The Meme Machine

THE ALTRUISM TRICK 167
eat us. Saving them from death makes no genetic sense; nor does working to
relieve their suffering. I have never come across a sociobiological explanation
of kindness to animals, although I can think of several possibilities. Animals
cannot, on the whole, pay back the favours; so direct reciprocal altruism is no
explanation. However, a possible argument is that reciprocal altruism has given
us the emotions that drive this behaviour. We feel empathy with suffering
animals and want to relieve it; we feel guilt if we do not, and so on. Another
possibility is that we raise our status in the reciprocal altruism stakes by
appearing so kind. I am not convinced that this makes sense, because of the
high potential costs of such behaviour. Surely, natural selection would have
weeded out any tendencies to be too kind to animals, especially wild and
dangerous ones. These theories are also hard to test.
Why do we do it then? I suggest that kindness to animals can easily take
hold because it fits well in people who are already infected with altruism memes.
They see themselves as kind people and have an investment in continuing to be
so. The way they behave makes them more likely to be imitated, and so
kindness to animals spreads.
Exactly the same argument applies to the increasingly widespread practice of
refusing to eat meat. Humans were clearly designed to eat a certain amount of
meat. Meat is high in protein and fat, and was probably necessary to feed the
increasingly large brain of our far ancestors. Yet now many people, myself
included, do not eat meat. Some argue that they feel better on a vegetarian diet
and a few do not like meat, but most say they are affected by the suffering of the
animals bred and killed for food. I suggest that vegetarianism succeeds as a
meme because we all want to be like the nice people who care about animals,
and we copy them. Not everyone will get infected by this meme; some like meat
too much and others have sets of memes that are not very compatible with this
one. Nevertheless, it does quite well. Vegetarianism is a memetically spread
altruistic fashion.
If this is right we should expect to be able to trace the historical origins of
such memes as they gradually appear and take hold of whole populations. We
would not expect to find such actions in societies with little communication and
few ways for memes to spread. We would expect them to be most common in
societies in which people have plenty of resources to spare and plenty of
opportunities for picking up new memes. We should not necessarily expect
people to brag about being kind to animals, but simply to find themselves
wanting to be so.
Note that it is not necessary that the superficially kind actions should actually