The Meme Machine

40 THE MEME MACHINE
Mithen 1996; Tudge 1995). They tend to agree that people lived in groups of
roughly 100–250 people, with strong family ties and complex social rules.
Women tended to gather the plant foods and men to hunt. Life expectancy was
short compared with today. Density of population was limited by the large area
of land needed for this lifestyle and there were predators and disease to worry
about. However, providing the food would not take all day and there would
have been many hours left over.
In such a situation would it make sense to keep on thinking all the time?
Should those endless thoughts have justified their energy costs in terms of
survival advantage? Or would it have been better to save the energy and be able
just to sit and not think – as cats appear to do when resting in the sun? I am only
speculating but I would suggest that it may have benefited the genes more if we
could stop thinking sometimes and conserve valuable resources. Why, then, can
we not?
The answer from memetics is to start thinking in terms of replicators trying to
get copied.
First, let us think about brains without memes. If the brain really is a Darwin
machine then the thoughts, perceptions, ideas, memories, and so on, that go on
inside it must all be competing for the brain’s limited processing resources.
Natural selection will have ensured that the brain’s attention mechanisms
generally devote most resources to the processing that helps the genes that made
it. Within those constraints, all the thoughts and ideas will compete for attention
and the chance to get copied. However, they are limited to one brain and subject
to the pressures of natural selection.
Now imagine a brain capable of imitation – a brain with memes. A brain
with memes not only has much more information to store, but the memes
themselves are tools for thinking with (Dennett 1991). Far more kinds of
thinking are possible when you have learned words, stories, the structure of
arguments, or new ways of thinking about love, logic or science. There are now
far more thoughts competing for the same limited processing capacity of the
brain. Not only that, but memes can also get copied from one brain to another.
If a meme can get itself successfully copied it will. One way to do so is to
command the resources of someone’s brain and make them keep on rehearsing
it, so giving that meme a competitive edge over memes that do not get rehearsed.
Memes like this are not only more likely to be remembered but also to be ‘on
your mind’ when you next speak to someone else. If we take stories as an
example, a story that has great emotional impact, or for any other reason has the