The Meme Machine

THE BIG BRAIN 77
As a consequence, whatever is deemed best spreads fastest.
Another important decision is whom to mate with, and again the answer
should be the best imitators, because they will provide you with children who
are more likely to be good imitators. With this pressure for better imitation
creates more people who are good at spreading memes – whether the memes are
ways of making tools, rituals, clothes or whatever. As imitation improves, more
new skills are invented and spread, and these in turn create more pressure to be
able to copy them. And so it goes on. In a few million years, not only have the
memes changed out of all recognition but the genes have been forced into
creating brains capable of spreading them – big brains.
That is the story in a nutshell, but I now want to unpack it and take it one step
at a time, looking more closely at the mechanisms involved.
The first step we might call ‘selection for imitation’. Let us assume, echoing
Darwin’s original argument, that there is some genetic variation in people’s
ability to imitate. Some people quickly pick up the new technology of stone
flaking, while others do not. Who will do better? The better imitators of course.
If stone tools help with food processing, then better toolmakers will eat better
and their children will eat better. So far, the same argument could be applied
equally well to having strong hands for making the tools. But the difference is
this – imitation is a general skill. The good imitators would also be good at
copying ways of making wooden scrapers or baskets, or plaiting their hair, or
carrying piles of leaves or fruits, or making warm clothes, or any skill that helps
survival and can be stolen from someone else. Genes for being a good imitator
will begin to spread in the gene pool. Now the environment in which the genes
are selected begins to change. If you are absolutely hopeless at imitation, you,
and therefore your offspring, will be at a disadvantage in a way you never would
have been a few thousand years earlier. The new selection pressure begins with
this step.
The next step we might call ‘selection for imitating the imitators’. Whom
does it pay to imitate? The good imitators of course. Imagine a woman who is
especially skilled at copying the latest ways of picking inaccessible fruits or
carrying them back to the family, or a man especially good at copying the best
toolmaker. If you are an inferior imitator it will pay you to copy the best
imitators. They will have acquired the most useful skills and you now need
those skills. During the last millennium you did not. When no one had clothes
there was no competitive edge to having them, but now they have been invented
you will be less protected from cold and injury and less likely to survive than
people who do have them. Now that carrying-baskets have been invented you