The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 3
The evolution of culture
From the early days of Darwinism analogies have been drawn between
biological evolution and the evolution of culture. Darwin’s contemporary
Herbert Spencer studied the evolution of civilisations, which he viewed as
progressing towards an ideal something like that of Victorian English society.
Lewis Morgan’s evolutionary theory of society included the three stages of
savagery, barbarism and civilisation. The historian Arnold Toynbee used
evolutionary ideas in identifying over thirty distinct civilisations some of which
were derived from others and some of which went extinct, and even Karl Marx
used evolutionary analogies in his analysis of society. Fifty years after Darwin,
the American psychologist James Baldwin said that natural selection was not
merely a law of biology but applied to all the sciences of life and mind, an early
version of Universal Darwinism (Baldwin 1909), and he coined the term ‘social
heredity’ to describe the way individuals learn from society by imitation and
instruction (Baldwin 1896).
In some ways it is obvious that ideas and cultures evolve – that is, changes
are gradual and build on what went before. Ideas spread from one place to
another and from one person to another (Sperber 1990). Inventions do not
spring out of nowhere but depend on previous inventions, and so on. However,
truly Darwinian explanations require more than just the idea of accumulating
changes over time. As we shall see, some theories of cultural evolution are little
more than this idea; others try to specify a mechanism but still come back to
biological evolution as the only driving force, while just a few involve the
concept of a second replicator as memetics does. This is what makes memetics
so distinctive and so powerful. The whole point of a memetic theory of cultural
evolution is to treat memes as replicators in their own right. This means that
memetic selection drives the evolution of ideas in the interests of replicating
memes, not the genes. This is the big difference that separates memetics from
most previous theories of cultural evolution.
Language provides a good example of cultural evolution. Darwin pointed
out the parallel between species and different languages: ‘We find in distinct
languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due
to a similar process of formation . . . A language, like a species, when extinct,