Free The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Page B

nature of those brains must have influenced which memes took hold and which did not. However, once memes had come into existence they would be expected to take on a life of their own.
    Dawkins argued that biologists had so deeply assimilated the idea of genetic evolution that they tended to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution. He complained of his colleagues that ‘In the last analysis they wish always to go back to “biological advantage” ’ (Dawkins 1976, p. 193). In other words, they might accept the idea of memes, or some kind of unit of cultural evolution, but then still believe that memes must always act somehow for the benefit of the genes. But this is missing the whole point of the second replicator. If memes are replicators, as I am convinced they are, then they will not act for the benefit of the species, for the benefit of the individual, for the benefit of the genes, or indeed for the benefit of anything but themselves. That is what it means to be a replicator.
    I am labouring this point because I am now going to review some theories of cultural evolution that
have
introduced the idea of a second replicator – or at least some kind of new cultural unit. (Durham 1991 provides a more thorough review.) At first sight these may all appear equivalent to the idea of the meme, but they are not. There are many similarities and differences but the most important point to look for is whether the new unit is really being treated as a replicator in its own right. If it is not then the theory is not equivalent to memetics.
    In 1975, just before Dawkins proposed the idea of memes, the American anthropologist F. T. Cloak wrote about cultural instructions. He pointed out that whenever we see any behaviour being performed we assume that there is some internal structure in the animal’s nervous system that causes that behaviour. All animals have such instructions but humans, unlike other animals, can acquire new instructions by observing and imitating others. Cloak suggested that culture is acquired in tiny, unrelated snippets that he called ‘corpuscles of culture’ or ‘cultural instructions’.
    Furthermore, he distinguished very carefully between the instructions in people’s heads and the behaviour, technology or social organisation that those instructions produce. The former he called the ‘i–culture’ and the latter the ‘m–culture’.
    He was absolutely clear about the status of cultural instructions, even though he did not use the replicator concept. He said that the ultimate function of both i–culture and m–culture is the maintenance and propagation of the i–culture. Therefore, he concluded, we should not be surprised to find some m–culture features that perform functions that are irrelevant, or even destructive, to the organisms who make or do them. He compared cultural instructions to parasites that control some of their host’s behaviour – a bit like a flu virus that makes you sneeze to get itself propagated. He concluded ‘In short, “our” cultural instructions don’t work for us organisms; we work for them. At best, we are in symbiosis with them, as we are with our genes. At worst, we are their slaves’ (Cloak 1975, p. 172). Quite clearly, Cloak had seen the implications of having a second selfish replicator – even though others subsequently argued that cultural instructions are not replicators at all (Alexander 1979).
    In
The Selfish Gene,
Dawkins mentions Cloak, saying that he wants to go further in directions being explored by Cloak and others. However, Dawkins lumps together both the behaviours and the instructions that produce them, and calls them all memes, while Cloak separates the two -a distinction that is somewhat analogous to the distinction between the genotype and the phenotype in biology. Later, Dawkins (1982) makes the same distinction as Cloak and defines a meme as ‘a unit of information residing in a brain’. I shall return to consider