Posted on Wednesday 23 October 2002

An objection to the memetic approach to culture

Richard Dawkins defines "memes" as cultural replicators propagated through imitation, undergoing a process of selection, and standing to be selected not because they benefit their human carriers, but because of they benefit themselves. Are non-biological replicators such as memes theoretically possible? Yes, surely. The very idea of non-biological replicators, and the argument that the Darwinian model of selection is not limited to the strictly biological are already, by themselves, of theoretical interest. This would be so even if, actually, there were no memes. Anyhow, there are clear cases of actual memes, though much fewer than is often thought. Chain-letters, for instance, fit the definition. The very content of these letters, with threats to those who ignore them and promises to those who copy and send them, contributes to their being copied and sent again and again. Chain-letters don't benefit the people who copy them, they benefit their own propagation. Moreover, some chain-letters are doing better than others because of the greater effectiveness of their content in causing replication.

Once the general idea of a meme is understood - and especially if it understood fairly loosely -, it is all too easy to see human social life as teeming with memes. Aren't, for instance, religious ideas, with their threats of hell for unbelievers and promises of paradise for the proselytes, comparable to chain-letters, and in fact much more effective in benefiting their own propagation, come what may to their human carriers? More generally, aren't words, songs, fashions, political ideals, cooking recipes, ethnic prejudices, folktales, and just about everything cultural, items that get copied again and again, with the more successful items managing to invade more minds over longer periods of historical time, and to recruit those minds to further their own propagation? If this were so, if culture were made of memes in Dawkins's strong sense, then the study of culture could - and arguably should - be recast as a science of memes or "memetics". The Darwinian model of selection could be used, with proper adjustments, to explain the properties, the variety and the evolution of culture, just as it explains the properties, the variety, and the evolution of life.

The question is whether the claim that culture is made of memes is a true one. Several objections have been made to this claim. In his "foreword" to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999), Richard Dawkins responds to the simplest and most serious objection: "that memes, if they exist at all, are transmitted with too low fidelity to perform a gene-like role in any realistically Darwinian selection process" (Dawkins 1999: x).1 I want here to discuss Dawkins's responses, and, in so doing, develop a different fundamental objection to the meme model.