The Meme Machine

168 THE MEME MACHINE
help the animals in question. An injured animal that is rescued is helped in the
short term, and a potential battery hen that is never hatched is almost certainly
better off for never having existed. But the long-term prospects are dubious,
especially when it comes to schemes for saving whole habitats or species. The
memetic approach makes it easy to understand why particular behaviours spread
even when they do not achieve what they are supposed to achieve. It is not just
that people make mistakes in their reasoning, which we know all too well, but
that they are especially likely to make certain sorts of mistakes – in this case
copying behaviours that look altruistic.
A final example of this kind is recycling waste. Recycling is certainly a
meme – that is, a behaviour that people pick up by copying other people,
whether they read about it, see it on television or discover that all their
neighbours are doing it. Many people put a great deal of effort into separating
different kinds of waste, storing them in their house or garage, taking them to
recycling points, and buying recyclable goods. The recycling meme has been an
enormously successful one, spreading far and wide in the developed world and
driving a massive amount of human activity. Some experts argue that the energy
thus used is far more than would be needed if the materials were simply dumped
and new ones made. I have no idea whether this is true, but from the memetic
point of view it does not matter. ‘We would expect these kinds of behaviour to
spread because they are easily picked up by people who already do all kinds of
generous, caring and ‘green’ activities, who are therefore seen as altruistic and
are therefore copied. The whole ‘green movement’, and the effort put into it, is
just what you would expect of meme-driven altruism in action.
Memeplexes and the altruism trick
Memes which have nothing to do with altruism can benefit from ‘copy-thealtruist’
by just tagging along for free. Like Kev the caveman’s flashy bluefeathered
arrows, some memes may just by luck happen to be carried by more
altruistic people, but this luck is not a memetic process that can be relied on.
Instead, we can expect memes to have devised strategies for getting into
altruistic people without actually being altruism memes themselves (or more
accurately – memes that happened to have such strategies should have survived
better than those without, and we should be able to observe them around us).
Are there such examples?
Yes. They range from little groups of co-memes to very complicated