The Meme Machine

UNIVERSAL DARWINISM 13
something more than it started with – and that something just happens to be this
world with us in it.
Is there progress in evolution? Gould (1996a) famously argues there is not,
but I think he has a concept of progress that I do not share. He is right to rule
out progress towards anything. This is the whole point of Darwin’s inspiration –
and what makes his theory so beautiful – there is no master plan, no end point,
and no designer. But of course there is progress in the sense that we now live in
a complex world full of creatures of all kinds and a few billion years ago there
was only a primeval soup. Although there is no generally accepted measure for
this complexity, there is no doubt that the variety of organisms, the number of
genes in individual organisms, and their structural and behavioral complexity
have all increased (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995). Evolution uses its
own products to climb upon.
Dawkins (1996a) describes this as ‘climbing Mount Improbable’ – as time
goes on natural selection inches up the gentle slopes to reach the heights of ever
more improbable creations, and when there are strong selection pressures,
progress may be maintained for many generations. Dennett describes the
progress as ‘lifting in Design Space’, the crane or wedge of natural selection
very slowly, and by tiny steps, finds and accumulates good design tricks by
building on the efforts of all the earlier climbing. In this sense, then, there is
progress.
This progress is not necessarily steady or always increasing. There are long
periods of stasis between periods of rapid change. Also, some animals, like
crocodiles, stay the same for long periods, while others change rapidly. And
sometimes millions of years of accumulated design are suddenly wiped out, as
when the dinosaurs became extinct. Some people believe that we humans are in
the process of obliterating as much biodiversity as was lost in that previous
extinction. If we do, then the evolutionary algorithm will start its creative work
again on whatever is left.
All this creativity depends on replicator power. The selfish replicators get
copied, and they do this willy-nilly so long as they have the machinery and
building blocks they need for that copying. They have no foresight, they do not
look ahead or have plans or schemes in mind. They just get copied. In the
process some do better than others – some obliterate others – and in this way
evolutionary design comes about.
These, then, are some of the general principles that apply to any theory of
evolution. If memes are really replicators and can sustain an evolutionary
process then all these principles must apply and we should be able to build a
theory of memetics on this basis. So are they? We can now ask two important