Abstract
The “meme” concept is usually attributed to Dawkins. It does, however, have a much longer history, predating the acceptance of the “gene” concept in early twentieth century biology. This chapter traces the history of the “meme” meme and explores the role of intentionality —or its exclusion—in the analogies drawn between biological and cultural evolution. There are three main problems with the “meme” meme in its current forms: a taken-for-granted gene-centric view of evolution; a disembodied notion of culture as the transmission of unit “ideas”; and the misleading promise of connecting biology and culture that is based on yet another taken-for-granted assumption: that biological and cultural evolution are ultimately two quite separate realms.
[…] neo-Darwinism involves a breach between organism and nature as complete as the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter.(Waddington 1957, ix)
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Notes
- 1.
The analogy of the locomotive engine has given way to the computer metaphor: “Consciousness may be like the heat or the hum or the smell of the computer. It is a side effect of the particular hardware and software being used, but is not of any particular importance in understanding that hardware or software” (Thagard 1986, p. 311).
- 2.
It is curious that Weismann’s doctrine of the continuity of the germ plasm was so widely accepted. As Hill (1893, p. 84) noted, “we must remember that the doctrine of the germ-plasm is itself purely theoretical”.
- 3.
Lamarck’s principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a supplement to his orthogenetic theory of evolutionary transformation: the continuing spontaneous emergence of organisms and their subsequent spontaneous differentiation into more and more complex organic forms. The inheritance of acquired characteristics was invoked to explain adaptation to the specific environmental conditions. Before Darwin, adaptation and transformation were widely regarded as contradictory on the grounds that any change would surely destroy the adaptive relations between organisms and their circumstances.
- 4.
“R. Dawkins […] is, of course, aware that his title is simply a clever gimmick—for only an extreme ‘mentalist’ could assume that a gene has the experience of being selfish. […] His restriction of memes to man amounts to saying that, from the evolutionary point of view, we can afford to ignore all the evidence of consciousness in animals; and the consequent development of primitive proto-cultures, as in primates” (Thorpe 1978, p. 75).
- 5.
This was the great attraction of analogies between evolution and individual development, especially the theory of recapitulation.
- 6.
Lyell, however, was not convinced that natural selection could explain the origin of our capacity for language, and Müller was convinced that it could not.
- 7.
Such cultural theory could take a distinctly evolutionist turn, invoking notions of progress, stages, and “parallels” with biological transformation (see Greene 1981). In fact, Darwinism needs to be carefully distinguished from evolutionism.
- 8.
The critical importance of animal and plant breeding to the Victorian economy has been stressed by Secord (1985) in a paper on Darwin’s relation to the breeders. As he points out, even after the Industrial Revolution, England remained “a largely agricultural nation with an important proportion of the populace engaged in the production of food, and most wealth and power securely anchored in the land” (Secord 1985, p. 521).
- 9.
Of course, the evidence that selective breeding, deliberate or incidental, could effect transformations was a useful “existence proof” that living beings could undergo transformation. The implication, however, of Darwin’s own argument concerning unconscious selection was that, since such selection was unwitting and based on very minute variations (rather than striking novelties), the changes would not be noticed, and hence not be recorded, by the breeders. Thus, artificial selection could not, as Darwin himself recognized, provide the evidence for gradual transformation he really needed.
- 10.
Darwin was very aware that he needed to distance himself from Lamarck. In this respect, therefore, “Lamarckism” would have discouraged him from making too free use of intentionalist descriptions. For an important clarification of Darwin’s use of Lamarckism, see Montgomery (1985).
- 11.
Lewontin, an impressive critic of the mechanistic approach of neo-Darwinism, has also consistently misrepresented Darwin himself as a Cartesian (e.g., Lewontin 1982).
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Costall, A. (2015). The ‘Meme’ Meme Revisited. In: Breyer, T. (eds) Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1387-9_4
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