What's in a Meme?

"The Meme Metaphor" by Mark Jeffreys, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Winter 2000), Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Journals Div., 2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md. 21218–4363.

Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s speculative concept of a meme—a replicating cultural entity analogous to a gene, that might explain how human culture evolves—has caught on in recent years. There’s even a three-year-old academic journal devoted to the fledgling science of memetics. Unlike some prominent scientists, Jeffreys, an English professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, does not dismiss memetics out of hand, but he says much work is needed to make the meme metaphor scientifically useful.

What is a meme? A lexicon on the Journal of Memetics website (www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/ jom-emit) gives this definition: "A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern.... Individual slogans, catchphrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes."

Jeffreys, however, contends that memeticists are mixing metaphors—ones drawn from virology, such as hosts and parasites, with the basic metaphor drawn from genetics. That metaphor asserts "that memes parallel genes" and form an independent, cultural system of natural selection. Researchers should stick with it, he maintains. "If memetic replication is not based on genetic replication and is truly part of a new selection process," he says, "it cannot be considered parasitic, nor can humans be called hosts. In certain respects, the spread of beliefs, fashions, technologies, and types of artifacts [does] resemble epidemics, but in those respects so does the spread of life on Earth in the first place, along with the subsequent waves and collapses of spreading speciation and mass extinctions."

Yet even with the viral metaphors discarded, Jeffreys says, memetics still is not genetics, nor "even a fully fledged theory of selection because it has proposed no plausible mechanism for sufficiently high-fidelity self-replication" of the memes. This is not a fatal flaw, in his view. It merely puts memetics in roughly the same situation as the "largely speculative" study of the origin of life, though without the plausibility that enterprise derives from "the success of the Darwinian explanations of speciation and the fossil record."

That offers a clue as to how memeticists should proceed, Jeffreys believes. "Culture most probably evolves," he says, "but relevant empirical evidence is desperately needed" to determine whether it evolves in memetic fashion, by a separate Darwinian system. Memeticists, he urges, should develop "a plausible model of replication," and test it against existing "cultural equivalents of species, such as religions and ideologies." If they can show, for instance, how the incest taboo or adoption, which run counter to people’s "genetic interests," are culturally transmitted, then memetics "will no longer be ‘cocktail party science.’ "