The Meme Machine

32 THE MEME MACHINE
He was absolutely clear about the status of cultural instructions, even though
he did not use the replicator concept. He said that ultimate function of both i-
culture and m-culture is the maintenance and propagation of the i-culture.
Therefore, he concluded we should not be surprised to find some m-culture
features that perform functions that are irrelevant, or even destructive, to the
organisms who make of do them. He compared cultural instructions to parasites
that control some of their host’s behaviour – a bit like a flu virus that makes you
sneeze to get itself propagated. He concluded ‘In short, “our” cultural
instructions don’t work for us organisms; we work for them. At best, we are in
symbiosis with them, as we are with our genes. At worst, we are their slaves’
(Cloak 1975, p. 172). Quite clearly, Cloak had seen the implications of having a
second selfish replicator – even though others subsequently argued that cultural
instructions are not replicators at all (Alexander 1979).
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins mentions Cloak, saying that he wants to go
further in directions being explored by Cloak and others. However, Dawkins
lumps together both the behaviours and the instructions that produce them, and
calls then all memes, while Cloak separates the two – a distinction that is
somewhat analogous to the distinction between the genotype and the phenotype
in biology. Later, Dawkins (1982) makes the same distinction as Cloak and
defines a meme as ‘a unit of information residing in the brain’. I shall return to
consider the importance of this difference later on. For now we need only note
that Cloak’s cultural instruction is, like the meme, a true second replicator.
Sociobiology and culture on a leash
While Dawkins was writing The Selfish Gene, the new science of sociobiology
was being established – studying the genetic and evolutionary basis of
behaviour. There was, at the time, a great outcry against applying sociobiology
to human behaviour. Some of this came from sociologists, anthropologists and
others who argued that human behaviour was almost entirely free from the
constraints of the genes and could not be understood by what they saw as (horror
of horrors) ‘genetic determinism’. The genes, they claimed, only give us a
‘capacity for culture’. Some came from ordinary people who rejected the idea
that their cherished beliefs, decisions and actions were constrained by their
genetic make-up – what about ‘free will’?
This reaction reminds me of the antagonism to Newton, to Copernicus, and to