The Meme Machine

160 THE MEME MACHINE
he-best-imitator’ spreads. In practice, this means mating with those people who
have the most fashionable (and not just the most useful) memes, and we can now
see that altruism is one of the factors that determined which memes come to be
fashionable.
So Kev, the meme-fountain, will not only make more friends and spread
more memes, but since these memes are fashionable he will also attract a better
mate and pass on the genes that made him altruistic in the first place. This
means that insofar as the originally altruistic behaviour depended on genetic
differences, these will be passed on to more offspring, and so altruistic
behaviour will spread genetically, as well as memetically. Note that this process
entails the memetic-driving of genes for altruism rather than just memes driving
memes for altruism as described above. By this process genes for human
altruism could have been meme-driven – making us genetically more altruistic
than we should otherwise be.
Note also that this possibility arises because two strategies coincide – ‘imitate
the altruist’ and (because altruism memes are imitated and become fashionable)
‘mate-with-the-altruist’. The same does not apply for Allison’s beneficent
norms because they depend on the strategy ‘mate-with-the-successful’, which is
directly in the interests of the genes, and is in any case widespread. In other
words, for Allison’s rules the outcome will be similar whether just genes were
involved, or memes as well.
I suggested that ‘imitate-the-altruist’ had two consequences: spreading
altruism memes and spreading other memes associated with altruists. The same
applies to the memetic driving of genes. So, not only might genes for altruism
be favoured but, by the quirks of history, other genes might be affected. For
example, let us suppose that there was some genetic components to Kev’s choice
of blue feathers (differences in colour vision, for example). Blue-feathered
arrows became popular because they first appeared on Kev, and Kev was a
generous person. Now people not only copy the feathers, but they preferentially
mate with people who have the fashionable blue-feathered arrows. Thus, the
genes for preferring blue feathers may now have an advantage, and, if the
fashion were maintained for enough generations, gene frequencies might start to
change. Note that there need be nothing intrinsically better about having bluefeathered
arrows. The whole process began only because it was an altruistic
person who started the fashion.
I have no idea whether memetic-driving of this kind has ever taken place or
not. There is some observational evidence that human infants show a tendency
to share (as well as to be selfish of course) at a young age, while infants of other
primate species do not, suggesting an innate basis. Certainly, humans have a far
more cooperative society than any other species, apart from the social insects