The Meme Machine

62 THE MEME MACHINE
Emily makes will be passed on, and if there follows a series of pianists copying
each other, the composition may gradually change, incorporating the errors or
embellishments of each player. In the second case, the individual playing styles
of each pianist will not have any effect because copies of the (unembellished)
written music are passed on. In the first case the process appears Lamarckian
but in the second case it does not.
In the biological world, sexual species work by copying-the-instructions.
The genes are the instructions that are copied, the phenotype is the result and is
not copied. In the world of memes, in which both processes are used, you could
argue for calling ‘copy-the-instructions’ Darwinian, and ‘copy-the-product’
Lamarckian, but I suggest this would only lead to more confusion. I deliberately
described the soup and the music in ways that allowed the two modes of
replication to be easily separated, but in the real world they may be inextricably
mixed. From me to your granny’s friend the instructions on making the soup
might go from brain to piece of paper, to behaviour, to another brain, to a
computer disk and another piece of paper and to another brain – with lots of
different flavoured soups being made along the way. Which is the genotype and
which the phenotype in each case? Are we to count memes as only the
instructions in the brains or the ones on paper too? Are the behaviours memes
or meme-phenotypes? If the behaviour is the phenotype, what then is the soup?
There are lots of possibilities in memetic evolution because memes are not
confined by the rigid structure of DNA. The ways they spread are legion. But
we can only decide whether memetic evolution is really Lamarckian if we can
answer these questions. We seem to be at an impasse.
Fortunately, we need not worry. All this trouble is caused by expecting there
to be a close analogy between memes and genes when there need not be. We
must remember Campbell’s Rule and the basic principle of memetics – that
genes and memes are both replicators but otherwise they are different. We need
not, and must not, expect all the concepts from biological evolution to transfer
neatly across to memetic evolution. If we do we will hit trouble as we have
done here.
My conclusion apropos Lamarck is that the question ‘Is cultural evolution
Lamarckian’ is best not asked. The question only makes sense if you draw
certain kinds of strict analogy between genes and memes but such analogies are
not justified. ‘We are best to confine the term ‘Lamarckian’ to discussion of
biological evolution in sexually reproducing species. When we come to other
kinds of evolution the distinction between mechanisms that ‘copy-theinstructions’
and those that ‘copy-the-product’ will prove more helpful.