The Meme Machine

78 THE MEME MACHINE
will get less of the best fruit if you cannot make one. Genes for imitating the
best imitators sill increase in the gene pool.
Note that this is an escalating process. A male robin can only get a bigger
territory in predetermined ways, for example, by singing well – and there is a
limit to how brilliant any robin song can be. But a male Homo erectus might get
power and influence, and come to be copied, by wearing more impressive
clothes, lighting bigger and better fires to cook the meat – or to scare the people
who have not yet mastered fire – having the sharpest tools, and so on. There is
no theoretical limit to this process or to the direction it may take. Selection
pressures on the genes will be influenced by whichever memes happen to
proliferate. Memes evolve as memes build on memes; new tools emerge; new
clothes are made; new ways of doing things are invented. As these memes
spread the most successful people are those who can acquire the currently most
important memes. Genes for being able to copy the best memes, and genes for
copying the people who have the best memes, will be more successful than other
genes.
But which are the best memes? ‘Best’ means, initially at least, ‘best for the
genes’. People who copy survival-related memes will fare better than people
who copy irrelevant memes. But it cannot always be obvious which these
memes are. The genes set us up with preferences that reflect their interests. So
we like cool drinks and sweet foods, and enjoy sex, for example. These things
feel ‘best’ to us because they were best for the genes of our ancestors. But
memes can change faster than human genes, so the genes will not be able to
track them effectively. The best the system can do is probably to evolve
heuristics such as ‘copy the most obvious memes’ or ‘copy the most popular
memes’ or ‘copy memes to do with food, sex and winning battles’. We will
look at the effect of such heuristics in modern society later. In ancient hominid
society such heuristics would initially have helped individuals survive and
spread their genes, but then increasingly would allow the memes to outwit the
genes. Any meme that looked popular, sexy, or very obvious would spread in
the meme pool and thus change the selection pressures on the genes.
The third step could be called ‘selection for mating with the imitators’. In
our imaginary society it would pay to mate with the same people you want to
copy. If you mate with the best imitators, then your offspring are more likely to
be good imitators and so to acquire all the things that have become important in
this newly emerging culture. It is this conjunction that drives the process on –
first it pays to copy the best imitators because they will have the most useful
skills, next it pays to mate with them so that your children can also get these