Free The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Page A

cannot.
    Although Popper did not use the idea of a replicator, his views directly gave rise to the new field of evolutionary epistemology, which does. Evolutionary epistemology began in 1974 with a critique of Popper by Campbell, and applies Darwinian thinking to the evolution of knowledge (Hull 1988
a
,
b
; Plotkin 1982). The American philosopher David Hull studies the way scientific ideas develop over time in lineages rather as species do. He treats scientific ideas as the replicators and scientists as the interactors (he prefers the term ‘interactor’ to Dawkins’s ‘vehicle’ because of its more active connotations). Plotkin considers science as not only ‘the product of a “Darwin machine” ’ but ‘a special form of culture that is transformed in time by evolutionary processes’ (Plotkin 1993, pp. 69, 223). According to evolutionary epistemology, biological adaptations are one form of knowledge, and science is another; both are produced by the processes of blind variation and selective retention (Campbell 1975). This approach is firmly based in Universal Darwinism and does not bring everything back to genetic advantage.
    Whose advantage?
    We can now see that many theories of cultural change use evolutionary ideas but they are not the same as memetics. There are two fundamental differences. First, most do not distinguish general evolutionary theory from the specifics of biological evolution. This means they are unclear about the relationship between biology and culture and easily fall foul of the obvious differences between genetics and cultural evolution. Second, they do not introduce the idea of a second replicator such as the meme. This means they do not see cultural evolution as proceeding in the interests of a selfish replicator.
    This last issue is most important and I want to pursue it. The whole point of memetics is to treat the meme as a replicator in its own right, operating entirely for the benefit of its own selfish replication. If there is no second replicator, and you are a committed Darwinian, then somehow or other everything must come back to the genes – to biological advantage. If there are two replicators (or more) then there will inevitably be conflicts of interest – circumstances in which the interests of the genes pull in one direction and those of the memes in the opposite direction. These examples are very important for memetics because they would not be predicted by a purely genetic theory. If they occur, they prove that we need a theory of memes – or at least a theory involving some kind of second replicator. This is what distinguishes memetic theory from other theories of cultural evolution.
    Dennett (1995) makes the same point when he asks ‘
Cui bono
?’, who benefits? He says ‘The first rule of memes, as it is for genes, is that replication is not necessarily for the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at … replicating! … The important point is that there is no
necessary
connection between a meme’s replicative power, its “fitness” from
its
point of view, and its contribution to
our
fitness (by whatever standard we judge that)’ (Dennett 1991, p. 203, italics in the original).
    Dawkins explains:
    As soon as the primeval soup provided conditions in which molecules could make copies of themselves, the replicators themselves took over. For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator
can
make copies of itself, the new replicators
will
tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this newevolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old (Dawkins 1976, pp. 193-4, italics in the original).
    Of course, memes could only come into existence when the genes had provided brains that were capable of imitation – and the