likely
to copy altruists. This makes sense, because if you live in a communion that
uses reciprocal altruism you are likely to gain most by being with people who
are known to be generous. So the generous people will have more contact with
others and therefore more opportunities for spreading their memes. However,
there is another reason why it might pay to copy altruists. A fundamental
principle of reciprocal altruism is that people are most generous to people who
are generous to them. But there is a way to cheat the system. If you want the
rewards (other people’s generosity) without paying the costs (actually being
generous) you could try to look like a generous person. In other words, it would
pay you to copy the people who really are generous. So the strategy ‘copy-thealtruist’
should spread. This strategy is, at first, of benefit to the genes but
because it involves the second replicator the genes cannot keep it under control.
‘Copy-the-altruist’ starts as a strategy for biological gain, and ends up as a
strategy for spreading memes – including (but not restricted to) memes for