Authors: Unknown
Words
- at least when they are understood - are self-normalizing in the same
kind of way as origami operations. In the original game of Chinese
Whispers (Telephone) the first child is told a story, or a sentence,
and is asked to pass it on to the next child, and so on. If the
sentence is less than about seven words, in the native language of all
the children, there is a good chance that it will survive, un-mutated,
down ten generations. If it is in an unknown foreign language, so that
the children are forced to imitate phonetically rather than word by
word, the message does not survive. The pattern of decay down the
generations is then the same as for a drawing, 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) twenty-six 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 'memeplexes'.
As usual with memes, we gain understanding by going back to the genetic
origin of the analogy.
For
didactic purposes, I treated genes as though they were isolated units,
acting independently. But of course they are not independent of one
another, and this fact shows itself in two ways. First, genes are
linearly strung along chromosomes, and so tend to travel through
generations in the company of particular other genes that occupy
neighbouring chromosomal loci. We doctors call that kind of linkage
linkage,
and I shall say no more about it because memes don't have
chromosomes, alleles or sexual recombination. The other respect in
which genes are not independent is very different from genetic linkage,
and here there is a good memetic analogy. It concerns embryology which
- the fact is often misunderstood - is completely distinct from
genetics. Bodies are not jigsawed together as mosaics of phenotypic
pieces, each one contributed by a different gene. There is no
one-to-one mapping between genes and units of anatomy or behaviour.
Genes 'collaborate' with hundreds of other genes in programming the
developmental
processes
that culminate in a body,
in the same kind of way as the words of a recipe collaborate in a
cookery process that culminates in a dish. It is not the case that each
word of the recipe corresponds to a different morsel of the dish.
Genes,
then, co-operate in cartels to build bodies, and that is one of the
important principles of embryology. It is tempting to say that natural
selection favours cartels of genes in a kind of group selection between
alternative cartels. That is confusion. What really happens is that the
other genes of the gene pool constitute a major part of the
environment
in which each gene is selected versus its alleles. Because
each is selected to be successful in the presence of the others - which
are also being selected in a similar way - cartels of co-operating
genes
emerge.
We have here something more like a
free market than a planned economy. There is a butcher and a baker, but
perhaps a gap in the market for a candlestick maker. The invisible hand
of natural selection fills the gap. That is different from having a
central planner who favours the troika of butcher + baker + candlestick
maker. The idea of co-operating cartels assembled by the invisible hand
will turn out to be central to our understanding of religious memes and
how they work.
Different
kinds of gene cartel emerge in different gene pools. Carnivore gene
pools have genes that program prey-detecting sense organs,
prey-catching claws, carnassial teeth, meat-digesting enzymes and many
other genes, all fine-tuned to co-operate with each other. At the same
time, in herbivore gene pools, different sets of mutually compatible
genes are favoured for their co-operation with each other. We are
familiar with the idea that a gene is favoured for the compatibility of
its phenotype with the external environment of the species: desert,
woodland or whatever it is. The point I am now making is that it is
also favoured for its compatibility with the other genes of its
particular gene pool. A carnivore gene would not survive in a herbivore
gene pool, and vice versa. In the long gene's-eye-view, the gene pool
of the species - the set of genes that are shuffled and reshuffled by
sexual reproduction - constitutes the genetic environment in which each
gene is selected for its capacity to co-operate. Although meme pools
are less regimented and structured than gene pools, we can still speak
of a meme pool as an important part of the 'environment' of each meme
in the memeplex.
A
memeplex is a set of memes which, while not necessarily being good
survivors on their own, are good survivors in the presence of other
members of the memeplex. In the previous section I doubted that the
details of language evolution are favoured by any kind of natural
selection. I guessed that language evolution is instead governed by
random drift. It is just conceivable that certain vowels or consonants
carry better than others through mountainous terrain, and therefore
might become characteristic of, say Swiss, Tibetan and Andean dialects,
while other sounds are suitable for whispering in dense forests and are
therefore characteristic of Pygmy and Amazonian languages. But the one
example I cited of language being naturally selected - the theory that
the Great Vowel Shift might have a functional explanation - is not of
this type. Rather, it has to do with memes fitting in with mutually
compatible memeplexes. One vowel shifted first, for reasons unknown -
perhaps fashionable imitation of an admired or powerful individual, as
is alleged to be the origin of the Spanish lisp. Never mind how the
Great Vowel Shift started: according to this theory, once the first
vowel had changed, other vowels had to shift in its train, to reduce
ambiguity,
and so on in cascade. In this second stage of the process, memes were
selected against the background of already existing meme pools,
building up a new memeplex of mutually compatible memes.
We
are finally equipped to turn to the memetic theory of religion. Some
religious ideas, like some genes, might survive because of absolute
merit. These memes would survive in any meme pool, regardless of the
other memes that surround them. (I must repeat the vitally important
point that 'merit' in this sense means only 'ability to survive in the
pool'. It carries no value judgement apart from that.) Some religious
ideas survive because they are compatible with other memes that are
already numerous in the meme pool - as part of a memeplex. The
following is a partial list of religious memes that might plausibly
have survival value in the meme pool, either because of absolute
'merit' or because of compatibility with an existing memeplex:
•
You will survive your own death.
•
If you die a martyr, you will go to an especially wonderful part of
paradise where you will enjoy seventy-two virgins (spare a thought for
the unfortunate virgins).
•
Heretics, blasphemers and apostates should be killed (or otherwise
punished, for example by ostracism from their families).
•
Belief in God is a supreme virtue. If you find your belief wavering,
work hard at restoring it, and beg God to help your unbelief. (In my
discussion of Pascal's Wager I mentioned the odd assumption that the
one thing God really wants of us is belief. At the time I treated it as
an oddity. Now we have an explanation for it.)
•
Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy
the evidence, the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can
manage to believe something really weird, unsupported and
insupportable, in the teeth of evidence and reason, are especially
highly rewarded.
•
Everybody, even those who do not hold religious beliefs, must respect
them with a higher level of automatic and unquestioned respect than
that accorded to other kinds of belief (we met this in Chapter 1).
•
There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstanti-ation,
incarnation) that we are not
meant
to understand.
Don't even
try
to understand one of these, for the
attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a
mystery.
•
Beautiful music, art and scriptures are themselves
self-replicating tokens of religious ideas.*
*
Different schools and genres of art can be analysed as alternative
memeplexes, as artists copy ideas and motifs from earlier artists, and
new motifs survive only if they mesh with others. Indeed, the whole
academic discipline of History of Art, with its sophisticated tracing
of iconographies and symbolisms, could be seen as an elaborate study in
memeplexity. Details will have been favoured or disfavoured by the
presence of existing members of the meme pool, and these will often
include religious memes.
Some
of the above list probably have absolute survival value and would
flourish in any memeplex. But, as with genes, some memes survive only
against the right background of other memes, leading to the build-up of
alternative memeplexes. Two different religions might be seen as two
alternative memeplexes. Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous
gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one. The ideas of one religion
are not 'better' than those of the other in any absolute sense, any
more than carnivorous genes are 'better' than herbivorous ones.
Religious memes of this kind don't necessarily have any absolute
aptitude for survival; nevertheless, they are good in the sense that
they flourish in the presence of other memes of their own religion, but
not in the presence of memes of the other religion. On this model,
Roman Catholicism and Islam, say, were not necessarily designed by
individual people, but evolved separately as alternative collections of
memes that flourish in the presence of other members of the same
memeplex.
Organized
religions are organized by people: by priests and bishops, rabbis,
imams and ayatollahs. But, to reiterate the point I made with respect
to Martin Luther, that doesn't mean they were conceived
and designed by people. Even where religions have been exploited and
manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong
possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been
largely shaped by unconscious evolution. Not by genetic natural
selection, which is too slow to account for the rapid evolution and
divergence of religions. The role of genetic natural selection in the
story is to provide the brain, with its predilections and biases - the
hardware platform and low-level system software which form the
background to memetic selection. Given this background, memetic natural
selection of some kind seems to me to offer a plausible account of the
detailed evolution of particular religions. In the early stages of a
religion's evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive
by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where
the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of
religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized,
elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions, are quite
well handled by the theory of memeplexes - cartels of mutually
compatible memes. This doesn't rule out the additional role of
deliberate manipulation by priests and others. Religions probably are,
at least in part, intelligently designed, as are schools and fashions
in art.
One
religion that was intelligently designed, almost in its entirety, is
Scientology, but I suspect that it is exceptional. Another candidate
for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph Smith, its
enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a
complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a
whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century
English. Mormonism, however, has evolved since it was fabricated in the
nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream
religions of America - indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one,
and there is talk of fielding a presidential candidate.