The Meme Machine

56 THE MEME MACHINE
specialised replication among minority groups, or short-lived mass popularity.
But note that none of this matters for the simple argument I am making here.
That is, that any catchy tune that gets you to rehearse it in your head will get
passed on, and so we will all come across such tunes and be in danger of
‘catching’ them.
Memetics thus provides a simple and obvious explanation for those irritating
tunes that go round and round in our heads – as it did for why we cannot stop
thinking in general. The tunes are like weeds and just tend to grow. Does it
matter what we count as the unit of a meme in either of these cases? I say no.
The competition to grab any spare brain power will go on regardless of the way
we might decide to divide the competing instructions. The meme is ‘whatever it
is that is passed on by imitation’. If your irritating humming at work passes on
all four verses of Blake’s Jerusalem to the rest of the office then the whole
inspirational song is the meme. If you infected them only with ‘da, da, da,
dum’, then those good old four notes are the meme.
We do not know the mechanism for copying and storing memes
No we do not. The fact that we now know so much about how DNA works can
easily lead us to imagine that we need that level of understanding for memetics –
right away. I do not think this is so. Don’t forget how far evolutionary theory
got before DNA was even heard of. Darwin’s Origins of Species was published
in 1859. It was not until the 1930s that genetics and natural selection were
brought together (Fisher 1930); not until the 1940s that other areas of science
were brought into what is sometimes known as the modern synthesis, leading to
neo-Darwinian theory; and not until the 1950s that the structure of DNA was
finally discovered (Watson 1968). In the first century of Darwinism an
enormous amount was achieved in the understanding of evolution without
anyone having any idea about chemical replication, the control of protein
synthesis or what on earth DNA was doing.
The memetics we build at the very end of the twentieth century will doubtless
appear inept in another century’s time, but that is no reason not to begin. We
may get a long way with the general principles of memetic selection without
understanding the brain mechanisms it relies on. We can also make some
educated guesses about those mechanisms based on what little we do know.