richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

196 T H E G O D D E L U S 1 O N
and it will become garbled. When the message makes sense in the
children's own language, and doesn't contain any unfamiliar
words like 'phenotype' or 'allele', it survives. Instead of mimicking
the sounds phonetically, each child recognizes each word as a
member of a finite vocabulary and selects the same word, although
very probably pronounced in a different accent, when passing it
on to the next child. Written language is also self-normalizing
because the squiggles on paper, no matter how much they may
differ in detail, are all drawn from a finite alphabet of (say) twentysix
letters.
The fact that memes can sometimes display very high fidelity,
due to self-normalizing processes of this kind, is enough to answer
some of the commonest objections that are raised to the meme/gene
analogy. In any case, the main purpose of meme theory, at this early
stage of its development, is not to supply a comprehensive theory
of culture, on a par with Watson-Crick genetics. My original
purpose in advocating memes, indeed, was to counter the impression
that the gene was the only Darwinian game in town - an
impression that The Selfish Gene was otherwise at risk of conveying.
Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd emphasize the point in the
title of their valuable and thoughtful book Not by Genes Alone,
although they give reasons for not adopting the word 'meme' itself,
preferring 'cultural variants'. Stephen Shennan's Genes, Memes and
Human History was partly inspired by an earlier excellent book by
Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Other
book-length treatments of memes include Robert Aunger's The
Electric Meme, Kate Distin's The Selfish Meme, and Virus of
the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie.
But it is Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine, who has
pushed memetic theory further than anyone. She repeatedly visualizes
a world full of brains (or other receptacles or conduits, such as
computers or radio frequency bands) and memes jostling to occupy
them. As with genes in a gene pool, the memes that prevail will be
the ones that are good at getting themselves copied. This may be
because they have direct appeal, as, presumably, the immortality
meme has for some people. Or it may be because they flourish in
the presence of other memes that have already become numerous
in the meme pool. This gives rise to meme complexes or