We have now travelled a considerable distance from the meme.
We began with the idea that culture might evolve through the replication of units analogous to genes.
We asked what such a unit might be.
We questioned the agency hidden in the word replicator.
We distinguished replication from instantiation.
We saw that cultural copies change.
We discovered that symbols can preserve access to inherited possibilities.
And we found that what is inherited is often not a thing at all, but a practice.
The next question is unavoidable.
If practices are inherited, transformed and sustained through participation, where do they exist?
The answer cannot simply be inside individuals.
A practice is not a possession of one person.
It exists in relations among participants, semiotic resources, institutions, material environments, histories and expectations.
Culture therefore begins to look less like a population of things and more like an ecology.
An ecology of meaning.
Meaning does not live in isolation
Consider a simple word.
Its meaning is not contained entirely in the word itself.
It depends upon the language in which it occurs.
It depends upon the situation.
It depends upon the participants.
It depends upon what has already been said.
It depends upon what is expected next.
It depends upon the social relations in which it is used.
It depends upon the distinctions the community has learned to make.
A word is therefore not a self-contained cultural object.
It is a node within a network of relations.
Change those relations, and what the word can mean changes with them.
This is why cultural inheritance cannot be adequately described as the movement of discrete objects from one mind to another.
Meaning is relational.
And relations form systems.
Culture as a semiotic system
This is where the SFL conception of culture becomes particularly valuable.
Culture can be understood as a higher-order semiotic system: a system of meaning-making possibilities realised through language and through other semiotic systems.
This formulation is worth dwelling upon.
Culture is not simply a collection of meanings.
It is a system that provides possibilities for making meanings.
Language is one of the principal systems through which those possibilities are enacted.
But it is not the only one.
Gesture, dress, architecture, images, spatial organisation, ritual, objects, technologies and bodily practices can all participate in cultural meaning.
They do not necessarily operate independently.
They can be integrated into larger semiotic formations.
A classroom, for example, is not made meaningful by language alone.
Its spatial arrangement, furniture, timetable, clothing, modes of address, written materials and patterns of movement all contribute to the organisation of the situation.
The culture is not sitting behind these things as an invisible substance.
It is being enacted through them.
Realisation and instantiation
This also gives us an opportunity to preserve a distinction that has become important throughout our discussion.
A semiotic system can be realised in a lower-level semiotic system.
And a potential is instantiated in an actual instance.
These are not the same relation.
We might say that culture is realised through language and other semiotic systems.
Within language, the systemic potential is instantiated in particular acts of meaning.
A cultural practice may therefore involve several levels of organisation.
Culture provides higher-order possibilities.
Language and other semiotic systems realise those possibilities.
Particular texts, utterances, gestures, performances and material arrangements instantiate the available potential in specific contexts.
This layered organisation helps us avoid imagining culture as a mysterious super-agent.
Culture is a system of possibilities that becomes actual through its realisations and instantiations.
The ecology metaphor
Why call this an ecology?
Because the relevant relations are not linear.
A biological ecology contains organisms, environments, resources, constraints and interactions.
No organism exists independently of the ecological relations in which it participates.
Something similar can be said of cultural meaning.
A speaker depends upon a language.
A language depends upon speakers.
A practice depends upon participants.
Participants are formed by practices.
Institutions stabilise practices.
Practices reproduce institutions.
Technologies enable new forms of interaction.
New forms of interaction alter practices.
Practices alter the meanings of symbols.
Changed meanings alter subsequent practices.
The relations are circular, recursive and historically accumulated.
The metaphor of ecology therefore draws attention to interdependence.
It does not require us to imagine culture as a biological organism.
The environment is meaningful too
There is another important difference.
In a biological ecology, an environment may be described physically.
In a cultural ecology, much of the environment is already semiotically organised.
A university campus is not merely buildings, roads and vegetation.
It contains lecture theatres, offices, laboratories, signs, libraries, notices, timetables and designated spaces.
These material forms are organised through cultural distinctions.
A door marked "Staff Only" is not merely a physical barrier.
It participates in a social organisation of access.
A red traffic light is not merely coloured glass or emitted light.
It participates in a system of regulated movement.
A courtroom is not merely a room.
Its architecture participates in the enactment of institutional roles.
The cultural environment is therefore partly constituted by meanings.
People inhabit not only physical environments but semiotically organised environments.
Affordances are relational
This gives us a useful way to think about affordance.
A chair affords sitting.
But whether that possibility is salient depends upon a participant and a context.
A lectern affords one set of activities in a lecture theatre.
The same physical object could become something else in another context.
A stone can be a building material, a weapon, a geological specimen, a paperweight or a memorial object.
Its physical properties constrain what can be done with it.
But culture organises which possibilities matter.
The cultural environment therefore selects and foregrounds affordances.
It teaches participants what things are for.
More precisely, it provides systems of meaning through which particular possibilities for action become recognisable.
This is another reason why cultural evolution cannot be understood simply as the competition of memes.
The environment is not merely a passive arena in which cultural objects compete.
It is itself partly constructed through the practices and meanings of the participants.
Meaning creates environments
A practice changes the environment in which subsequent practices occur.
A road changes the possibilities for movement.
A library changes the possibilities for access to texts.
A laboratory changes the possibilities for scientific practice.
A school changes the possibilities for learning.
A legal institution changes the possibilities for resolving disputes.
A digital platform changes the possibilities for communication.
These environments then shape subsequent behaviour.
The relation is recursive:
people create environments of meaning, and those environments shape what people can subsequently do.
This is very close to the logic of ecological evolution.
But the cultural case has an unusual feature.
The environment can itself be represented, discussed and redesigned by its inhabitants.
People can ask:
Why is this room arranged this way?
Why does this institution have this procedure?
Why does this word mean that?
Why do we teach this?
Why do we treat this behaviour as normal?
The environment can become an object of reflection.
And once it does, it can become an object of deliberate transformation.
The ecology is historical
An ecology of meaning is never simply present.
It has a history.
Every language carries traces of earlier distinctions.
Every institution carries traces of earlier practices.
Every genre carries traces of earlier texts.
Every profession carries traces of earlier methods.
Every city contains traces of earlier social organisation.
Every conceptual system inherits distinctions it did not create.
The present cultural environment is therefore saturated with the past.
But those traces are not merely archaeological.
They remain active because contemporary participants continue to use them.
A convention inherited from the past can constrain present possibilities.
A forgotten distinction can suddenly become relevant again.
A discarded practice can be revived.
A new technology can reactivate an old form in a new context.
Cultural evolution therefore involves not simply transmission from generation to generation but continuous reorganisation of a historical ecology.
Nothing has meaning by itself
This may sound obvious, but it has a profound consequence.
Nothing in a cultural system has its meaning entirely by itself.
A word means through its relations.
A gesture means through its relations.
A symbol means through its relations.
A role means through its relations.
A practice means through its relations.
Even an institution means through its relations to other institutions and practices.
Meaning is therefore fundamentally systemic.
This does not mean that anything can mean anything.
Quite the opposite.
The system constrains interpretation.
Because a word has particular relations to other words, some interpretations are more probable than others.
Because a gesture occurs within a cultural practice, some readings are more available than others.
Because a ritual has conventional structure, participants know what counts as an appropriate performance.
The ecology therefore generates both possibility and constraint.
Constraint without determinism
This is another point at which the evolutionary analogy can mislead us.
A system of constraints does not determine every future instance.
Language does not determine what every speaker will say.
A musical tradition does not determine what every composer will write.
A scientific discipline does not determine what every researcher will discover.
A social practice does not determine how every participant will act.
The system provides a structured space of possibilities.
Within that space, participants can make choices.
Some choices are conventional.
Some are unusual.
Some are unintelligible.
Some become innovations.
Some disappear.
Some spread.
Some transform the system itself.
Constraint therefore does not eliminate agency.
It is the condition within which agency becomes intelligible.
Agency is distributed, not dissolved
This brings us back to a problem that has accompanied the series from its beginning.
If we reject the idea that memes are agents, do we risk eliminating agency altogether?
No.
We relocate it.
People act.
But they act within environments that they did not create.
They use semiotic resources that they inherited.
They participate in practices whose histories precede them.
They operate within institutions.
They inhabit material environments.
Their possibilities are therefore structured.
Yet they can also modify those structures.
This is neither the fantasy of the autonomous individual nor the fantasy of the autonomous meme.
Agency belongs to participants in relations.
The participant is neither wholly independent of the system nor merely an instrument of it.
They are a participant in its ongoing reproduction and transformation.
The ecology can learn
Once cultural systems are understood this way, another remarkable property becomes visible.
An ecology of meaning can accumulate changes.
A new practice can become conventional.
A successful explanation can become part of disciplinary knowledge.
A new word can become ordinary.
A new technology can reorganise interaction.
A new institution can create new roles.
The system can therefore retain the consequences of previous participation.
In this sense, culture can learn.
Again, the wording must be handled carefully.
Culture does not necessarily possess a mind.
It does not sit somewhere deciding what it has learned.
Rather, the system changes in ways that alter the possibilities available to subsequent participants.
The history of participation becomes incorporated into the organisation of future possibilities.
That is enough to produce something functionally resembling learning.
But the process is distributed.
Selection becomes ecological
This also transforms our understanding of selection.
Earlier, we might have imagined cultural selection as competition among memes.
One meme spreads.
Another fails.
One survives.
Another dies.
But if meaning is ecological, selection occurs at many levels simultaneously.
A form must be intelligible.
It must be usable.
It must fit some practice.
It may need institutional support.
It may need material infrastructure.
It may resonate with existing distinctions.
It may solve a problem.
It may create a new problem that another practice solves.
It may be aesthetically attractive.
It may acquire symbolic prestige.
It may simply become familiar.
Persistence is therefore not a property of the cultural item alone.
It emerges from the relation between the item and its environment.
A cultural form survives because it finds a place within an ecology.
The environment changes the form
But the relation runs in the other direction too.
A form that enters a new environment may change.
A word acquires a different meaning in a new community.
A ritual changes when transported across cultures.
A musical form changes when introduced to new instruments.
A scientific concept changes when imported into another discipline.
A technology changes as users adapt it to unexpected purposes.
The environment therefore does not merely select among pre-existing forms.
It can transform the forms themselves.
This is why cultural evolution is not well described as a population of fixed entities moving through a fixed environment.
Both the forms and the environment are changing.
And they can change one another.
Co-evolution without genes
We can therefore use the term co-evolution without assuming that culture is simply another biology.
A practice changes its environment.
The changed environment alters the practice.
A new technology changes language use.
Changed language use changes social practice.
New social practices generate new institutional arrangements.
Those institutions create new expectations.
Those expectations shape subsequent practices.
The system evolves through reciprocal modification.
The process is not reducible to a single replicating unit.
It is a network of mutually conditioning changes.
This is perhaps closer to what cultural evolution actually looks like.
The semiotic environment is also a conceptual environment
There is a further consequence for concepts.
A concept does not evolve in isolation.
It exists within a conceptual ecology.
The meaning of "freedom" depends partly upon its relations to constraint, responsibility, authority, choice and power.
The meaning of "knowledge" depends upon distinctions involving belief, evidence, justification, explanation and understanding.
The meaning of "intelligence" changes when it enters relations with computation, language, learning and artificial systems.
A conceptual innovation therefore does not simply add a new object to an existing inventory.
It can reorganise relations throughout the ecology.
This is why conceptual change can be so consequential.
Change one distinction and neighbouring distinctions may have to move.
The system reorganises.
New concepts create new possibilities
This is where our earlier work on conceptual evolution becomes relevant.
A new concept can create possibilities that did not previously exist in the same form.
Not because the concept magically creates reality.
But because it changes what participants can distinguish, discuss, question and organise.
Once a distinction becomes available, new questions become possible.
Once a question becomes possible, new practices may emerge.
Once practices emerge, institutions may change.
Once institutions change, the cultural environment changes.
A semiotic innovation can therefore propagate through an ecology without behaving like a replicating particle.
Its effects are relational.
The innovation changes the space of possible participation.
The ecology has no centre
One of the most striking consequences is that there may be no single location at which cultural evolution occurs.
It does not happen exclusively in individual minds.
Nor exclusively in texts.
Nor exclusively in institutions.
Nor exclusively in language.
Nor exclusively in material artefacts.
It happens across their relations.
A new scientific concept may emerge in an individual's thinking, be articulated in language, recorded in a paper, debated by a community, incorporated into teaching, embedded in instruments and eventually become part of institutional practice.
Where, exactly, did the evolution occur?
There is no simple answer.
The evolution lies in the reorganisation of the network.
This is why an ecological model may be more illuminating than a particulate one.
The important question becomes not "Where is the meme?" but:
What relations have changed?
Cultural evolution as ecological memory
We can now combine the previous two essays.
The symbol provides durable access to inherited possibilities.
The practice brings those possibilities into embodied activity.
The ecology connects symbols and practices with participants, institutions, technologies and environments.
Cultural memory therefore becomes distributed across the ecology.
A text remembers nothing.
A practice remembers nothing.
An institution remembers nothing.
Yet together they can preserve historical possibilities across generations.
A participant can enter the system and recover some of those possibilities.
The past is therefore distributed across the present.
It does not survive in one place.
It survives in relations that remain available for reactivation.
The ecology can forget
But what is preserved can also disappear.
A practice can cease to be taught.
A word can fall out of use.
A ritual can be abandoned.
A technique can be forgotten.
A text can become inaccessible.
An institution can disappear.
When enough of the supporting ecology disappears, a cultural possibility may become difficult or impossible to recover.
This gives us a richer account of cultural extinction.
A cultural form does not necessarily die because nobody possesses its "copy."
It can die because the ecological relations that sustained its use have disappeared.
A manuscript may survive while the practice of reading it disappears.
An instrument may survive while the technique for playing it is lost.
A word may survive in a dictionary while the social practice that gave it meaning disappears.
Cultural survival is therefore ecological.
So is cultural extinction.
Revival is reconstruction
This also explains why cultural revival is rarely simple restoration.
When a community attempts to revive an abandoned tradition, it must reconstruct practices.
It may have surviving texts.
It may have artefacts.
It may have recordings.
It may have memories.
But these resources have to be integrated into a new ecology.
The revived practice is therefore necessarily contemporary.
It may be historically informed.
It may be remarkably faithful.
But it cannot simply become the past again.
The past is being reinstantiated within a new environment.
This is another form of cultural evolution.
The ecology is open
No cultural ecology exists in complete isolation.
Cultures interact.
Languages borrow.
Musical traditions cross boundaries.
Scientific ideas travel between disciplines.
Technologies move between societies.
Practices are adapted to new environments.
Symbols acquire new meanings.
The ecology therefore remains open to other ecologies.
This makes cultural evolution particularly fertile.
Contact creates new possibilities.
But it can also create conflict.
An inherited practice may fit poorly into a new environment.
A symbol may acquire incompatible interpretations.
A foreign practice may challenge established distinctions.
The resulting tension can produce rejection, hybridisation, transformation or new forms.
Cultural evolution often happens at the boundaries between semiotic ecologies.
Hybridisation is not contamination
From the replicator perspective, mixing can look like corruption.
A supposedly pure cultural form encounters another form and becomes hybrid.
But from an ecological perspective, hybridisation is unsurprising.
Systems of meaning are open.
Participants belong to multiple practices.
Semiotic resources can be recombined.
A musical tradition can absorb another tradition's rhythms.
A language can borrow vocabulary.
A scientific field can import concepts from another discipline.
A cuisine can combine ingredients and techniques from different histories.
The result may become something neither tradition originally contained.
This is not simply copying with errors.
It is reorganisation through interaction.
The ecology produces novelty
At this point, the evolutionary significance of culture becomes clearer.
Novelty does not need to arrive from outside the system as random mutation.
It can emerge from the interactions within the system.
Different practices encounter one another.
Different participants combine inherited resources.
A new technology changes an old practice.
An old symbol acquires a new interpretation.
A conceptual distinction is imported into a new field.
A problem exposes a limitation in an inherited convention.
The ecology generates new possibilities through its own internal relations.
This is perhaps one of the deepest differences between the meme metaphor and the ecological model.
The unit is no longer the source of novelty.
Relations are.
Meaning is therefore evolutionary material
If this is right, then meaning is not merely something that evolution happens to carry.
Meaning is part of the medium in which cultural evolution occurs.
Participants respond to meanings.
They modify meanings.
They create distinctions.
They establish conventions.
They change practices.
Those changes alter the environment in which future meaning-making occurs.
Meaning therefore participates in its own historical transformation.
Not as an agent.
Not as a replicator.
But as an organised field of possibilities within which participants act.
This is why semiotics is not an optional decorative layer added to an evolutionary theory of culture.
It is central to the phenomenon being explained.
The limits of the ecological metaphor
We should nevertheless resist allowing ecology to become another totalising metaphor.
It illuminates interdependence.
It highlights reciprocal influence.
It draws attention to environments, constraints and relations.
But it can also tempt us to imagine cultural systems as though they were biological ecosystems with neat boundaries and stable populations.
They are not.
Cultural boundaries are porous.
Participants belong to multiple systems.
Meanings cross boundaries.
Institutions overlap.
Semiotic resources travel.
And unlike biological organisms, human participants can reflect upon the systems in which they participate and attempt to change them.
The metaphor is therefore useful only if we keep its scope visible.
It is a way of drawing attention to relational organisation.
It is not a claim that culture simply is an ecosystem.
From the meme to the milieu
Perhaps we can now formulate the transition in another way.
The meme asks us to look for the unit.
The practice asks us to look at participation.
The symbol asks us to look at semiotic continuity.
The ecology asks us to look at the relations that make participation and continuity possible.
Each step has widened the field.
And the widening changes the explanatory question.
Instead of asking:
What cultural object is reproducing?
we ask:
What system of relations is enabling some possibilities of meaning to persist, change and generate further possibilities?
That question is much harder.
But it is also much closer to the phenomenon.
An ecology of becoming
We can now see why the language of evolution remains useful even after the replicator has been displaced.
There is inheritance.
But inheritance is of possibilities and practices.
There is variation.
But variation is structured by semiotic systems and contexts.
There is selection.
But selection occurs through participation within changing ecologies.
There is persistence.
But persistence depends upon continued usefulness, intelligibility and institutional or social support.
There is novelty.
But novelty can emerge from recombination and interaction.
There is cumulative change.
But the cumulative changes reorganise the environment itself.
This is not Darwinism simply transferred from biology to culture.
It is a different evolutionary problem.
Culture evolves because systems of meaning-making can inherit, transform and reorganise the conditions of their own continuation.
What the meme could not see
The meme metaphor gave us one valuable insight.
Cultural forms can persist beyond individual lifetimes.
But it encouraged us to imagine persistence as the survival of discrete units.
The ecological perspective reveals something more complicated.
What persists is often not an isolated form but a configuration of relations.
A word persists because a language continues to provide uses for it.
A practice persists because participants continue to enact it.
A symbol persists because a community continues to interpret it.
An institution persists because its practices continue to be recognised and performed.
A concept persists because it remains productive within a conceptual ecology.
The cultural form survives because the ecology continues to make it possible.
And when the ecology changes, the form may change with it.
The culture that makes its future
There is therefore something extraordinary about cultural evolution.
A cultural system does not merely adapt to an environment.
It participates in constructing the environment in which its future evolution will occur.
People build institutions.
Institutions organise practices.
Practices organise meanings.
Meanings shape expectations.
Expectations influence action.
Action alters institutions.
The system therefore becomes, in part, the environment of its own future.
This is a powerful form of historical reflexivity.
The inheritance of the past helps constitute the conditions under which the future can become different.
And the future, when it arrives, changes the inheritance.
The question has changed
We began by asking what a meme is.
We can now see why that question was too small.
It assumed that cultural evolution must have a unit corresponding to the gene.
But perhaps the more revealing question is not:
What is the cultural equivalent of the gene?
It is:
What kind of system allows meaning to persist, transform and become available for further participation across generations?
The answer is beginning to emerge.
It is a semiotic ecology.
Within it:
symbols preserve access;
practices enact possibilities;
language organises meaning;
other semiotic systems extend that organisation;
institutions stabilise patterns;
participants interpret and act;
material environments constrain and afford;
and historical interactions continually reorganise the whole.
No single component is the cultural equivalent of the gene.
The evolution lies in the relations among them.
The ecology of meaning
Perhaps, then, the title is no longer metaphorical in quite the same way.
Meaning really does have an ecology.
Not because meanings are organisms.
Not because concepts reproduce themselves.
Not because symbols possess agency.
But because meanings exist within systems of relations that sustain, constrain, transform and sometimes extinguish them.
A meaning can flourish because a practice supports it.
A practice can flourish because an institution supports it.
An institution can flourish because its meanings remain intelligible.
A symbol can survive because participants continue to find uses for it.
A concept can transform because its relations to neighbouring concepts change.
The system is alive in the sense that it is continually being enacted and reorganised.
Its continuity is an achievement of participation.
Its evolution is an achievement of change.
Beyond the replicator
We can therefore finally leave the replicator behind without discarding what motivated the concept.
Dawkins saw something important.
Cultural forms can persist across generations in ways that are not reducible to biological inheritance.
That insight remains.
But the explanation need not be a cultural particle reproducing itself.
The cultural inheritance we have uncovered is stranger.
It is distributed.
It is embodied.
It is semiotic.
It is institutional.
It is historical.
It is participatory.
And it is reflexive.
Culture does not merely reproduce forms.
It organises possibilities for further meaning-making.
Those possibilities are inherited.
They are instantiated.
They are transformed.
They are sometimes lost.
They are sometimes rediscovered.
And through the accumulated activity of participants, the ecology itself changes.
The question with which we began has therefore undergone its own evolution.
We asked:
What is the meme?
We are now asking:
How does a culture become capable of continuing itself?
And the answer seems increasingly to be:
By inheriting not things, but organised possibilities for participation in meaning.
That is an evolutionary process.
But it is an evolution in which the thing being inherited can help determine what the inheritors are able to become.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the ecology of meaning:
the future of a culture is not contained in its memes. It emerges from the relations through which its meanings remain possible.