The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 18
Out of the meme race
Now we have a radically new idea of who we are. Each of us is a massive
memeplex running on the physical machinery of a human body and brain – a
meme machine. Crick was wrong. We are not ‘nothing but a pack of neurons’;
we are a pack of memes too. And without understanding the pack of memes we
can never understand ourselves.
The sociobiologists have missed a crucial point. Their achievement is to
explain much of human behaviour in terms of the past selection of genes; to
apply Darwin’s great theory to psychology. But in concentrating on genes alone
they miss out on the importance and power of the social world. To stick to their
Darwinian framework they have to treat all of culture as part of the environment
of genetic selection, and so they fail to see that it has its own evolutionary
processes and its own power to effect change. Without the concept of the
second replicator sociobiology must always remain impoverished.
By contrast, sociologists have long realised the power of social forces. As
Karl Marx (1904, p. 11) argued ‘It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines
their consciousness.’ Social scientists study the way that people’s lives and
selves are constructed by their roles, and by the texts in which they are
embedded. But they have no evolutionary theory within which to understand the
processes going on. For them the biological world and the social world are
explained in entirely different ways and must remain divorced. Only when we
see a human being as a product of both natural and memetic selection can we
bring all aspects of our lives together within one theoretical framework.
What I am saying about human nature is so easy to misunderstand that I want
to spell it out very carefully.
‘We humans are simultaneously two kinds of thing: meme machines and
selves. First, we are objectively individual creatures of flesh and blood. Our
bodies and brains have been designed by natural selection acting on both genes
and memes over a long period of evolution. Although each of us is unique, the
genes themselves have all come from previous creatures and will, if we
reproduce, go on into future creatures. In addition, because of our skill with