The Meme Machine

THREE PROBLEMS WITH MEMES 63
Terminology
So what do we call that soup? The value of asking the question about Lamarck
is that it does make us face up to some really tricky questions about terminology.
Some previous authors have, understandably, evaded these questions, while
others have launched in and made distinctions that might turn out not to be
justified. In fact, the terminology of memetics is in a mess and needs sorting
out, I am going to consider the use of three terms: meme, meme-phenotype
(sometimes called phemotype), and meme vehicle.
First, what are we to count as a meme? In the case of the soup, is it the
stored instructions in my brain, the soup itself, my behaviour in the kitchen, the
words on the piece of paper, or all or none of these things? We might have
doubts about the soup because, however delicious it is, you could not easily
work out how it was made from tasting it – though perhaps an expert chef might
be able to do it, just as a musician might be able to reconstruct a piece of music
from hearing it. So do we need a different scheme for copyable meme products
from uncopyable ones? I am deliberately making life difficult for myself
because no consensus has yet emerged and if memetics is going to make
progress we will have to agree on fundamentals like this. Let us see whether
definitions exist that can help us sort it all out.
Dawkins (1976) initially did not commit himself at all and used the term
‘meme’ to apply to the behaviour, the physical structure in a brain, and memetic
information stored in other ways. His original examples, remember, were tunes,
ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or arches. Later
he decided that ‘A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in
a brain (Cloak’s i-culture)’ (Dawkins 1982, p. 109). This implies that the
information in the clothes or the arches does not count as a meme. But later still
he says that memes ‘can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to
book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer’
(Dawkins 1986, p. 158). Presumably, they still count as memes in all these
forms of storage – not just when they are in a brain.
Dennett (1991, 1995) treats memes as the ideas that are passed on; whether
they are in a brain or a book or some other physical structure, they are
information undergoing the evolutionary algorithm. He points out that the
structure of a meme may not be the same in any two brains – indeed it almost
certainly will not be – but when a person carries out any behaviour there must be
some kind of instruction stored in their brain, and when someone else copies and