The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 5
Three problems with
memes
Is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony a meme, or only the first four notes?
This raises a real question for memetics and one that is worth exploring – but
I do not think it is a problem. There are several such objections to memetics that
are frequently raised and worth trying to resolve. I am going to consider three
and will argue that all are either soluble or irrelevant.
We cannot specify the unit of a meme
Whether by coincidence or by memetic transmission, Beethoven is the favourite
example for illustrating this problem. Brodie (1996) uses Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony, Dawkins (1976) uses the Ninth, and Dennett (1995) uses both the
Fifth and the Seventh. Dennett adds that the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth
are a tremendously successful meme, replicating all by themselves in contexts in
which Beethoven’s works are quite unknown. So are they the meme, or the
whole symphony?
If we cannot answer this question we cannot identify the unit of the meme,
and some people clearly think this is a problem for memetics. For example,
many years ago Jacob Bronowski wondered why we do not have a better
understanding of social change and blamed our not being able to pin down the
relevant units (Hull 1982). I have heard people dismiss the whole idea of
memetics on the grounds that ‘you can’t even say what the unit of a meme is’.
Well that is true, I cannot. And I do not think it is necessary. A replicator does
not have to come neatly parcelled up in ready-labelled units. Since genes are
our most familiar example we should look at the same issue for them.
Defining a gene is not easy and in fact the term is used quite differently by
breeders, geneticists and molecular biologists because they are interested in
different things. At the molecular level, genes consist of sequences of
nucleotides along a molecule of DNA. Names are given to different lengths of
DNA, such as a codon, which is a sequence of three nucleotides, or a cistron,