© Adrian Winter 2006

Introduction

Chapter 1: Inheriting the Earth - culture and the imitating brain

Chapter 2: Cultural evolution - the watchmaker’s revenge

Chapter 3: Invention is the mother of necessity

Chapter 4: Gull bills, computer viruses and killer jokes

Chapter 5: What memes mean for freewill and novelty

Conclusion

Footnotes

References

Introduction

The struggle for existence among species which replicate with fidelity and fecundity but also with variation must lead, by definition, to evolutionary progress (Darwin 1986). The human species replicates itself with fidelity, ever growing fecundity and no lack of variation but are there sufficient selection pressures to produce further evolution in us? The struggle for existence is still very much in evidence among other species: the cheetah still chases the gazelle and genes for faster gazelles will favour genes for faster cheetahs and vice versa. Modern medicine and the relatively abundant availability of food, at least among the developed nations, has drastically reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy. Despite disease, famine, wars and genocide the Earth’s population has grown from an estimated 250 million in AD. 950 to 6.6 billion in 2006 (Wikipedia 2006a) a blink of an eye on an evolutionary timescale. The criterion of human survival, especially in western societies where the birth rate is actually falling, no longer seems to be any kind of genetic fitness. More intelligent people do not have more offspring nor do better athletes nor more attractive individuals, in fact, often the reverse. For every Susan Blackmore and Adam Hart Davis, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie[4] there is a Mr. and Mrs. Average who are equally successful, if not more, at spreading their genes through the gene pool of humanity.

Thoughts about ‘improving’ the human race have led in the past to the ideas and even attempts at the practical implementation of eugenic programmes, which are both scientifically misconceived (Medawar 1966) and morally repugnant. But we don’t have to wait for natural selection to equip us with better brains, fitter bodies and more beauty. We already have them: we call these traits things like writing, levers and body ornaments; or the iMac, the Boeing 747 and the Wonderbra.

Writing, perhaps the most significant invention in human history, allows you to store information separately from your brain which not only extends the capacity of your memory but allows others access to the same information, now and in the future, and allows that information to be augmented and modified both by you and potentially anyone else. Levers and other tools, from the paperclip to the helicopter, allow the human body to do things it cannot otherwise do, such as fly or lift heavy objects, or perhaps would rather not do, such as indefinitely hold together bits of paper. Modification and adornment of the human body serves, among other things, to enhance attractiveness and foreground desirable qualities relating to reproductive fitness or the ability to provide resources in order to attract potential mates; from lipstick to the Ferrari.

All these things are not only extensions of the human body but appear to have an evolutionary history of their own: even the humble paperclip had ancestors (Petroski1993). This exogenetic evolution, as Medawar (1988: 184) (following Alfred J. Lotka[5]) termed it, we call culture and culture is genetic evolution by other means.

How human culture differs from culture in animals, how human culture itself evolves and the implications of cultural evolution for what we are as a species are profound and fascinating questions on which I hope to shed some light.

Chapter 1: Inheriting the Earth - culture and the imitating brain

Humans are different to other animals. To explain what characterises that difference let me ask a question. When you are born what do you inherit? It might be your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose, your uncle’s red hair, high intelligence, an aptitude for music or perhaps some less desirable trait such as colour blindness or Hodgkinson‘s disease. These traits are all genetic: you cannot help having red hair, being musical or colour blind. The recipe for everything that physically determines you is inherited from your parents which includes the general design features common to all members of our particular species plus the specific features of your parents’ particular race (or races) plus the individual idiosyncrasies resulting from the mixture of your specific parents’ genes. But there is something else which you can be said to inherit, upon which your genetic inheritance is entirely contingent, and that is environment. The very existence of an evolved species presupposes an environment in which the genes of that species can be expressed. DNA itself needs the environment of the cell in order to replicate. The developing embryo needs the nourishing environment of the womb or its potential for red hair or musicianship will never be realised. Everything that constitutes you then is genes plus environment, nature and nurture, it makes no more sense to think of any physical or behavioural trait without both than it does to think of a rectangle having width without height (Pinker 1994). That much can be said of all species, their physical and behavioural characteristics are determined by an inheritance of genes plus environment; but you, as a modern human, may inherit other kinds of things. In a legal sense you may inherit wealth or property, you will almost certainly inherit your parents’ language and a regional accent, you may also inherit beliefs and particular customs. Beyond the things that are passed on to you by your family or immediate peers is another inheritance which includes things like the Mona Lisa, the theory of relativity, David Copperfield, trial by jury, cricket, knock-knock jokes, the M6 and Basingstoke. These inheritances we call culture and no other species has culture to the extent and in the way that humans do.

Though other species exhibit some aspects of culture - learned behaviours which are passed, non-genetically, from one generation to the next and have features specific to individual groups, such as termite fishing among chimpanzees (Goodall 1963) - there are fundamental differences. No animal, other than humans, can store knowledge externally. This means that an animal can only learn what has been learned by some other animal during its lifetime. If, for some reason, the technique of termite fishing were lost it would have to be reinvented. If, for some reason, the technique of fly fishing were lost, or indeed a novice simply wanted to learn it, they could do so without having to directly observe another fly fisherman since sufficient instructions in the art have been encoded in material forms such as books. Watching another angler might help reveal the finer points of casting and, since the advent of film and television, that too is possible.[6] Better still would be critical advice from an experienced angler who might see where we were going wrong however, though such one-to-one learning and teaching might help speed things up, a theoretical understanding of general principles coupled with our own process of trial and error would eventually lead to the acquisition of as much skill as we were capable. Our technique might not be “classical” but as long as it worked - produced the required result, i.e. fish - it would hardly matter, we may even have invented an improvement. It is said that a self taught man is a man taught by an fool but a book taught man can be a man taught by a genius, perhaps Isaac Walton[7] or indeed, Isaac Newton.

There are, of course, skills which humans learn which require years of apprenticeship to perfect which no amount of “book learning” could properly equip us for. It is fascinating to think that the techniques of glass blowing, aboriginal painting or how to swing a golf club have been handed down from individual to individual in an unbroken chain of inheritance (with modification) over hundreds of years. Once skills such as these have been lost they are hard to recover, especially if encoded knowledge of the skills is absent or incomplete.[8] So are these “once in a lifetime” skills inherited in the same way that chimps termite fishing is? No, and the difference is in how they are learnt. For a start although chimps learn to fish for termites they are not taught (Lonsdorf 2006). The cheetah bringing back live prey for her young is not teaching them hunting skills just providing a learning environment. Young chimps will attend to what their mother is doing and may try to copy but they are not deliberately instructed and it takes, on average, 5.5 years (Lonsdorf 2001) of more or less successful trial and error before a young chimp acquires all the skills necessary to become a competent termite fisher. Would a human infant exposed to the same learning environment have mastered the technique by a similar age or perhaps sooner? Maybe, maybe not, but I think one can suppose that an adult chimp from a non-fishing group would, at best, take an appreciable length of time to learn the fishing technique whereas you or I would pick up the idea at once, even if it took some further practical experimentation to hone our skill: because we possess an entirely different set of cognitive abilities. We would grasp what the fishing chimp was trying to achieve and be able to link a chain of cause and effect between the act of pushing a stick into a hole and extracting termites. In other words our mental representation of the event of a chimp termite fishing would be entirely different; our representation allows us to extract the instructions for carrying out the behaviour, what Distin (2005: 18) calls “cultural DNA“, in other words the content of mental representations, which in our case would include things like a theory of intention and an understanding of cause and effect.

It is this ability to imitate which Blackmore (1999: 47) characterises as the special method of learning which makes cultural transmission possible. Imitation is rare in other species, birds who can imitate the songs of others and even manmade sounds such as car alarms and even chainsaws,[9] are the most notable exceptions. The fact that birds show region variation in their songs, in other words have an accent, (Bitterbaum 1979) coupled with the imitative ability of many birds shows that bird culture, though highly restricted, may be at one end of a continuum with full blown human culture at the other.

Rizzolatti’s discovery of mirror neurons (di Pelligrino et al 1992) suggests a possible mechanism for the imitative ability, which in turn suggests that there exists a continuum in learning styles between humans and other species rather than a sharp distinction and that imitation may not be the unique human ability that Blackmore (1999) suggests, though there may be other distinctions which are unique and account for the differences described above.

It was discovered (di Pelligrino et al 1992) that areas of the brain in monkeys which fired when specific physical actions took place such as manipulating objects in particular ways also fired when these activities were simply observed by another monkey. Ramachandran (2000) has suggested that mirror neurons will ,“…[D]o for psychology what DNA did for biology,” and predicted that the symptoms of autism, lack of empathy and theory of mind, are due to damage or absence of a mirror neuron system.

The mirror neuron system is not only suggestive of a mechanism for imitation but could provide an explanation for consciousness itself. The use of memory or imagination to picture some event or future action may be facilitated by simulating those brain areas which would be involved in seeing or doing it in reality. It has been suggested that the pleasure derived from watching the virtuoso performance of an athlete or dancer may be due to the stimulation it provides to the brain, vicariously rehearsing the observed movements. This could also explain the popularity of boxing, especially among men. I remember as a child how the then relatively rare event of seeing a football match on television made it almost impossible for me not to go out and play football myself afterwards. Armchair sports fans may at least be exercising their brains if not their bodies. Is mirror stimulation more likely if the event is one which the observer is already familiar with? In other words do non-drivers enjoy motor sport as much as drivers. If the action is unfamiliar is the mirror system still engaged, if so what neurons can be being mirrored? Does the observer guess at what the likely moves would be to accomplish the action based on the most similar activity in their experience?

The ability to emulate presupposes that the observer realises that whoever is performing the action is someone like me, in other words someone I can imitate. People don’t generally try to emulate inanimate objects or plants, though the attempted emulation of other species is not unknown and must underlie the desire to “fly like a bird” or even swim with dolphins. It would be interesting to examine how far the “someone like me” principle extends in chimpanzees, would a chimp ever naturally mirror a baboon or a human?
 

The cultured ape

In the same way that your genetic inheritance is the accumulation of the mutations produced and passed on by every generation dating back to the first forms of life on Earth so cultural inheritance is the accumulation of behaviour and artefacts which have been produced and passed on by previous generations of humans since culture first began. Culture, by definition, is learned or acquired during the lifetime of the individual and is not inherited or passed on genetically, though the ability to learn must be genetic what you learn and pass on is not. You generally inherit your particular language from your parents because they generally provide the language environment in which you learn, as their parents generally provided theirs, not because they provide you with genes for English. If you happen to be adopted into another culture or born deaf you will probably learn a different language to your genetic parents.

It could be argued that some species inherit their equivalent of Basingstoke, beavers’ dams, birds’ nests and termite mounds, for example, may have been built by previous generations who have each made their contribution to the overall structure and “passed it on.” The difference is that if a beavers’ dam is destroyed or a beaver wishes to start a new one it can do so without any external instruction (Dawkins 1983). If I were called upon to rebuild Basingstoke or even just one house I would have to acquire all sorts of information about building techniques, wiring, plumbing, architectural design and so on. Some of this information I might get first hand by looking at other houses or by asking people but a lot of it would be written down in various forms but apart from general abilities to manipulate objects or solve problems none of the information I would require is innate. Even if I got together a team of skilled people to do the work for me each would be dependent on their acquired knowledge and on embodied knowledge such as blue prints. Even the architect will have only a general idea of the overall structure and will depend on drawings to both develop the design and communicate it to others. The difference between humans building a house and a beaver building a dam is not simply one of complexity but of where the instructions come from: Basingstoke is not an extended phenotype.

Complex structures such as Basingstoke or Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle or even a flint axe cannot come into being all at once and undergo a process of evolution during their development which, in the case of Basingstoke, which is never “finished”, is ongoing. This process is accumulative and depends on there being a number of intermediate stages each taking a physical form. In the case of Basingstoke most of those intermediate stages were to some extent adaptive, when Basingstoke was just a village[10] it still was still a place for people to live and work. The evolutionary lineage of the flint axe began with using natural flints as tools and must have involved a number of intermediate stages by which the natural flint was adapted to make it “fitter“. During the manufacture of a sophisticated axe of the late stone age these intermediate evolutionary stages would have been to some extent replayed, with ontogeny following phylogeny in the same way that a developing embryo recapitulates some of the evolutionary history of its species.[11] The flatfish, for example, begins life as a “normal” vertically swimming fish with an eye on each side which later migrates as the fish adopts its characteristic sideways habit (Brewster 1985).

Although a genius like Mozart could reputedly write entire pieces of music in his head it is generally the case that complex structures such as the Ring Cycle, David Copperfield or the design for St. Paul’s Cathedral are developed accumulatively, working from the general to the particular. To take the case of a novel writers each have their own methods but it is rare, though not unknown, for a novelist to start at page one without any idea of plot or characters and just see what happens. Generally some overall plan is developed first but the crucial point is that it is writing it down that enables the novel to develop; just as an embryo develops cell by cell or a house brick by brick.

Once something has been committed to paper it becomes objective. Another person could finish a novel started by someone else, as happened with Dickens’s unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.[12] This objectification of knowledge by inventions like writing or an architect’s drawings, enables structures of great complexity to develop and to undergo evolution not only during their development but for as long as the code in which the information is stored is understood.

Chapter 2: Cultural evolution - the watchmaker’s revenge

The progression of aircraft design, in less than a hundred years, from the Wright brothers’ Flyer of 1903 to the Stealth Bomber, the Jumbo Jet, the Sikorsky Helicopter, the micro-light, and Gossamer Albatross[13] displays a history of increasing complexity, fitness and adaptation to specialised niches. The history of visual representation from the cave paintings of Lascaux via the Sistine Chapel ceiling to Star Wars can be seen as a progressive accumulation of the techniques of illusion (Gombrich 1986). The wide variety of team ball games, including association football, Rugby football, rugby league, hurling, Australian rules football, American football, netball and basketball can, with some degree of certainty, be traced back to a common ancestor. “Real” tennis spread first to the new environment of the lawn, then the table. People still sometimes refer to darts as “arrows“, a vestige of their toxophilic ancestry. Christianity split from Judaism and has itself split into further species, or perhaps, in some cases, subspecies: Catholicism; Protestantism; Anglicanism;[14] Methodism; Baptism; Presbyterianism; Quakerism; Seventh Day Adventism; Mormonism and Greek Orthodox, to name but a few. Rivals compete for limited resources from VHS to Betamax, Blur to Oasis, Coronation Street to Eastenders. Culture gives every appearance of Darwin’s “entangled bank” (1986: 459) and the existence of complex designs such as Selafield nuclear power station, Lord of the Rings and local government require as much explanation as does the eye. Paley’s watch (Dawkins 1988: 4) may have had a designer but whoever it was did not start from scratch but then nothing[15] starts from scratch.

The theory of evolution is not just an explanation for the appearance of design and variety in nature: it is a substrate neutral universal algorithm (Dennett 1995). An algorithm is a set of mindless interlinked processes which always lead to the same result; if it is substrate neutral it is not dependent on any particular medium or vehicle. The process of addition, for example, is not dependent on whether it is worked out on an abacus, a calculator, the back of an envelope or in a person’s brain, provided the algorithm is followed correctly 2 + 2 will always equal 4. The conditions needed for evolution to occur are heredity, variation and selection, if these occur then evolution must be the result no matter what is inherited, why it varies, or who or what selects. Heredity must be largely reliable, that is, once any variation arises, it must mostly be preserved and passed to the next generation or useful traits will be lost. To put it another way there must not be too much variation, if each generation is different to the next, again, useful traits will never become established.

Heredity, variation and selection can occur independently of each other without creating evolution. The watch you inherit from your father is physically same watch therefore there is no variation and nothing to select between. The instructions for making a watch which your father teaches you and your sibling are not physically same instructions since they have been passed from his brain to two others; more copies now exist than did before. Your copy may vary slightly from the original and your sibling‘s. If you have misunderstood some stage in the fabrication process your watch may very likely not work at all, however some variation in the original design (which may be “mutation” i.e. a mistake or a deliberate innovation, where the variation comes from is not at issue) may make your watch in some way better so that, if you set up a rival watch making business to your sibling, your watches are more likely to be sold and you are more likely to pass on the instructions for making your watch to your children than is your sibling to theirs. Your sibling might, for example, go out of business and have to find an alternative occupation or their financial plight might make it hard to attract a spouse and so reduce their chances of having children at all. In any event the instructions, and by extension the watch, will have evolved through being copied.

Does evolution always imply then that something has been copied, that there has been replication? Many things change over time, the course of a river, which may have to adapt to changes in its environment such as a landslide, will do so as the inevitable consequence of gravity and the water cycle, it cannot be said to have evolved in the sense that it is in any way “fitter” than it was before. A road may have changed over time from perhaps a footpath, to a track, to a paved road, to a dual carriageway, and there is a sense in which it is fitter. So has the road evolved and, if so, what has been replicated? The road itself has not “bred” but something has and that is the road using behaviour, which began and maintained the original path to begin with and the road making behaviour which further adapted it. If this was the first ever paved road then the idea of paving itself may have been copied from some other context, flooring for example, if the road in question is not the first to be paved the idea of paved roads must have been copied from somewhere else, unless it is an example of convergent evolution. In any event something has been replicated.

For selection to have heredity and variation to work on there must then be replication. Genes are what are replicated in biological evolution and DNA is the replicator. If cultural evolution is not merely analogous to biological evolution but a cognate example of a universal algorithm at work it begs the question, where are culture’s genes? Where is its DNA?

In his landmark and highly influential book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1989: 189) proposed the idea of ‘memes’ as units of cultural inheritance. Dawkins original intention was simply to demonstrate the universality of Darwinian evolution showing that it was not necessary to visit another planet where the theory predicts, given the conditions of heredity, variation and selection, evolution will also occur, because another evolving replicator existed right here on earth. He gave examples of memes as, “…tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” (1989: 192) The idea of a cultural replicator was not new, Lumsden and Wilson (1981) proposed a similar idea using the term culturgen. Both the idea and the term have, appropriately, taken on a life of their own. Dawkins in his forward to The Meme Machine (Blackmore 1999: viii) reported the results of an internet search for the term ‘memetic’ finding 5042 mentions; a search (Google 2006) carried out today (25^th March) found 610,000 mentions; the meme meme is doing very well.[16]

Memetics has a growing literature with contributions from among others Brodie, (1996) Lynch, (1996) Blackmore, (1999) Aunger, (2002) Distin, (2005) and most notably, Dennett (1995). Though still slightly on the fringes of academic respectability the idea of a cultural replicator is becoming widespread but the reality of the meme, its mode of transmission and its implications remain controversial even among memeticists.

The method of transmission proposed by Blackmore (1999) and others is imitation, this and some of memetics’ implications, are discussed bellow. But are memes actually real? If you could isolate a meme what would it look like, could one ever be examined under a microscope or are they not that sort of thing at all? If memes exist then they must have some physical properties, just as what we call mind must be some physical state of a brain, unless we are postulating some quasi-mystical substance of which thoughts are composed, I personally don’t believe in ghosts.[17] Aunger (2002) has suggested a neurological model of brain states replicating within single brains first, before escaping into the world to infect other brains. Whereas Dawkins (1989) Blackmore (1999) and Dennett (1995) find memes not only in brains but in artefacts and in behaviour.

Memes must spend some of their life cycle in brains as they need them in order to replicate. If so, given enough knowledge of the human brain, could it be possible to literally read someone’s mind, to be able to tell from a physical examination of their brain what their favourite colour is, what football team they support, if they believe in astrology, their recipe for chicken soup? To presume so is to suggest that there is a universal neurological code in which all ideas are written. An examination of a the code stored on a computer’s hard drive will reveal what software is installed, or to take a simpler example, that a particular jpeg file is saved in memory. However, two computers might both have jpeg files of pictures of the Mona Lisa stored but unless it was the same file the actual code could be substantially different, though both files would undoubtedly be representations of the same Mona Lisa. I suspect that the brain is like this and that no two brains ever share exactly the same “files.” Most English speakers understand what is meant by the word ‘dog’, in the sense of canine, such that if I use ‘dog’ in the sentences: “I’ve just bought a dog” or “I was bitten by a dog” it will be understood what I have bought or was bitten by but each person’s representation of ’dog’ will be different. There is a further point to be taken from the computer analogy which is that, although one could discover whether or not a computer stored a particular file if one already knew what the code for that file was, just looking at the stream of 0s and 1s which code for an unknown file is meaningless without allowing the code to be, as it were, expressed. You might know that a particular sequence codes for a pixel to be R: 234, G: 23, B: 125 at X: 1.28, Y: 0.97 and know the code for every pixel in the image that does not tell whether the picture represents The Empire State Building or Britney Spears.

It seems then that memes will have to wait a while to find their Crick and Watson and that memes themselves, unlike genes, may be, if not substrate neutral, are certainly capable of being encoded in a variety of forms. It has been suggested that DNA is the sole survivor among a number of competing replicators which existed in the early history of life. To pin memes down further we need to examine what they actually do. It is important to realise that potentially everything in culture is a meme but that not everything is and for this reason: memes are instructions.

In order for anything cultural to be inherited, such as Dawkins’s “…tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” (1989: 192) it is the instructions which underlie them which must be passed on. If I hear a tune I might be able to hum it to myself, that is form a mental representation of that tune, but unless I can hum it to someone else I cannot pass it on and the tune potentially could die with me. The “tune” could be Beethoven’s ninth symphony which I hear at a concert, I might be able to still “hear” substantial parts of if with the full orchestra playing in my head but I can only pass on such parts of it, perhaps just the Ode to Joy theme, as I can encode into a form which is “performable” to someone else. That part is the meme.

Dennett (1995: 344) also takes an example from Beethoven in defining a meme as the smallest unit capable of independent survival, in his case the da-da-da-dum opening of the fifth symphony. Any part of either symphony is potentially capable of independent survival but any other four notes will have to have something pretty special going for them for them to become detached from the parent symphony and achieve a life of their own. The “Jupiter” theme from Holst’s The Planets Suite has achieved independent existence as the tune for the hymn I Vow To Thee My Country which became even further separated from its parent when it was used as the World In Union theme for the 1999 Rugby World Cup. This was true speciation as the rugby use made reference to the patriotic content of the hymn but none to Holst’s original planets context.

So where is the meme in our examples of tunes, is it in my head or in the music? In order for me to pass it on it must be in my head but it must also be in the music too in order for it to get into my head in the first place. The tune, as it were, is its own instructions, provided that I can understand them, that is represent them in a way understandable to someone else, then I can pass them on. In this sense the genotype of the tune is contained in its phenotype but that is not the sense in which the genotype of an organism is contained in its phenotype; the cells of a body are not themselves the instructions for making new cells it is the DNA within them.

There are biological entities which are like tunes, in the sense that they are their own instructions: prions. These proteins pass on their structure to other proteins by a process of inductive conversion without recourse to DNA.

If one could deconstruct a cell, given the necessary understanding of the genetic code, the underlying instructions which code for it could be deduced enabling us to make our own copy i.e. imitate it. This perhaps is what we are doing when we hear a tune and imitate it, we are deducing the instructions from its structure. In this sense the genotype of the tune is never in the tune itself but is transmitted from brain to brain via the tune phenotype, which acts like messenger RNA to the tune carrying brain‘s “DNA“.

Blackmore (1999: 61) talks about the difference between copying the product and copying the instructions, the difference between deducing the genotype from the phenotype and having a genotype in the first place. Copying the product is reverse engineering which depends on some degree of a priori knowledge. If I lunch with an expert chef they are more likely to be able to later imitate the soup than I am, even if the recipe is unknown to them it will probably be similar to soups they do know about and their general knowledge of ingredients and flavours will tell them what the likely constituents are. It took many years before Europeans worked out the secret of making Chinese porcelain but they eventually did so.[18] A conjurer goes to great lengths so that the audience cannot “copy the product” that is understand how the trick is done, as are many manufacturers who wish to retain their trade secrets.

Memes then can exist in products or artefacts such as tunes, in as far as the instructions for the product can be deduced from the artefact itself. An arch, to return to Dawkins’s examples, is a kind of architectural conjuring trick from which instructions would be hard, though not impossible, to deduce from just seeing the arch alone; seeing an arch being constructed would be a different matter.

The human species however have invented a variety of methods by which instructions themselves can be encoded and so very easily passed on. Beethoven’s ninth can be written down and thus inherited vertically from one generation to the next and horizontally between peers. Imagine if each orchestra had to learn to play it by listening to another orchestra, even if it were a recording, the rate of transmission would be very much slower and quite possibly inaccurate.

Do methods of encoding such as written music prevent further evolution by fixing the instructions in permanent form whereas, for example, the oral tradition of passing on stories from one generation to the next allowed natural mutations and adaptations to emerge? Yes and no. Evolution can still occur but the site at which it occurs shifts from the individual piece of music. Following the memes and constructing a taxonomy of artefacts is not as straightforward for culture as it is for biology. What appears as a single lineage in terms of niche, maps for the London Underground for example, may not be a lineage in terms of memes. The ancestor for Harry Beck’s brilliant design was not the previous generation of maps but the electrical circuit diagram.

Chapter 3: Invention is the mother of necessity

Imagine a population of fruit eaters living in an isolated ecosystem. Given a steady supply of fruit throughout the year, and over many years, a stable population will be maintained. If there are no other factors, such as disease, affecting their ability to survive, the size of the population will be proportional to the amount of fruit available; one tree might sustain only two, a whole orchard two hundred. Collecting fruit costs time and energy, as does eating it. The population are grazers, they move from branch to branch or from tree to tree collecting and eating as they go. The fruit however provides more energy than it takes to collect and eat it so that any healthy individual can collect and eat enough fruit in a day not only to sustain their grazing behaviour but to do all the other things, such as having sex, that they need to do in order to survive and reproduce. These fructivores seem to have it made, it might not be the most stimulating lifestyle and they might not have much leisure time but from the point of view of their genes and themselves, since they know no “better“, it appears an idyllically stable and sustainable way of life and, all other things being equal, could carry on without changing ad infinitum.

Then one day, into this Eden, comes a snake and says to an Eve or an Adam, “Pssst, want to buy a basket?” If Adam or Eve buys the basket how much of an advantage will that give them over the rest of the population? They can now collect fruit faster than anyone else and then sit down and eat it when they please, which in time and motion terms is more energy efficient than grazing. It is better to do all the washing up then all the drying than to wash up a plate, dry it, wash up a spoon, dry it and so on: energy is wasted in changing between different tasks; removing this waste is the principle behind the production line. So Adam or Eve save some energy and thus will need to collect less fruit in order to maintain their original lifestyle or can collect the same amount of fruit and use the extra energy for doing something else, such as having sex, either way the basket should improve their chances of survival and reproduction. However, the basket itself has a cost, they have to buy it from the snake. Adam or Eve’s only currency is the fruit which they can collect, so the snake gives them a mortgage on the basket and takes a percentage of each harvest until the cost, plus interest, has been paid off; in return the snake promises to repair the basket or even replace it if needed. If the snake’s cut is greater than the amount of extra fruit the basket enables Adam or Eve to collect then they are better off not using it and the snake will go out of business,[19] so the snake sets the cost so that there is something in it for Adam or Eve as well as itself.

But now what happens is that others start wanting baskets too. The snake, of course, is delighted: more baskets means it gets more fruit. Baskets start selling like hot cakes and soon the snake has more fruit than it knows what to do with. Given an unlimited supply of fruit everyone would be a winner, the snake would be able to go into the jam business and the fructivores would have energy to spare for other activities. Even in this scenario those without baskets would be disadvantaged since they are spending more time and energy collecting fruit than the leisured basket users. But there never is an unlimited supply of fruit. In any ecosystem any population size will be determined by its ability to exploit the amount of resources available to it which are therefore always limited. So once basket use becomes widespread it becomes a necessity for you to have a basket or all the fruit will be gone before you’ve got your share.

In the model I’ve proposed the population would actually shrink since there is only so much fruit to go around but more fruit needs to be picked by individuals in order to ensure their personal survival and pay the snake. So cui bono: who benefits? All other things being equal[20] the surviving members of the population haven’t benefited since they would have been just as likely to survive B.B. (before baskets). Those that didn’t survive because they were either too slow in taking up the new technology or lost out in the ensuing competition for the limited supply of fruit certainly didn’t benefit. The fruit hasn’t benefited or lost as we are assuming that the same amount of fruit is being picked as before; the basket only enabled fruit to be picked more quickly, not more of it to be picked. The only beneficiaries are the snake and, you could argue, since there are now more of them, the baskets.

So we come to the point of this parable. If the snake sold not baskets but the idea of baskets, with some basket weaving instructions and perhaps a few practical demonstrations to get you started, and then we say that the snake is not an actual snake but just a process by which an idea arose in the mind of Adam or Eve, then what we are talking about is an invention. Adam or Eve’s very first “basket” might have been no more than a big leaf[21] and its cost negligible; only that of collecting it and perhaps forming it into a rough cone. Its advantage too might have been slight in that rudimentary form but as basket technology developed and more elaborate structures were introduced then both the costs and potential benefits would begin to rise. The costs for any individual, however, must never exceed the benefits or those who don’t use baskets, or use a “cheaper” model, will do better and basket technology will either cease developing or die out altogether. Given that the cost-benefit ratio remains in favour of the individual then basket use and further technological development will have to continue, not because the technology is of itself necessary for survival (Adam and Eve were perfectly capable of collecting enough fruit to survive without baskets) but because the invention of the technology creates a necessity to use it, if others are doing so, in order to compete for limited resources.

Now imagine the early Earth, before anything like we call life got going but with simple replicating molecules, something like DNA, which just float freely around in the primordial soup. Suppose that these molecules consist of complimentary pairs of chemicals, call them A and B. In order to replicate each molecule splits in two and when it meets its compliment they join forces to form new molecules: A with a B, B with an A. Each A would have to join with a new B and vice versa or no replication would take place.[22] Splitting requires the presence of a catalyst. Assuming that a steady supply of new chemicals is available then the amount of AB’s will depend on the rate at which they can divide and find new partners, which will in turn depend on the available amount of the catalyst and of A and B chemicals. Now into this soup comes an ABCD molecule. ABCD’s replicate in the same way but the combination of A,C and B,D (let us imagine) allows the molecule to produce its own catalyst. Now what will happen to the AB’s? In time, probably quite quickly, they will become extinct. The AB’s cannot compete with the faster reproducing ABCD’s who are no longer dependent on a chance encounter with the catalyst. All the A and B chemicals will eventually be used up before the slower AB’s can find them. The ABCD’s “invention” gives them an advantage over the AB’s in just the same way that basket use gave Eve or Adam an advantage over their rivals. The AB’s didn’t need to invent anything but once a better rival replicating system was created then they needed (if they could) to compete or die.

Both genetic, biological innovation (back in the real world among early replicating molecules the “invention” of the cell membrane, for example, must have been a major advantage) and exogenetic, technological innovation are not (necessarily) produced by the need of an individual (not at all in the case of biological innovation since genetic mutations are “blind“) in the sense that the individual did not need it to survive before the innovation arrived but once it has arrived and it confers an advantage over rival individuals that creates a need for rivals to adapt or die. Invention is the mother of necessity.
 

What is the most important technological invention in human history? Arguably it is the wheel. What do all the sports seen in the Winter Olympics have in common? The answer is not wheels but sliding. Be it skis, skates, bob-sledges, curling-stones or pucks all winter sports are dependent to some extent on the technology of sliding. Sliding must have been one of the earliest means of moving something from a to b. Beginning with simple dragging of, for instance, a large kill, methods for reducing friction must have been gradually adopted progressing from frame structures, to sledges, to the use of rollers and eventually the wheel. In environments where friction is not such a problem, where snow and ice are present often year round, sliding persisted, though rotary motion in the shape of the caterpillar track of the skidoo has given rise to a hybrid. In Central America the use of wheels for transport was unknown until the arrival of the Spanish, yet wheeled toys have been discovered dating back to the Aztecs (Basalla 1989 p.10) what can account for this anomaly? Simply that the terrain of Central America selects for transport with two or four legs rather than with any amount of wheels. Rotacentric transportation is a specifically western phenomena, even in the Near East where the wheel is thought to have originated it was replaced by the camel and not reintroduced until the onset of European imperialism.

If the natural environment is less than ideal for the use of wheeled transport but such transport still has advantages, a cart pulled by an animal can carry far more than that animal can on its back and with less expenditure of energy than by dragging, then it is the environment which is likely to be changed. The use of wheeled transport in itself will change the environment creating proto-roads.

The discovery of the principle of rotary motion had far reaching consequences and many subsequent technologies were based on it: wood turning; glass blowing; pottery; wool spinning; water power; grinding corn; wind power; pulleys. It’s hard to think of many technological artefacts which do not employ rotary motion to some extent from the turbine to the rolling pin. Even such solid state devices as the computer still have a mouse which employs rollers.

Chapter 4: Gull bills, computer viruses and killer jokes

The argument against the autonomy of memes as separate replicators with interests of their own, which need not necessarily be the same as those of the genes, comes from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology where any observed behaviour or cultural trait, from contraception to cricket, is always explained in terms of biological and ultimately genetic advantage. Considerable ingenuity is expended in explaining how apparently non-biological activities such as writing operas or skydiving can be always be related back to some adaptive trait which must have evolved in an aboriginal context, such as the handicap principle (Zahavi 1999). On the face of it this seems quite sensible: if a cultural behaviour evolves then it must be good for the organism in which it evolves or it would never get passed on. How could something which is bad for the genes of an organism, that may actually reduce its fitness, its ability to reproduce and pass on its genes, ever get passed on when it is, in the example of culture, humans with human brains which do the passing on and they have been shaped by evolution and are ultimately determined by genes. This argument is, however, a mistake in several ways.

Sociobiology or evolutionary psychology say little about why opera or skydiving, in particular, but perhaps they don’t have to, historians, anthropologists or sociologists can worry over the details as long as they recognise that ultimately the genes are in charge, but are they? What actually is it that genes are in charge of? Genes code for amino acids; which make proteins; which build bodies; which produce behaviour. So in that sense genes are the cause of behaviour but that is not to say that there are genes for behaviour or that any particular behaviour is due to any particular genes. A minor stir was caused in the popular press in 1992 when it was claimed that a gene for grammar had been discovered (Pinker 1994 p.297). What had actually been discovered was that an inherited language disorder could be traced to a single gene. This means that the absence of a single gene disrupts normal language abilities but not that a single gene is responsible for them. Single genes can be responsible for discrete physical traits such as eye colour, and combinations of genes for variable traits such as height. The “grammar gene” shows that language abilities are in some way genetically determined: all normal human children exposed to a linguistic environment acquire language without apparent effort; a universal grammar may underlie all languages (Chomsky 1957) which may be “hard wired” into the brain but it is the specific cultural environment that determines whether a child speaks English, French, Bantu or American Sign Language or with a Scots, Essex or Normandy accent, there are no genes for Hungarian or a Birmingham accent. And this is the crucial point: genes can only act at a distance.

Traits which genes code for which enable those genes to replicate themselves more than some other rival genes will come to dominate the gene pool, that is how evolution works but traits which genes code for are at one remove from DNA itself which is the stuff that ultimately gets replicated and, in the case of behavioural traits, are many removes away. Genes create mechanisms which make the organism want to do things, such as eating or having sex, which will ultimately lead to the replication of those genes but DNA itself does not make you hungry or horny. The most basic drives of all organisms are concerned with the acquisition of energy from the environment and, in sexually reproducing species, finding and attracting mates - in other words survival and reproduction. These drives have the effect of increasing the reproductive success of the genes which create them, which is why they have evolved in the first place, but drives must of necessity work at one or more stages removed from the genes themselves and may therefore not always have the effect that the genes would like. Gull chicks are primed to peck at the red spot on their parents’ bills which has the effect of stimulating the adult to regurgitate food. The chick does not peck in order to get the adult to feed it, it is just that genes for pecking at red spots have been successful in the past in helping chicks to survive and eventually reproduce. However, it has been shown (Tinbergen 1966, 1953) that gull chicks will peck at any old red spot, just as chicks of nidifugous species of birds will follow the first big thing they see as their “mother” by the process of imprinting (Lorenz 1952). These behaviours then are non-associative and therefore transferable, as we would expect them to be: genes don’t know about red spots and mothers, natural selection just rewards genes for behaviours which have worked in the past. In the world without ethological researchers in which birds first evolved the first big thing a chick sees is very likely to be its mother, any red spot that a gull chick sees is very likely to belong to its parent; chicks haven’t needed to be more discriminating and evolution, as ever, works on a good enough, need to know principle.

So now the genes only camp will come right back at me and say, that’s all very fine but if a genetically determined drive has an effect that “the genes don’t like” then those genes will be selected against. Suppose birds had evolved in a world of ethological researchers, any chick which followed the wrong “mother” or pecked at the wrong “bill” would decrease its chances of reproduction in favour of more discriminating chicks, thus the false information would act as a selection pressure for better discrimination just as the discriminatory prowess of the chicks could act as a selection pressure for better fake “bills” and “mothers“. Such a co-evolutionary arms races must underlie all forms of mimicry in nature, the exquisite camouflage of many stick insects is testament not only to the morphological ingenuity of their genes but to the perceptive skill of their predators.

Another such arms race is between cuckoos and their hosts (Davis 1989). If a cuckoo lays an egg in your nest it pays you to be able to tell it apart from your own eggs so that you can reject it. If you’re a cuckoo it pays you to make your egg as similar to the host’s eggs as possible so that it is not rejected. By “pays” I mean, of course, that genes which enhanced discrimination and mimicry, in hosts and cuckoos respectively, would be more likely to be replicated and to spread in the respective gene pools than genes which were “fooled“, or “foolish“. Given a steady mutation rate in both cuckoos and hosts, over a long enough period of time, cuckoos should become clever egg mimics and hosts not easily fooled. Cuckoos do indeed become very good mimics with females tending to specialise in particular hosts. In newly parasitised species of host, cuckoo eggs tend not to be accurate mimics because the arms race has only just begun; hosts have not had time to develop discrimination so eggs don’t need to be accurate mimics. Once a mutation arises in the host’s genes which enables better discrimination, genes for better mimicry will be selected for in the cuckoo; the resulting positive feedback loop starts another arms race.

The operative word is race. Cuckoos always have a head start since they instigate the loop by laying eggs in other bird’s nests. Given enough time hosts will become expert egg discriminators and cuckoo eggs should become indistinguishable from the host’s. Returning to our fake red spots, given that pecking at the wrong spot is a disadvantage as it does not lead to food, chicks should “learn” pretty quickly to discriminate between the fake spots and the real ones. That is genes for discrimination will be more likely to be passed on than genes which are “fooled.”

That is true, given enough time but there is a crucial difference between the innate drive of the chick and the artificially created red spots: the information coding for discrimination is genetic and has to wait for random mutations to come up with new solutions, the information coding for fake bills may be partly genetic, if we assume a genetic component to the creativity of ethologists, but is mostly memetic: a better fake bill produced by one ethologist can be replicated by another by copying or having the information passed on to him. Even assuming a timescale of a several years, during which time research papers are written, peer reviewed, published and discussed, the speed at which such memetic information spreads is many orders of magnitude faster than any successful mutation can spread among a population of gulls: the genes don’t stand a chance.

The sociobiological argument is that the gulls are simply making a mistake which, given enough time, the genes must recover from, genes for not pecking at a fake bill must by definition get spread more widely than “mistaken” genes which do. The same kind of argument is put forward to explain other non-adaptive behaviours such as contraception and celibacy. Memetics however suggests that genes can never catch up as their mutation and replication rates are so much slower than those of memes, but more importantly the memetic argument says that memes themselves have driven human evolution.

This is the most radical implication of memetic theory and the one that seems to require most explanation, seeming as it does to be so counterintuitive. Even if memes can replicate and evolve faster than genes how can brains which have been provided by genetic evolution decide to do something which is not in its own interest. How can memes which are “bad” for the carrier ever hope to get passed on at all.

To explain it is necessary to return to the idea of genes acting at a distance, providing general drives and abilities. A prime example is human sexuality, specifically male sexuality,[23] where arousal can be very quickly achieved through appropriate visual stimulation, for obviously adaptive reasons. In the context in which this drive and its associated physiological effects evolved, the visual stimulation would always have been “appropriate“. However, since the invention of things like photography it no longer, from the gene’s “point of view”, necessarily is. Like the gull chicks we get turned on by the wrong thing. A successful meme will use its appearance, to the genetically evolved brain, of usefulness without necessarily being useful at all.

At some point in our evolutionary history a switch may have occurred when those with the best memes began to reproduce more successfully, good users of language, for example. Thus possession of memes and the associated genes for abilities to inherit memes such as imitation became a criterion of survival and reproduction. Memes began to drive genes. This is a special case of the Baldwin effect (1896) where the adoption of a new behaviour becomes the background against which genes are then selected, the classic example being lactose tolerance among milk drinkers.

Sexual selection may in particular have driven this switch. It’s easy to see how an adornment like the peacock’s tail, whatever its value as a handicap signal, becomes driven by female choice, selecting not only for peacocks with the best tails, judged by whatever criterion that might be, but peahens who prefer the “best” tails. If the information encoding for the tail happened to come from another source, suppose our ethologists tired of teasing gull chicks and turned their attention to “improving” peacock’s tails, would those with artificially “better” tails get more mates and produce more viable offspring? In the short term, if the right criterion for improvement were chosen, then they must get more females however, the next generation would not inherit the new tails (unless the ethologists got at them as well). But if the peacocks decided of their own accord to adopt the improved tail then those of their sons who decided to do likewise, by inheriting their fathers “deciding” genes, would also do better. What is now being selected is the ability to decide, which might be from a range of “improved” tails that the ethologists present as choices. Even so female choice of artificial tails and the males who adopt them is still driven by the same genetically determined criterion that drove natural tail selection, so are the genes still driving the memes? The answer seems to be that each becomes dependent on the other in a kind of information symbiosis. Like a lichen which is a symbiosis between a fungus and an algae. The fungus cannot do without the algae as it hasn’t the ability to photosynthesise, the fungus may provide some minerals not available to the algae but it would probably do better on its own.

Two final examples illustrate the independence and interdependence of memes and their genetic hosts. A computer is designed to execute instructions, that ability can be hijacked by computer viruses, which instruct the computer to make copies of the virus and pass it on to other computers. Thanks to the peculiar mentality of virus writers the life span of most computer viruses is relatively short since they cannot resist making the virus do something nasty to the host computer, thus giving itself away and often killing the host at the same time. The epidemiology of real viruses follows a similar course. A computer virus which only wanted to replicate and survive would try to remain invisible and would only become apparent when it began to compete for resources, that is computer memory, with legitimate software. Viruses of any kind however can spread very widely and only need to use the host for as long as it takes to infect another one.

Monty Python (BBC Television 1969) created a sketch in which Earnest Scribbler (Michael Palin) writes a joke so funny that anyone who reads it dies laughing. Earnest is, of course, the joke’s first victim but luckily (for the joke) not before he has written it down. His mother (Eric Idle) who discovers the body and finds the joke, assuming it is a suicide note, is the second. The joke is eventually put to use as an offensive weapon, being translated into German:

“Wenn ist das Nunstrück git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!”

The troops who deploy the joke are thus immune to its effects. The Germans try to come up with a counter-joke of their own, with predictable results. At the end of the war joke warfare is banned and the joke buried under a monument to the “unknown joke”. This meme, in common with 99.9% of all species that have ever existed, becomes extinct.

Chapter 5: What memes mean for freewill and novelty

Has the replacement of the kind of “genes only” explanation for human behaviour, implied by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with a gene/meme symbiosis simply shifted the blame from one determinant to another? Is free will still an illusion after all? Is a mind infested by other people’s ideas and beliefs as bad, if not worse, than one still operating in the stone-age, driven by biological imperatives? Yes and no, freedom of choice cannot exist without there being choices. “Any colour you like as long as it’s black,”[24] is truly “Hobson’s” choice. If you have only ever been exposed to one view of the world, then one view of the world is all you will have. It is only when competing alternatives are presented that any element of choice is involved.

Many belief systems from Christianity to psychoanalysis are resistant to challenge since they have found ways of inoculating their adherents against “evil” influences by creating anti-memes. Ask a Christian why they believe in the bible and they will tell you it is because it is the word of God. And how do they know it is the word of God? Because the bible tells them so. More enlightened theologians who perhaps accept the findings of modern science and that the bible is not to be taken literally, still believe in God because they have “faith.” If you tell a psychoanalyst that you’ve never wanted to sleep with your mother (if you happen to be a man) or envied your brother’s penis (if you happen to be a woman) then of course you are repressing those feelings and proving the analyst’s a priori hypothesis. These are caricatures but are representative of the kind of circular argument which makes belief systems, where one believes because one believes, impervious to any kind of rational argument.

This type of belief from authority has obvious adaptive advantages, if a member of your tribe tells you that there is a tree with ripe fruit on it a mile to the west, if their information has proved reliable in the past, it will probably pay you to believe them, but won’t if they have a reputation for lying. Once human language developed the capacity to represent objects not immediately apparent it simultaneously introduced the concepts of truth and falsity and assessing the trustworthiness of any source of information became crucial. It will of, course, be in the interests of people to generally tell the truth if they want to be trusted. This is fine if the information given is ultimately testable, I may not have any experience of the trustworthiness of a particular source but if other people whose trustworthiness I do have experience of tell me the source is reliable then I will trust it too, until I have evidence to the contrary. In the modern world one has to take an enormous amount on this kind of common sense trust. It may have been possible in Leonardo da Vinci’s day for an educated person to be equally erudite in all branches of knowledge but it certainly isn’t any more. I haven’t personally carried out the “two slit experiment” and could not possibly understand the mathematics of quantum mechanics even if I wanted to but I trust that people, who have and do, know what they are talking about. In a more practical realm if my doctor tells me I am ill, or indeed well, it makes common sense to believe her: this is still belief from authority but it is probabilistically rational. It’s not very likely that my doctor or Richard Feynman are liars or incompetent (though the latter is more likely) or that there is a complete and consistent universal conspiracy to cover these facts up.[25]

Other forms of belief however are not testable, from religious conviction, through various superstitions to astrology. Why do people hold these beliefs and does it matter? Much of human existence is uncertain and historically the causes of events such as natural disasters, disease and accidents, were unknown or unknowable. Anyone who makes a prediction that appears to be born out by events, either through luck or by making the kind of general statements, known to every stage “mind reader” that look impressive but really aren’t,[26] is going to look as if they have some kind of special knowledge and is likely to be believed about all sorts of things, provided no one can contradict them.[27] The shaman/witch doctor figure may actually do some good in terms of providing medicine. In a sense irrational beliefs do not greatly matter as long as they are not seriously detrimental to people’s and, more importantly, other people’s lives. The person who won’t leave the house on Friday the 13^th is not doing themselves or anyone else a great deal of harm, the suicide bomber who blows themselves and others up in the name of whatever god, is.

Though there can be no such thing as complete freewill, the more choices we have the freer we are. This realisation should emphasise, as if it needed it, the value of education. However, choosing between, for example, creationist explanations for the diversity of life on Earth and the Darwinian explanation, is not the same as choosing what to have for lunch. All choices are not equal. Meme theory should bring the realisation that the ideas that many of us are infected with produce symptoms which actively fight against ideas which might be good for us and the rest of humanity. For me the most important thing that can be, and should be taught to everyone, is what constitutes a real and rational choice at all, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?
 

To me it’s actually an intriguing rather than disturbing thought that the vast percentage of the ideas, in even the most creative minds, have been inherited from other people with lineages stretching back perhaps over many generations. But Is there no such thing as a new thought? To take what seems like an obvious counter example, are not novelists and other story tellers constantly inventing new plots, situations and characters? Isn’t every new novel or movie unique? In a sense yes, in the same sense that virtually every utterance made by anyone is a unique combination of words. However as the structural analysis of literature has revealed there are anything from 7 to 36 basic plots (The Internet Public Library 2006) and a set of distinct genres into which all stories can be characterised. That is not to say there is nothing new under the sun but that novelty is largely the result, to use the language of genetics, of recombination rather than mutation.

To take a recent literary phenomenon, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books seem highly original and so, in some respects they are, but an evolutionary analysis reveals that they are basically Tom Brown’s School Days with wizards. Originality stems from a recombination of existing elements, as though genre and plot are alternative alleles. The flexibility of memes, however, allows for many more possible combinations than genes allow at a particular locus; the creativity of the writer is in finding new combinations. This is in contrast to the so called ‘high concept’ movie where a new idea is pitched in terms of existing movies to make it easily understandable to studio executives and audiences alike, “It’s Top Gun with helicopters,” for example; Cf. ITV’s recent, “Strictly Come Dancing on ice“.[28]

There are, of course, more stories in existence than there were 20, 200 or 2,000 years ago[29] and although lineages can be traced back through the generations many have become sufficiently distinctive to be classed as new species. I suggest that speciation occurs when a new combination of existing elements becomes a meme, that is a unit of information capable of being imitated. A “school for wizards” genre for example or the celebrity “talent show.” In other words a recombination of elements creates a new element which, if it is subsequently imitated, takes on a life of its own.

Novelty then is the result of the recombination of existing elements, how could it be otherwise? You can mix a new shade of purple but you can’t create a new colour. If the resulting combination is sufficiently distinctive it becomes an element in its own right which can be further recombined. If you think about attempts to create imaginary creatures it is quite easy to see who their ancestors are, from the rather obvious horse/man combination of the centaur, lion/eagle of the gryphon, horse/narwhal of the unicorn to the less obvious but none-the-less identifiable elements of ET, Alien and the Daleks. King Kong is a big gorilla, Godzilla a big lizard. Frankenstein’s monster is literally a combination of bits of other people. Dracula is a man with pointy teeth, Mr. Spock a man with pointy ears.

The meme pool of available combinations is the material from which novelty emerges. That this meme pool is shared results in examples of convergent evolution. The history of technology abounds with examples of inventions which were arrived at more or less simultaneously in different places, photography is a prime example. The meme pool analysis suggests a situation where things are not so much invented as discovered. In other words, all the necessary pieces are in place “in the culture” it just needs someone to put them together.

Conclusion

Human culture and its products evolve and this evolution occurs by a mechanism of exogenetic rather than genetic heredity. The theoretical basis for this argument is how the principles of universal Darwinism and selfish replicators interact with the uniquely human mechanism of information gathering and learning, namely the imitating brain. The theory of a separate, exogenetic, replicator using human brains to pass on information from one generation to the next carries the radical implication that the “interests” of culture will not necessarily be those of our genes or indeed of ourselves, as individuals or as a species. By creating brains capable of gathering and passing on information and acting as host to a new replicator, DNA may have made a “big mistake” and unleashed, as it were, a monster which can reproduce and evolve faster than genes by many orders of magnitude and may in time completely outlive any dependence on its original creator and master.

Evolution, here on Earth, is an “experiment” being run only once, human beings are not only observers of this experiment but active participants and it is not yet finished.

References

Aunger, R. (2002) The Electric Meme; a new theory of how we think, New York: The Free Press

Baldwin, J. M. (1896) ‘A New Factor in Evolution’ American Naturalist, 30 441- 451, 536-553

Basalla, G. (1989) The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

BBC Television (1969) Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode one, BBC2 [October 5, 1969]

Benzon, W. L. (2002) ‘Colorless Green Homunculi.’ Human Nature Review. 2, 454-462

Bitterbaum, E., and L. F. Baptista, (1979) ‘Geographical variation in songs of California House Finche
                (Carpodacus, mexicanus). Auk 96, 462-474

Blackmore, S. J. (1999) The Meme Machine, New York: Oxford University Press

Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Brewster, B. (1987) ‘Eye migration and cranial development during flatfish metamorphosis: a reappraisal
                (Teleostei: Pleuronectiformes).’ Journal of Fish Biology 31, (6) 805-833

Brodie, R. (1996) Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Seattle, WA: Integral Press

Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton

Darwin, C. (1986) The Origin of Species (first published 1859), London: Penguin Classics

Davies, N.B. and Brooke, M.deL. (1989) ‘An experimental study of co- evolution between the Cuckoo, Cuculus
                canorus, and its hosts.’ Journal of Animal Ecology 58, 207-224

Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene, revised edition Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dawkins, R. (1988) The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin Books

Dawkins, R. (1983) The Extended Phenotype, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea, London: Penguin

di Pellegrino G, Fadiga L, Fogassi L, Gallese V, Rizzolatti G (1992) ‘Understanding motor events: a
                 neurophysiological study.’ Experimental Brain Research, 91:176-180.

Distin, K. (2005) The Selfish Meme, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Edge (2006) Daniel C. Dennett page 2 [online] available from
                 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett/dennett_p2.html  [2 March 2006]

Gilbert, S. F. (1988) Developmental Biology, 2nd ed., Sunderland MASS: Sinauer Associates, Inc.

Goodall, J. (1963) ‘Feeding behaviour of wild chimpanzees: a preliminary report.’ Symposium of the Zoological
                 Society of London 10, 39-48

Google (2006) Google Search [online] available from http://www.google.co.uk/  [25 March 2006]

Gombrich, E.H. (1986) Art and illusion, Oxford: Phaidon Press

The Internet Public Library (2006) The ‘Basic’ Plots in Literature [online] available from
                 http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html  [13 February 2006]

Lorenz, K. (1952) King Solomon’s Ring, London: Methuen

Lonsdorf, E.V. (2001) ‘Development and acquisition of termite-fishing skills in the Gombe chimpanzees.’
                Proceedings of "The Apes: Challenges for the 21st Century"

Lonsdorf, E.V. (2006) The role of the mother in the acquisition of tool-use skills in wild chimpanzees. Animal
                Cognition 9, 36-46

Lumsden, C.J. & Wilson, E.O. (1981) Genes, mind and culture: The coevolutionary process. Cambridge, MA:
                Harvard University Press

Lynch, A. (1996) Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, the New Science of Memes, New
                York: Basic Books

Medawar, P. (1988) Pluto’s Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Medawar, P. (1966) ‘Science and the sanctity of life’ Encounter 27 (6)

Oosterhuis (1998) 1998 Discussion Marcus Novak [online] available from
                  http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=272  [17 March 2006]

Petroski, H.( 1993) The Evolution of Useful Things, London: Pavilion Books Limited

Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Co

Ramachandran, V.S. (2000) Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap
                forward" in human evolution [online] available from
                http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html  [15 February 2006]

Ridley, M. (1996) Evolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Science

Sanz, C., D. Morgan, and S. Gulick. (2004) ‘New insights into chimpanzees, tools, and termites from the Congo
                  basin.’ American Naturalist 164, 567-581

Thompson, D.W. (1917) On Growth & Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tinbergen, N. (1966) Animal Behaviour. Nederland: Time-Life International

Tinbergen, N. (1953) The Herring Gull's World. London: Collins

Wikipedia (2006a) World Population [online] available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population  [17
                 March 2006]

Wikipedia (2006b) Porcelain [online] available from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain  [26 March 2006]

Zahavi, A. and Zahavi, A. (1999) The Handicap Principle, Oxford: Oxford University Press