The Meme Machine

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