The Meme Machine
TheMemeMachine1999
TheMemeMachine1999
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66 THE MEME MACHINE<br />
memes around with them and thus act as their ‘vehicle’.<br />
I have thought long and hard about these distinctions. I have tried to see<br />
which works well and which does not and so adopt one or other version. I have<br />
tried to make new ones of my own and despaired of it. In the end, I come back<br />
to what I have called the most basic principle of memetics – that genes and<br />
memes are both replicators but otherwise they are different. <strong>The</strong> analogy<br />
between genes and memes has led many people astray and will probably<br />
continue to do so for a long time to come. <strong>The</strong>re is an analogy there but only<br />
because both are replicators. Beyond that the analogy is weak. <strong>The</strong>re need be<br />
no exact memetic equivalent of the phenotype or the vehicle, any more than<br />
there are equivalents for strictly genetic concepts like alleles, loci, mitosis and<br />
meiosis. In biological evolution genes build their phenotype but copy<br />
themselves straight down through the germ line, but in memetic evolution it can<br />
be more like a zigzag with memes hopping from brain to paper to computer and<br />
back to brain.<br />
<strong>The</strong> conclusion I have come to from all of this, is to keep things as simple as<br />
possible. I shall use the term ‘meme’ indiscriminately to refer to memetic<br />
information in any of its many forms; including ideas, the brain structures that<br />
instantiate those ideas, the behaviours these brain structures produce, and their<br />
versions in books, recipes, maps and written music. As long as that information<br />
can be copied by a process we may broadly call ‘imitation’, then it counts as a<br />
meme. I shall use the term ‘vehicle’ only in the ordinary sense of carrying<br />
something around, and I shall not use terms like ‘sociotype’ or ‘memephenotype’<br />
at all. If it turns out later that we need more terms and distinctions<br />
then I am sure someone will provide them. It will be easier for someone else to<br />
add on necessary distinctions at a later date than to demolish any unhelpful ones<br />
that I make now.<br />
This has been a long struggle through some (and certainly not all) of the<br />
problems of memetics but I think it will stand us in good stead. Using the<br />
simple scheme we have arrived at, and bearing in mind the lurking dangers, we<br />
can get on with exploring just what a science of memetics can do – like<br />
explaining why we humans have such big brains.