The Meme Machine

UNIVERSAL DARWINISM 15
millions of stories every day but most are completely forgotten and only very
few achieve urban-myth status.
Where do new memes come from? They come about through variation and
combination of old ones – either inside one person’s mind, or when memes are
passed from person to person. So, for example, the poodle story is concocted
out of language that people already know and ideas they already have, put
together in new ways. They then remember it and pass it on, and variations
occur in the process. And the same is true of inventions, songs, works of art,
and scientific theories. The human mind is a rich source of variation. In our
thinking we mix up ideas and turn them over to produce new combinations. In
our dreams we mix them up even more, with bizarre – and occasionally creative
– consequences. Human creativity is a process of variation and recombination.
In thinking about thinking we should remember that not all thoughts are
memes. In principle, our immediate perceptions and emotions are not memes
because they are ours alone, and we may never pass them on. We may imagine
a beautiful scene from memory, or fantasise about sex or food, without using
ideas that have been copied from someone else. We may even, in principle,
think up a completely new way of doing something without using any memes
from anyone else. However, in practice, because we use memes so much, most
of our thinking is coloured by them in one way or another. Memes have become
the tools with which we think.
Human thinking (indeed all thinking) may itself depend on other Darwinian
processes. There have been many attempts to treat learning as a Darwinian
process (e.g. Ashby 1960; Young 1965) or the brain as a ‘Darwin machine’
(Calvin 1987, 1996; Edelman 1989). And the idea that creativity and individual
learning are selection processes is far from new (Campbell 1960; Skinner 1953).
However, all these ideas concern processes entirely within one brain, while the
meme is a replicator that jumps from one brain to another. Darwinian principles
may apply to many aspects of brain function and development, and
understanding them will be very important, but this book is just about memetics.
There are many reasons why some memes succeed and others fail. These
reasons fall roughly into two categories. First, there is the nature of human
beings as imitators and selectors. From the memetic point of view the human
being (with its clever thinking brain) acts both as the replicating machinery, and
as the selective environment for the memes. Psychology can help us understand
why and how this operates. There are the properties of our sensory systems that
make some memes obvious and others not, the mechanisms of attention that