There is something peculiar about cultural inheritance.
We copy things.
And yet the copies change.
A song is taught to a child, and the child sings it differently.
A story is retold, and details shift.
A proverb is remembered imperfectly, and the altered version becomes familiar.
A scientific idea is taught to a student, and the student applies it somewhere its originator never imagined.
A musical form is inherited by a composer and transformed into something new.
A word passes from one generation to another and acquires another meaning.
If cultural evolution is understood primarily as replication, these changes can look like imperfections.
If culture is understood as a semiotic system, however, they begin to look rather different.
Perhaps the remarkable fact is not that cultural copies sometimes change.
Perhaps the remarkable fact is that cultural continuity depends upon change.
The fantasy of the perfect copy
The language of replication naturally invites an image.
There is an original.
A copy is made.
The copy resembles the original.
Another copy is made from that copy.
And so on.
Variation enters when copying is imperfect.
This image works rather well for some kinds of physical reproduction.
But it becomes increasingly awkward when applied to cultural forms.
Suppose a teacher explains a concept to a student.
The student later explains it to someone else.
Which explanation is the original?
Which is the copy?
What counts as an error?
If the student uses different words but preserves the relevant distinction, has the concept been copied?
If the student changes the example but makes the concept easier to understand, is that a mutation?
If the student's interpretation reveals an implication the teacher had not noticed, is the new version defective?
Or has something been added to the tradition?
The questions become difficult because cultural inheritance is not simply a sequence of physical duplications.
It is a sequence of meaningful performances.
And meaningful performances are responsive to context.
The copy is never merely a copy
Consider a familiar story.
A parent tells a child a story that the parent learned from their own parent.
The child later tells it to someone else.
Perhaps the plot remains recognisable.
But the child changes the vocabulary.
A character becomes more sympathetic.
A detail is forgotten.
Another detail is added.
The ending is slightly altered.
Eventually, the altered version becomes the version that another generation learns.
What has happened?
We could describe the differences as mutations.
But that vocabulary conceals something important.
The child did not merely fail to reproduce the story accurately.
The child reconstrued it.
The story entered a new context and was re-formed within the semiotic resources available there.
The variation is therefore not necessarily an accidental departure from the copying process.
It can be part of the process by which the cultural form remains usable.
A story that cannot be retold in a new context is a story with very limited cultural life.
A semiotic system expects variation
This becomes clearer when we think about language.
A language is a system of meaning-making possibilities.
Its speakers continually produce particular instances of those possibilities.
But no speaker needs to reproduce every previous utterance.
Indeed, if speakers could only repeat existing utterances, language would cease to be an effective resource for dealing with new circumstances.
The system must permit novelty.
A speaker can produce a sentence that has never previously been uttered.
Another speaker can understand it.
Others can adopt the construction.
Eventually, what was once unusual may become conventional.
This is not a breakdown in the system.
It is one of the ways in which the system changes.
The distinction between systemic potential and instance therefore becomes crucial.
An instance is not a copy of the whole system.
It is an actual selection from the possibilities that the system provides.
And different circumstances call for different selections.
Cultural continuity therefore does not require the repetition of identical instances.
It requires the continuing availability of a system from which meaningful instances can be produced.
Instantiation is not replication
This distinction deserves to be stated as clearly as possible.
To instantiate a systemic potential is not the same thing as to replicate an object.
When a speaker produces an utterance, the utterance is an instance of the language system.
When a writer produces a sonnet, the text can instantiate the potential of a genre.
When a musician performs a musical work, the performance instantiates a musical possibility within a particular tradition.
When a scientist applies a theory to a new problem, the application instantiates the conceptual resources of a theoretical system in a new context.
The instance is therefore not simply a copy of the system.
It is a contextually selected realisation of its possibilities.
And because contexts differ, instances can differ while remaining recognisably related.
This gives cultural inheritance a different structure.
What is inherited is not necessarily an object that must be copied.
What is inherited can be a potential that can be instantiated again.
That potential can persist even while its instances change.
But the system changes too
There is an important complication.
It would be too simple to say that the system remains constant while different instances are produced from it.
Systems have histories.
The accumulated use of a semiotic resource can change the resource itself.
A new word can become conventional.
A new grammatical pattern can spread.
A genre can acquire new conventions.
A musical technique can move from the experimental margins into ordinary practice.
A scientific term can acquire a new technical meaning.
A metaphor can become so familiar that its metaphorical origin is no longer noticed.
The system changes because people continually instantiate it.
This creates a peculiar temporal relation:
the system makes the instance possible, while the history of instances contributes to the changing system.
Inheritance is therefore recursive.
The past provides resources for the present.
The present changes those resources.
The changed resources become available to the future.
This is not a chain of copies.
It is a historical process of constrained transformation.
Variation is not arbitrary
There is another reason the biological analogy can mislead.
When we hear variation, we may imagine random difference.
But cultural variation is often highly structured.
A musician does not produce an arbitrary sound when altering a melody.
A speaker does not produce an arbitrary sequence of words when creating a new sentence.
A scientist does not alter a theory in an arbitrary direction.
A designer does not transform a familiar form without regard to what the form affords.
The inherited system constrains what counts as an intelligible variation.
This is precisely why novelty can be recognised as novelty.
A variation must stand in some relation to what preceded it.
A completely unrelated form may simply be something else.
The inherited system therefore provides both continuity and constraint.
And constraint does not merely prevent change.
It makes particular changes possible.
Constraint creates recognisability
Imagine hearing a melody that has been altered almost beyond recognition.
At some point we stop hearing it as a variation of the original and start hearing it as another melody.
The interesting question is:
Where is the boundary?
There is no simple numerical answer.
Recognition depends upon the relations that remain.
A rhythm may be preserved while the pitch changes.
The contour may remain while the harmony changes.
The phrase structure may remain while the instrumentation changes.
Different listeners may draw the boundary differently.
What matters is that the cultural system provides criteria through which similarities and differences can be recognised.
This is one reason why cultural forms can change so extensively without losing their identity.
The identity is not necessarily located in an invariant physical substance.
It may lie in a network of relations that remains sufficiently stable across instances.
The strange success of variation
Now we can see something that the language of mutation can obscure.
Variation is not merely something evolution must tolerate.
It can be the source of evolutionary possibility.
A tradition that could not vary would have difficulty responding to changing circumstances.
A language with no capacity for innovation would be extraordinarily difficult to use in a changing world.
A scientific tradition incapable of modification would cease to be an effective form of inquiry.
A musical tradition that permitted no transformation would eventually become exhausted.
Cultural systems persist partly because they can generate differences.
The inherited system provides continuity.
Variation provides responsiveness.
Selection, in the broad evolutionary sense, can then favour some variations over others.
But selection is operating on forms that have already been produced within a semiotic and social environment.
The variation is not merely noise.
It is structured novelty.
Selection after interpretation
This also changes how we should think about cultural selection.
Imagine that a new expression appears.
It does not simply compete for transmission like a biological particle.
People encounter it.
They interpret it.
They find uses for it.
They reject it.
They adapt it.
They place it in new contexts.
Others notice those uses.
Institutions may adopt it.
Teachers may teach it.
Media may amplify it.
Eventually it may become conventional.
The process can certainly be described in evolutionary language.
Some forms persist.
Others disappear.
But the mechanism is not adequately described by saying that the successful form simply reproduced itself more effectively.
Its success may depend upon the participatory practices through which people find uses for it.
Selection is therefore entangled with interpretation.
And interpretation is entangled with the semiotic system.
A word changes because people use it
Consider a word whose meaning changes over generations.
The process is not usually planned.
No committee sits down and decides that the old meaning will be replaced.
People use the word in new contexts.
Those uses become recognisable.
Some are repeated.
Some become conventional.
Eventually the semantic range of the word shifts.
The word has been inherited.
But its inheritance has involved transformation.
Indeed, the word's ability to survive may depend upon its capacity to accommodate new uses.
A rigidly fixed meaning would sometimes make a word less adaptable to changing circumstances.
The cultural form persists because the system permits it to change.
That is a striking inversion of the replication picture.
The question is no longer:
How accurately was the word copied?
but:
How much transformation can occur while the resource remains recognisably the same cultural resource?
Variation can preserve identity
This suggests that cultural identity may be more like a pattern of constrained continuity than a fixed substance.
A language remains a language through enormous lexical, grammatical and semantic change.
A musical tradition can remain recognisable while transforming radically.
A scientific discipline can survive revolutions in its theories.
A religious tradition can undergo major reinterpretations while retaining a recognisable historical identity.
An institution can change its membership, practices and stated purposes while remaining recognisably the same institution.
In each case, continuity is real.
But it is not the continuity of an unchanged object.
It is continuity through organised transformation.
That is precisely the kind of phenomenon for which the language of copying becomes least satisfactory.
The inheritance of a way of changing
There is an even more interesting possibility.
Perhaps what a cultural tradition inherits is not merely a set of forms.
It can inherit ways of transforming forms.
A musical tradition can provide conventions for variation.
A scientific tradition can provide methods for criticism and revision.
A literary tradition can provide techniques for transforming inherited genres.
A language provides resources for producing novel meanings.
A mathematical tradition provides procedures for deriving new results from inherited structures.
A culture can therefore transmit not merely what to reproduce, but how to continue the tradition by transforming it.
This is a profoundly different notion of inheritance.
The inherited resource contains possibilities for its own further development.
A tradition can teach its participants how to innovate within it.
And sometimes it can provide the resources through which its own fundamental assumptions can be challenged.
That is difficult to describe in terms of a replicator.
It is much easier to describe in terms of participation in a system.
Innovation from within constraint
This brings us back to a theme that has appeared repeatedly in our earlier work.
Constraint is not simply the opposite of possibility.
Constraint can be what makes possibility available.
A musical scale constrains the notes available to a composition.
That constraint does not prevent musical creativity.
It creates a structured space within which relations can be explored.
A genre constrains what counts as a recognisable instance.
That constraint allows writers to innovate while remaining intelligible as participants in the genre.
A language constrains how meanings can be organised.
That constraint makes an enormous range of novel utterances possible.
A scientific framework constrains what counts as a legitimate explanation.
That constraint allows researchers to accumulate knowledge rather than starting from nothing each time.
Cultural inheritance therefore does not merely preserve the past.
It provides structured affordances for the future.
And that may be a much better description of what inheritance accomplishes than the image of copying.
Copies that change
We can now return to our title.
A cultural copy changes because it is not really a copy in the narrow sense.
It is an instance produced within an inherited system.
Its difference from earlier instances may be accidental.
It may be deliberate.
It may arise through misunderstanding.
It may arise through adaptation to a new context.
It may arise because a participant combines inherited resources in a new way.
It may arise because the surrounding system has changed.
Whatever its immediate cause, the resulting variation can become part of the history of the system.
This is why cultural continuity can coexist with profound transformation.
The tradition is not preserved by keeping its instances unchanged.
It is preserved by making further instantiation possible.
What, then, survives?
This leaves us with a question more difficult than the original question of the meme.
If the instances change, what exactly persists?
Sometimes the answer is a recognisable form.
Sometimes a relation.
Sometimes a convention.
Sometimes a practice.
Sometimes a distinction.
Sometimes a way of organising meaning.
Sometimes an entire semiotic system.
And sometimes what survives is not a particular form at all, but the capacity to generate further forms that belong to the same historical tradition.
That last possibility is especially important.
A cultural tradition can survive even when many of its particular contents have changed.
What persists is the organisation that makes new instances recognisably continuous with the old.
The inheritance is therefore neither pure identity nor pure difference.
It is continuity through transformation.
Beyond the copying metaphor
The meme was an ingenious attempt to make cultural evolution imaginable.
But its central metaphor may have encouraged us to focus too heavily on copying.
If we replace copying with participation, a different picture emerges.
People do not merely receive cultural forms.
They enter systems of meaning.
They inherit possibilities.
They instantiate those possibilities in particular circumstances.
Their instances can be taken up by others.
Some become conventional.
Some disappear.
Some alter the system.
The resulting system is inherited by the next generation, not as a fixed object, but as a changed field of possibilities.
This process is evolutionary in a meaningful sense.
There is inheritance.
There is variation.
There is differential persistence.
There is cumulative change.
But the mechanism is not adequately captured by the image of one little cultural object reproducing itself inside another mind.
The evolutionary process is distributed across a semiotic ecology.
The paradox of cultural fidelity
There is therefore a curious paradox.
A cultural form may be preserved because it is not copied exactly.
A story survives because each generation can retell it.
A song survives because musicians can perform it differently.
A language survives because speakers can use it to say things that have never been said before.
A scientific tradition survives because its practitioners can criticise and revise it.
A concept survives because it can enter new relations.
The fidelity of the tradition may therefore lie not in the fidelity of its instances but in the fidelity of its generative possibilities.
The tradition remains itself by continuing to produce differences that belong to it.
This is a very different conception of inheritance.
It is also one that brings us closer to the peculiar character of culture.
From copying to becoming
Perhaps, then, the question we should ask is no longer:
How accurately does culture copy itself?
but:
How does a cultural system remain recognisable while becoming something else?
That question shifts the emphasis from transmission to transformation.
It also changes what counts as an evolutionary mechanism.
The interesting unit may no longer be a meme.
The interesting event may be an instantiation.
The interesting environment may be a semiotic ecology.
The interesting inheritance may be a structured potential.
And the interesting evolutionary achievement may be the capacity of a system to preserve continuity while generating novelty.
This gives us a rather different picture of cultural evolution.
The past does not simply reproduce itself in the present.
The present does not simply mutate the past.
Rather:
the inherited system constrains what can become possible, while participation in that system changes what the future can inherit.
That is evolution as a historical dialogue between constraint and possibility.
And once we see cultural inheritance in those terms, the symbol begins to look less like a cultural object that gets copied and more like a resource through which a community can continue making meaning.
That may finally bring us to the question that has been waiting behind the meme from the beginning:
What does a symbol actually do?
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