The Meme Machine

36 THE MEME MACHINE
largely takes the same standpoint. Evolutionary psychology is based on the idea
that the human mind evolved to solve problems of a hunter-gatherer way of life
in the Pleistocene age (Barkow et al. 1992; Pinker 1997). In other words, all our
behaviours, beliefs, tendencies and customs are adaptations. For example,
sexual jealousy and love for our children, the way we acquire grammar or adjust
our food intake to deal with nutritional deficits, our avoidance of snakes and our
ability to maintain friendships are all seen as adaptations to a lifestyle of hunting
and gathering. Evolutionary psychologists therefore argue that all behaviour
ultimately comes back to biological advantage.
Evolutionary psychology can take us a long way, but is it far enough? I say
not. From the perspective of memetics, evolutionary psychology provides a
crucial underpinning. In order to understand why certain memes are positively
selected and others rejected we need to understand the way natural selection has
moulded our brains for the benefit of the genes. We like sweet cakes and
caffeine-filled drinks, we look twice at a magazine with a naked woman on the
front and not at the one with trains on it. We buy bright bunches of flowers and
avoid the smell of rotting cabbages, and all this is essential to understanding
memetic selection. But it is not the whole story. To fully understand human
behaviour we must consider both genetic and memetic selection. Most
evolutionary psychologists reject outright the idea that a second replicator is
needed. My task in this book must be to show why it is.
I have explored various approaches to cultural evolution to see whether any use
the same ideas as memetics but under another name. The answer, with the
limited exceptions I have discussed, is no. It seems that there is no ready-made
science of memetics waiting to be taken over. If we need a science of memetics,
as I convinced we do, then we shall have to build one up from scratch.
The main tools available are the basic principles of evolutionary theory, the
founding ideas of Dawkins, Dennett and other early memeticists, and the
relevant ideas from a cultural anthropology discussed above. Of course, we can
also draw on more than a century of research in psychology and several decades
of cognitive science and neuroscience.
Using these tools, I shall try to lay the foundations for a science of memetics.
I can then use this to provide new answers to old questions from the apparently
trivial, such as ‘Why is my head so full of thoughts?’ to the weighty questions of
why human beings have such big brains. The first step in this endeavour is to
start looking at the world from a meme’s eye view.