The Meme Machine

THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE 29
journal papers, the experimental apparatus, and the so on). But they are more
than just physical objects. The ideas themselves influence those objects. The
problems, hypotheses, theories and intellectual struggles work through World 2
and into World 1. Scientific ideas really do change the world: ‘once theories
exist, they being to have a life of their own’ (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 40).
How can an idea change the physical world? Popper was struggling here
with a difficult and important problem, related to the value of reductionism in
science and the viability of materialism as a world view. I do not think he
solved it. His three worlds contain very different kinds of material and he has to
propose a tricky kind of interactionism to link them. Interestingly, he touches on
the role of imitation but without realising how it might help. For example, in
explaining how artistic ideas can have real effects, he says ‘a sculptor may, by
producing a new work, encourage other sculptors to copy it, or to produce
similar sculptures’ (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 39). In his terms, the ideas in
the sculptor’s mind (World 3) affect the experiences of others (World 2) and
thus lead to new sculptures (World 1).
In memetic terms, all that happens – whether in science or art – is selective
imitation. The emotions, the intellectual struggles, the subjective experiences –
these are all parts of the complex system that leads to some behaviours being
imitated and others not. And it is because imitation lets loose a second
replicator that ideas begin to ‘have a life of their own’. In this way, memetics
provides a mechanism for the evolution of scientific ideas that Popper’s three
worlds cannot.
Although Popper did not use the idea of a replicator, his views directly gave
rise to the new field of evolutionary epistemology, which does. Evolutionary
epistemology began in 1974 with a critique of Popper by Campbell, and applies
Darwinian thinking to the evolution of knowledge (Hull 1988a, b; Plotkin 1982).
The American philosopher David Hull studies the way scientific ideas develop
over time in lineages rather as species do. He treats scientific ideas as the
replicators and scientists as the interactors (he prefers the term ‘interactor’ to
Dawkins’s ‘vehicle’ because of its more active connotations). Plotkin considers
science as not only ‘the product of a “Darwin machine”’ but ‘a special form of
culture that is transformed in time by evolutionary processes’ (Plotkin 1993, pp.
69, 223). According to evolutionary epistemology, biological adaptations are
one form of knowledge, and science is another; both as produced by the
processes of blind variation and selective retention (Campbell 1975). This
approach is firmly based in Universal Darwinism and does not bring everything
back to genetic advantage.