The Meme Machine

THE BIG BRAIN 75
initiated and driven by memes.
I shall explore this new theory in two ways, first by rather speculatively
looking at our origins again, and then by examining in more detail the processes
of memetic driving.
The turning point was when early hominids began to imitate each other. The
origins of imitation itself are lost in our far past, but the selective (genetic)
advantage of imitation is no mystery. Imitation may be very difficult to do but
is certainly a ‘good trick’ if you can acquire it. If your neighbour has learned
something really useful – like which foods to eat and which to avoid, or how to
get inside a prickly pine cone – it may pay (in biological terms) to copy him.
You can then avoid all the slow and potentially dangerous process of trying out
new foods for yourself. This is only worthwhile if the environment does not
change too fast, a factor that can be modelled mathematically. Richerson and
Boyd (1992) have shown the conditions under which natural selection might
favour more reliance on social learning (including imitation) rather than
individual learning. Economists have devised models of how optimisers (who
incur the cost of making a decisions) can coexist with imitators (who avoid the
cost but make inferior decisions) and studied how fads and fashions result when
large numbers of people all imitate each other (Bikhchandani et al. 1992;
Conlisk 1980). Indeed, fads and fashions have been associated with imitation
ever since Charles Mackay (1841) blamed such ‘extraordinary popular
delusions’ as the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch seventeenth-century mania for
tulips on ‘popular imitativeness’.
But why did generalised imitation apparently evolve only once? We know,
from studies of other animals, already discussed, that social learning is fairly
common in the animal kingdom but true imitation is very rare. Why should it
have arisen in early hominids rather than any other kind of animal?
I suggested that imitation requires three skills: making decisions about what
to imitate, complex transformations from one point of view to another, and the
production of matching bodily actions. These basic skills, or at least the
beginnings of them, are available in many primates and were probably available
to our ancestors of 5 million years ago. Primates have good motor control and
hand co-ordination, and good general intelligence which would enable them to
classify actions and decide what to imitate. Some of them can imagine events
and manipulate them mentally, as is shown by their use of insight to solve such
problems as reaching food with sticks or by piling up boxes, and, most notably,
they have Machiavellian Intelligence and the beginnings of a theory of mind.