The Meme Machine

THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE 27
modern hunter-gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a
week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that
they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in
which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over
have given up an easier life in favour of a life of toil and drudgery?
Tudge assumes ‘that agriculture arose because it was favoured by natural
selection’ (1995, p. 274) and therefore looks for a genetic advantage. He
suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land,
farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighbouring huntergatherer’s
lands and so destroy their way of life. For this reason, once farming
arrives no one has the luxury of saying ‘I want to keep the old way of life’.
However, we know from the skeletons of early farmers that they were
malnourished and sickly. So was there really a genetic advantage?
Memetics allows us to ask a different question. That is, why were farming
practices successful as memes? In other words, how did these particular memes
get themselves copied? The answers might include their benefits to human
happiness or to human genes, but are not confined to those possibilities. Memes
can spread for other reasons too, including less benign ones. They might spread
because they appear to provide advantages even when they do not, because they
are especially easily imitated by human brains, because they change the selective
environment to the detriment of competing memes, and so on. With a meme’s
eye view we ask not how inventions benefit human happiness or human genes,
but how they benefit themselves.
Turning to more modern technology, from the invention of the wheel to the
design of cars, there is plenty of evidence that innovations evolve in the sense
that they arise from what went before. In The Evolution of Technology, George
Basalla (1988) develops an evolutionary account of the way in which hammers,
steam engines, trucks and transistors have come about. Playing down the
importance of heroic inventors he emphasises the gradual process of change
through imitation and variation. For example, many features of wooden
buildings were reproduced in stone by the Greeks, the first iron bridge built in
the late 1770s was modelled on woodworking practices, and even the humble
plastic bucket often still shows signs of its origins in metal. Transistors were
only gradually miniaturised and radio signals very gradually transmitted further
and further.
Basalla questions the idea of technology making progress towards any grand
goal such as ‘the advancement of humanity’ or ‘the overall betterment of the