The Meme Machine

16 THE MEME MACHINE
allow some memes to grab the available processing capacity, the nature of
human memory that determines which memes will be successfully remembered,
and the limitations of our capacity to imitate. We can, and will, apply this to
understanding the fate of memes but it is more properly the domain of
psychology and physiology than memetics.
The other kinds of reasons concern the nature of the memes themselves, the
tricks they exploit, the ways they group together and the general processes of
memetic evolution that favour some memes over others. These have not
previously been studied by psychology and are an important aspect of memetics.
Putting together all these reasons we may be able to see why some memes
succeed and others fail; why certain stories take off while others are told once
and never again. Other examples include recipes, clothes fashions and interior
designs; trends in architecture, rules of political correctness, or the habit of
recycling glass bottles. All of these are copied from one person to another and
spread by imitation. They vary slightly in the copying and some of them are
more frequently copied than others. That is how we get useless popular crazes,
and good ideas that never seem to get off the ground. I think there can be no
doubt that memes count as replicators. This means that memetic evolution is
inevitable. It is time we began to understand it.
Memes and genes are not the same
A word of caution is needed here. I have explained that the meme is a replicator
and in this sense it is equivalent to the gene. However, we must not fall into the
trap of thinking that memes can only work if they are like genes in other ways.
This is simply not so. The science of genetics has blossomed in recent decades
to the point where we can identify particular genes, map the entire human
genome, and even undertake genetic engineering. Some of the insights gained
from all this understanding may help us to understand memes, but alternatively
some of it may just mislead us.
Also, genes are not the only other replicators to consider. For example, our
immune systems are now known to work by selection. The British psychologist
Henry Plotkin (1993) refers to both brains and immune systems as ‘Darwin
machines’, and in his study of Universal Darwinism uses general evolutionary
theory to apply to many other systems including the evolution of science. In
each case, one can apply the ideas of replicators and vehicles (or of replicators,
interactors and lineages, to use Hull’s formulation) to understand the way the
system evolves.