There are questions that become important because they are answered.
And there are questions that become important because, once asked, they can no longer quite be put back where they were.
Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, belongs to the second kind.
The book is often remembered for its provocative central metaphor: the gene is "selfish". It is also remembered for introducing the meme as a cultural analogue of the gene, a replicating unit through which ideas and other cultural forms might undergo an evolutionary process. Both ideas have generated decades of argument, and both can easily be caricatured. The selfish gene becomes a gene with intentions; the meme becomes an idea that wants to reproduce itself.
But beneath these provocative formulations lies a more fundamental and considerably more interesting question.
What, exactly, is capable of evolving?
Darwinian theory had provided an extraordinarily powerful account of the transformation of living forms over generations. But it was possible to imagine the theory as being tied rather closely to its original biological objects: organisms, reproduction, heredity, variation and natural selection.
Dawkins made a conceptual move that loosened that connection.
What if evolution were not fundamentally a theory about organisms?
What if it were a theory about a more general process of inheritance, variation and differential persistence?
And if so, what might happen when the process appeared outside biology?
That is the question with which our investigation begins.
From organisms to inheritance
The history of evolutionary thought is, among other things, a history of changing the scale at which biological explanation takes place.
We can describe what happens to an organism.
We can describe what happens to a population.
We can describe the changing frequency of inherited characteristics.
Dawkins proposed that we look beneath the organism.
The organism, on this view, is not necessarily the ultimate object of evolutionary explanation. It can instead be understood as part of the environment through which inherited information persists and changes.
This is the conceptual force of the gene-centred perspective.
The gene need not be conscious. It need not literally struggle, desire, calculate or make decisions. "Selfishness" is a metaphor for a pattern of differential persistence: variants that contribute to their own continued representation in subsequent generations tend to become more prevalent than variants that do not.
The metaphor is rhetorically powerful because it reverses an ordinary way of looking at evolution.
We are accustomed to saying that organisms reproduce themselves.
Dawkins asks us to look at the process from another angle.
Perhaps organisms are also the means through which genes persist.
This is an important change of perspective.
And once the perspective has been adopted, a further question becomes almost irresistible.
If the evolutionary process can be understood in terms of entities that are copied with variation and differentially retained, why should biology necessarily provide the only possible substrate?
Why should evolution stop at the boundary of the organism?
The possibility of another inheritance
This is where the meme enters.
Dawkins's suggestion was not simply that people have ideas and that ideas sometimes spread.
That observation was ancient.
What was new was the attempt to recognise a structural analogy between biological and cultural processes.
People learn songs.
They repeat stories.
They imitate behaviours.
They acquire customs.
They transmit beliefs.
They teach techniques.
They reproduce words and phrases.
And yet transmission is rarely exact. What is passed on can change. Some forms disappear; others persist. Some become widespread; others remain local. Some are copied with remarkable fidelity; others are transformed almost immediately.
There appears, in other words, to be something resembling inheritance with variation.
Once we notice that, a fascinating possibility opens.
Perhaps evolutionary processes are not intrinsically biological.
Perhaps biology is one domain in which a more general logic of cumulative change becomes visible.
This is the conceptual leap that matters.
The meme was an attempt to name the cultural counterpart of the replicating unit.
Whether it ultimately succeeds is another question.
But the question that produced it is profound:
Can culture evolve in something like the way biological populations evolve?
We should resist answering too quickly.
For the moment, it is enough to notice what the question does.
It asks us to think about culture dynamically.
Not simply as a collection of things people possess.
Not simply as a body of traditions handed down intact.
But as something that changes through transmission.
Culture begins to look less like an archive and more like a process.
Why the analogy is so compelling
There is a reason the analogy between genes and memes has proved so durable.
Both seem to provide a way of thinking about continuity through change.
A biological lineage can persist even though individual organisms die.
Likewise, a cultural form can persist even though individual bearers of it disappear.
A particular song can outlive everyone who first sang it.
A mathematical technique can survive the mathematicians who developed it.
A religious story can cross centuries.
A political concept can pass from one historical setting to another and acquire new meanings along the way.
A word can remain recognisable while its uses change.
A ritual can be repeated for generations while its significance is gradually transformed.
In all these cases, something appears to persist through alteration.
And that is precisely the sort of phenomenon for which evolutionary language is attractive.
Evolution gives us a way of thinking about patterned continuity without requiring identity.
The form does not have to remain exactly the same in order for a lineage to exist.
Indeed, without variation there would be no evolutionary process.
This is one of the deepest insights behind the analogy.
Culture is obviously not static.
But neither is it simply replaced from moment to moment.
There is continuity.
There is transformation.
There is inheritance.
And there is history.
The question is how these are related.
The liberation of evolution
There is, then, something liberating about Dawkins's proposal.
It invites us to stop treating biological evolution as though it were synonymous with evolution itself.
That distinction is easy to miss.
Evolutionary theory arose from biology, but a theory can sometimes reveal a pattern that exceeds the domain in which it was first formulated.
Newtonian mechanics began with terrestrial and celestial motion, but its conceptual machinery was not confined to the particular objects that first motivated it.
Likewise, evolutionary thinking may reveal something about processes of persistence and transformation that is not exhausted by biological reproduction.
The meme is an experiment in that possibility.
It asks us to imagine a second evolutionary domain.
Biological evolution operates through biological inheritance.
Cultural evolution might operate through cultural inheritance.
The analogy need not be exact to be illuminating.
Indeed, analogies are often most productive precisely where they begin to fail.
The interesting question is not whether a culture has genes.
It plainly does not.
The interesting question is whether there are structural features of evolutionary processes that become visible when we compare biological inheritance with cultural inheritance.
That question remains open.
And it is the question we want to preserve.
But what has actually been transferred?
At this point, however, the analogy begins to acquire a complication.
When a gene is inherited, there is a physical mechanism by which genetic material is transmitted.
But what happens when a cultural form is inherited?
Suppose I teach you a song.
What exactly have I transmitted?
The sequence of sounds?
The melody?
The rhythm?
The words?
The performance practice?
The conventions that make the melody recognisable as a particular kind of song?
Or perhaps something more abstract: a potential for producing performances that count as instances of the song?
Suppose instead that I teach you a concept.
What have I transmitted?
A sentence defining it?
A mental representation?
A pattern of use?
A distinction?
A way of organising experience?
A place within a network of related concepts?
The questions become increasingly difficult.
And that difficulty matters.
Because the biological analogy is clearest when we imagine cultural inheritance as the transmission of things.
But culture does not seem to consist simply of things.
It consists, at least in part, of ways of making things meaningful.
A language is not merely a vocabulary.
A musical tradition is not merely a collection of tunes.
A religion is not merely a set of propositions.
A scientific discipline is not merely a storehouse of information.
A culture is organised through systems of distinctions, expectations, practices and meanings.
This suggests that the cultural analogue of biological inheritance may not be a replicated object at all.
Perhaps what is inherited is something closer to a semiotic potential.
That possibility will become important later.
But we should not introduce it too early.
For now, we should stay with Dawkins's question.
The danger of answering the question too soon
There is a temptation, once we recognise the difficulties of memetics, to conclude that the whole project was misguided.
Culture is not biology.
Ideas are not genes.
People do not reproduce memes in the same way that cells reproduce DNA.
Cultural transmission involves interpretation, institutions, learning, language, technology and social practice.
All true.
But none of these observations makes Dawkins's original question disappear.
Indeed, they may make it more important.
If cultural evolution is not simply biological evolution repeated in another medium, then what is it?
What does cultural inheritance consist in?
How can forms of meaning persist across generations?
How can they change without losing all continuity with what came before?
Why do some traditions become extraordinarily stable while others vanish?
Why can a symbolic form survive thousands of years and yet acquire radically different meanings?
Why can a concept invented in one historical world become the basis for possibilities that its originators could never have imagined?
These are evolutionary questions in a broad sense.
They concern the emergence, persistence and transformation of forms across time.
Dawkins did us the service of making the question difficult to ignore.
We do not have to accept his proposed answer in order to inherit the question.
The meme as a conceptual experiment
Perhaps, then, it is best to regard the meme initially not as a discovered object but as a conceptual experiment.
Imagine that cultural forms behave sufficiently like replicating entities that evolutionary reasoning becomes useful.
What can we see?
We can see transmission.
We can see differential persistence.
We can see variation.
We can see competition for attention.
We can see cumulative change.
We can see the dependence of cultural forms upon the environments in which they are reproduced.
And we can see something else.
We can see that culture has a history that is not reducible to the biological histories of the people who participate in it.
Human beings are biological organisms.
But the cultural forms through which human beings live are not simply expressions of their genomes.
Languages have histories.
Institutions have histories.
Scientific concepts have histories.
Musical traditions have histories.
Religious forms have histories.
Technologies have histories.
These histories interact with biological life, but they are not identical to it.
That is already an important result.
The question becomes larger than the meme
Once the distinction is made, however, the meme itself begins to recede.
We started by asking:
What is the cultural equivalent of a gene?
But perhaps that is not quite the right question.
The deeper question may be:
What makes cultural inheritance possible?
That is a different question.
It does not assume that culture must contain discrete units corresponding to genes.
It does not assume that cultural forms are agents.
It does not assume that transmission means copying.
It simply asks how a culture can maintain continuity while changing through time.
And here the word inheritance becomes more interesting than the word replication.
Inheritance implies continuity.
But inheritance does not necessarily imply identity.
A child inherits a language without receiving a copy of the language.
A student inherits a discipline without becoming a copy of their teacher.
A musician inherits a tradition by transforming it.
A culture inherits its past by continually re-enacting it in new circumstances.
The inherited form is therefore neither simply preserved nor simply replaced.
It is re-realised.
That word will matter.
A question about grammar
There is also a linguistic clue hidden in the vocabulary with which we have been thinking.
We routinely say that genes replicate.
We speak of genes as replicators.
We speak of memes as replicators.
We say that memes spread, compete, survive and reproduce.
Such language is extraordinarily useful.
It makes complicated processes imaginable.
But it also deserves scrutiny.
For language does not merely report experience.
It construes experience.
To call something a replicator is already to construe it in a particular way.
The suffix -or is not innocent. It constructs an entity in relation to a process as though it were the one responsible for carrying out that process.
A process becomes a noun.
The noun becomes a participant.
The participant is construed as an actor.
And so:
replication → replicator → the replicator replicates.
The grammar can make a process look as though it has acquired an agent.
This does not make the underlying evolutionary process unreal.
Quite the opposite.
It gives us a reason to become more precise about what is real in the process and what belongs to the metaphor by which we construe it.
That distinction will become central to our investigation.
For the moment, however, it is enough to notice that Dawkins's conceptual move contains two different achievements.
He gave us a new way of seeing evolutionary processes.
And he gave us a vocabulary for talking about them.
Those two things are not necessarily identical.
What Dawkins made possible
The lasting importance of the meme may therefore lie less in whether memes turn out to be the fundamental units of cultural evolution than in what the concept made thinkable.
It made possible the question of whether evolution can cross the boundary between biology and culture.
It drew attention to the possibility that cultural inheritance might have its own mechanisms.
It encouraged us to look for systematic processes of transmission, variation and differential persistence.
It helped make culture appear as something that evolves rather than merely changes.
And it forced us to ask what "evolution" means when the inherited forms are not organisms but meanings, practices and symbols.
Those are substantial achievements.
But once the question has been opened, the original metaphor cannot dictate the answer indefinitely.
The meme may be the beginning of the investigation rather than its conclusion.
Perhaps the cultural world does not contain little replicators moving from mind to mind.
Perhaps what persists is a pattern.
Perhaps what is inherited is a practice.
Perhaps what is reproduced is a semiotic system.
Perhaps what survives is a possibility for meaning.
Perhaps cultural evolution occurs because human beings enter inherited systems of meaning and, by participating in them, transform them.
If so, then the evolutionary process is still there.
What changes is our understanding of what participates in it.
The question we inherit
This is why it would be a mistake to begin our investigation by asking whether Dawkins was right.
The more interesting question is what happens when we inherit his question.
Dawkins asked us to imagine evolution beyond biology.
We can accept the invitation without accepting every consequence of the metaphor that carried us there.
Indeed, that may be the proper way to inherit an idea.
We do not preserve it by leaving it unchanged.
We preserve it by finding out what it can become.
The question that began with the gene can therefore lead somewhere unexpected.
From the gene to the meme.
From the meme to the symbol.
From the symbol to the semiotic system.
From the semiotic system to participation.
From participation to transformation.
And from transformation to a broader question about how cultures preserve and alter their own possibilities for making meaning.
That is where our investigation will eventually take us.
But for now we can leave Dawkins at the threshold.
He has opened the door.
The interesting thing is not whether we should walk through it.
It is what kind of world we discover on the other side.
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