The Meme Machine

THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE 33
Darwin himself. Sociobiology seemed to push human beings further off their
self-created pedestal – to undermine their sense of free will and autonomy. As
we shall see, memetics takes a further big step in this direction and so will
probably reap the same antagonism. Still – as Cloak put it ‘. . . if we are the
slaves of some of “our” cultural traits, isn’t it time we knew it?’ (Cloak 1975, p.
178).
Much of the antagonism to sociobiology has died down, perhaps because of
the increasing evidence for the evolutionary basis of human behaviour, and
perhaps because of a better understanding of the way genes and environment
interact. The old image of genes as providing a blueprint or wiring diagram for
building a body is clearly wrong. A better analogy is with a recipe, though it is
still not a close one. Genes are instructions for building proteins, and the results
of their protein synthesis are influenced at every stage by the available raw
materials and the nature of the environment. Nothing is purely genetically
determined and nothing purely environmentally determined. We human beings,
like all other creatures, are a complex product of both – and this is true of the
way we behave as well as the shape of our legs.
In spite of the antagonism, sociobiology made great progress but, as its
founding father Edward O. Wilson complained, it had little to say about the
individual human mind r the diversity of cultures. In 1981, Wilson teamed up
with the physicist Charles Lumsden to develop a theory of gene-culture
coevolution and introduced the concept of the ‘culturgen’ as ‘the basic unit of
inheritance in cultural evolution’ (Lumsden and Wilson 1981, p. x). They hoped
their new theory would lead right through from genes to mind to culture and
developed mathematical treatments of how different culturgens would affect
genetic fitness. However, they always came back to the genes as the final
arbiters. If maladaptive culturgens are sometimes selected this is because their
harm is not immediately apparent and so there is some lag before the system
adapts. Ultimately, the genes will win out. As they put it – ‘the genes hold
culture on a leash’.
The ‘leash principle’ is a more memorable way of expressing what Dawkins
meant about his colleagues wanting ‘always to go back to “biological
advantage”’. It also provides us with a helpful image. If Lumsden and Wilson
are right then the genes are always the owner and the culturgens are the dog.
The leash can sometimes longer – even extremely long – but it is still a dog at
the other end. According to memetics, the genes may turn into a dog and the
memes become the owner – or perhaps we should enjoy the spectacle of two
dogs, one on either end – each running like mad to serve their own selfish
replication.