The Meme Machine

UNIVERSAL DARWINISM 19
letter that contained a list of six names and instructed me to send a postcard to
the first name on the list. I was to put my own name and address at the bottom
and send the new list to six more people. It promised me I would receive lots of
postcards. I do not remember whether my mum prevented me from joining in or
not. She might have been wise to – realising, though she would not have put it
that way, that my meme-immunological system was not yet well developed. I
certainly do not remember a deluge of postcards.
As these things go, that was a fairly innocuous chain letter, consisting of just
a promise (the postcards) and an instruction to pass it on. At worst I would have
wasted seven stamps and a postcard. I might even have received a few cards
myself. Many are much more sinister, such as pyramid selling schemes, that can
lose people fortunes. You would think such trivial schemes would die out, but
they do not seem to. Only recently, I received an e-mail that said ‘Do you like
to play those scratcher lottery tickets?’ (I do not) ‘Would you like to learn how
to turn 6 tickets into thousands?’ (not particularly) ‘You’ll receive lottery tickets
from all over the country every month! Have fun just collecting them or scratch
them for the $$$jackpot$$$. There is a free service on the Web that can set you
up to do just that!’ Do people really join up? I suppose they must.
These are all examples of groups of memes that are replicated together.
Dawkins calls such groups ‘coadapted meme complexes’, a phrase recently
abbreviated to ‘memeplexes’ (Speel 1995). Memetic jargon is changing so fast
and much of it is so poorly thought out and so misused that I shall try to avoid
using it. However, ‘memeplex’ is a handy word for an important concept and so
it is one of the few new words I shall adopt.
Genes, of course, go around in groups too. They clump together into
chromosomes, and chromosomes are packed together inside cells. Perhaps more
importantly, the whole gene pool of a species can be seen as a group of mutually
cooperating genes. The reason is simple: a free-floating piece of DNA could not
effectively get itself replicated. After billions of years of biological evolution,
most of the DNA on the planet is very well packaged indeed, as genes inside
organisms that are their survival machines. Of course, there are occasional
‘jumping genes’ and ‘outlaw genes’ and little bits of selfish DNA hitchhiking on
the rest, and there are viruses that are minimal groups that exploit the replicating
machinery of other larger groups – but groups, by and large, are necessary for
genes to get around at all.
We could simply draw the analogy and say that memes should behave the
same way but it is better to go back to the basics of evolutionary theory.