We began with a simple question.
How does culture evolve?
Dawkins gave that question a striking answer.
Perhaps cultural forms evolve because they are copied.
Perhaps, just as genes are inherited and selected within biological evolution, cultural units are inherited and selected within cultural evolution.
He called these hypothetical cultural units memes.
It was an ingenious proposal.
It gave cultural transmission a name.
It made cultural inheritance visible as a problem in its own right.
It suggested that the evolution of culture might possess a logic that could not simply be reduced to the evolution of organisms.
And it opened a question that has proved much more durable than the particular answer:
How does something made by one generation become available to another, while remaining capable of change?
That question has survived.
The meme may not be the best answer to it.
But perhaps that is not the most interesting thing about the meme.
Perhaps the meme was a step in the evolution of the question itself.
What Dawkins saw
It is worth beginning by giving the idea its due.
Culture clearly does have cumulative historical continuity.
People inherit languages they did not invent.
They learn practices they did not create.
They use symbols whose origins they do not know.
They acquire concepts formulated before they were born.
They perform music composed by people long dead.
They inhabit institutions established by previous generations.
They can therefore participate in forms of meaning-making that vastly exceed the lifetime of any individual.
Something is being carried forward.
And biological inheritance alone does not explain how.
A child does not inherit a language through their genes.
A musician does not inherit a musical tradition through DNA.
A scientist does not inherit a theory biologically.
Cultural inheritance is a genuine phenomenon.
Dawkins was right to insist that it deserved to be theorised.
The question is what kind of inheritance it is.
The replicator was an important simplification
The meme gave the problem a manageable shape.
Instead of asking vaguely how "culture" changes, we could ask about particular forms.
A tune.
A phrase.
A story.
A belief.
A practice.
An image.
A slogan.
Something could be transmitted.
It could vary.
Some versions could become more widespread than others.
The population could change over time.
The analogy with biological evolution was therefore illuminating.
But simplification has a cost.
To make cultural evolution resemble biological evolution, we begin looking for a cultural equivalent of the gene.
And once we look for such a thing, we are tempted to assume that the thing must have the properties of the thing it is replacing.
We begin searching for cultural replicators.
Then we begin asking how they reproduce.
Then how they compete.
Then how they survive.
The metaphor has become a model.
And eventually the model can become an ontology.
That is where caution becomes necessary.
The agency hidden in a word
Our first warning came from the word replicator.
The suffix matters.
A replicator sounds like something that replicates.
An agent.
A doer.
A thing with a tendency to produce copies of itself.
But if we return to the biological process and look carefully at the grammar, the picture is more complicated.
In a clause such as:
The gene replicates.
The gene is Actor in the transitivity model.
But in the ergative model, it is Medium.
The gene is therefore not straightforwardly an Agent in the philosophical sense of an autonomous initiator.
The grammatical form encourages us to construe a process in which the gene participates as though the gene itself were the doer.
The danger is not that the grammar is wrong.
The grammar is perfectly useful.
The danger is that we forget the distinction between the lexicogrammatical construal and the process being construed.
The word replicator can then smuggle an agentive interpretation into the theory.
And once we have made the gene an agent, it becomes very easy to imagine the meme as an agent too.
The cultural object appears to want to survive.
It competes.
It spreads.
It exploits minds.
It protects itself.
The metaphor begins doing the thinking for us.
Unpacking the metaphor
This is where our notion of conceptual naturalism becomes useful.
A concept is not simply a transparent window onto reality.
It affords some construals more readily than others.
The choice of replicator makes certain questions easy to ask.
How accurately does it copy?
How often does it reproduce?
How does it spread?
What increases its fitness?
These questions can be illuminating.
But the same conceptual framing makes other questions harder to see.
What semiotic system makes the form meaningful?
What practices sustain it?
How do participants interpret it?
What institutional arrangements stabilise it?
What possibilities does it afford?
How does its meaning change when its context changes?
What happens when people deliberately transform it?
The metaphor has therefore not merely named an object.
It has structured the field of inquiry.
That is why unpacking metaphors matters.
We are not trying to eliminate them.
We are trying to see what they make visible—and what they make invisible.
From replication to instantiation
One of the most important distinctions we have encountered is the difference between replication and instantiation.
An instance is not simply a copy of a system.
A speaker produces an utterance.
A musician performs a composition.
A scientist applies a theory.
A writer produces a text.
A ritual participant performs a ceremony.
In each case, a systemic potential is instantiated in a particular context.
The instance belongs to the system without reproducing the system in miniature.
This is crucial for understanding cultural inheritance.
What is inherited need not be an object that is copied.
It can be a potential that can be instantiated again.
And because each instantiation occurs in a different context, variation is not an accidental intrusion into the process.
Variation is built into the process.
Copies that change
This was the paradox that eventually began to undo the replicator model.
Cultural copies change.
But not merely because copying is imperfect.
They change because participants encounter inherited forms in new circumstances.
A story is retold.
A melody is performed.
A concept is applied.
A word is used in a new context.
A ritual is adapted.
A scientific method is modified.
The inherited form enters another configuration of relations.
Its instance changes.
Sometimes the change is insignificant.
Sometimes it is rejected.
Sometimes it becomes conventional.
Sometimes it transforms the system itself.
Cultural continuity therefore depends upon a peculiar combination:
enough continuity for recognition, enough variation for participation.
A culture that could only copy exactly would be extraordinarily brittle.
A culture that changed without constraint would lose continuity.
Its evolutionary capacity lies in the relation between the two.
What survives?
This forced us to ask a more difficult question.
If the instances change, what persists?
Sometimes a form persists.
Sometimes a pattern.
Sometimes a distinction.
Sometimes a convention.
Sometimes a practice.
Sometimes a way of organising experience.
Sometimes an entire semiotic system.
And sometimes what survives is the capacity to generate new instances recognisably related to the inherited tradition.
This last possibility is particularly important.
The inherited cultural resource does not merely tell us what to repeat.
It provides possibilities for what can be done next.
A tradition can therefore contain the resources for its own transformation.
The symbol remembers—but does not remember
The symbol gave us another way of approaching the problem.
A word can survive its speakers.
A text can survive its author.
A musical score can survive its composer.
A mathematical notation can survive the mathematician who introduced it.
A ritual can survive the people who established it.
Something from the past remains available.
We called this, metaphorically, memory.
But the symbol does not remember.
It has no interior archive.
It does not retrieve its past.
What it does is more interesting.
It preserves access to inherited possibilities of meaning.
A later participant can take up the symbol.
They can interpret it.
They can perform it.
They can transform it.
The past becomes available without becoming present again.
Cultural memory is therefore not simply storage.
It is the possibility of re-entering inherited meaning-making.
But symbols are not enough
We then had to go beyond the symbol.
A recipe is not a cuisine.
A musical score is not a musical tradition.
A legal text is not a legal practice.
A scientific paper is not an experiment.
A ritual description is not a ritual.
The symbol provides resources.
The practice makes those resources consequential.
A person learns how to cook.
A musician learns how to perform.
A scientist learns how to investigate.
A lawyer learns how to argue.
A child learns how to participate in a community.
The inheritance is therefore not simply a set of representations.
It is a capacity for participation.
This is why cultural learning is so much more than the transmission of information.
The apprentice does not receive the craft.
The apprentice becomes capable of doing it.
Inheriting a practice
A practice is inherited when new participants acquire the capacity to participate in an historically organised activity.
They learn distinctions.
They acquire expectations.
They learn what counts as success and failure.
They acquire ways of acting.
They learn how to interpret situations.
They learn how to respond to others.
They acquire embodied capacities.
And eventually they modify what they have inherited.
The practice therefore persists through participation.
This is a very different mechanism from the replication of a cultural particle.
There is no need to imagine a little cultural object reproducing itself inside the learner.
The learner becomes a participant in a practice.
That is enough.
Culture is more than its participants
But neither can we simply put the practice inside individuals.
A practice is distributed across people, institutions, material arrangements, semiotic resources and histories.
The way a courtroom works depends upon participants, architecture, legal language, procedural conventions, documents, roles and institutional expectations.
A laboratory depends upon scientists, instruments, protocols, terminology, records, spaces and disciplinary conventions.
A university depends upon teachers, students, texts, buildings, assessment procedures, traditions, technologies and institutional structures.
The practice is not located at any one point.
It exists in the organisation of relations.
This is why culture begins to look ecological.
The ecology of meaning
An ecology is not a collection of isolated things.
It is a system of interdependent relations.
The same is true of cultural meaning.
A word 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 change practices.
Changed practices change meanings.
Changed meanings create new possibilities for practice.
The relations are recursive.
Culture is therefore not simply a population of cultural objects.
It is an ecology of meaning-making.
Culture as a semiotic system
This is where the SFL conception of culture gives us something particularly powerful.
Culture can be understood as a higher-order semiotic system.
It provides possibilities for meaning-making.
Those possibilities are realised through language and through other semiotic systems.
Language itself provides a system of choices that can be instantiated in particular texts and interactions.
Other semiotic systems—gesture, dress, architecture, music, images, spatial organisation, ritual and material design—can participate in the same larger cultural organisation.
The result is not a collection of independent codes.
It is an organised semiotic environment.
People enter that environment already structured by distinctions they did not create.
They learn how to participate in it.
And through participation, they change it.
The system constrains without determining
This gives us a better account of cultural constraint.
A language makes some meanings easier to express than others.
A genre makes some forms more recognisable than others.
A ritual makes some actions appropriate and others inappropriate.
An institution makes some behaviours expected and others surprising.
A conceptual system makes some questions easy to formulate and others difficult even to see.
But none of these determines what a participant must do.
The system provides a structured field of possibilities.
This is where agency becomes intelligible.
Agency is not freedom from structure.
Nor is it the absence of structure.
It is the capacity to act within inherited possibilities and sometimes to alter them.
Agency returns to the picture
This matters because abandoning the meme should not mean abandoning agency.
Indeed, it gives us a better place to locate it.
People really do interpret.
They really do choose.
They really do improvise.
They teach.
They refuse.
They redesign.
They institutionalise.
They challenge conventions.
They create new practices.
But they do all of these things using resources that they have inherited.
Their agency is therefore historically situated.
The participant is neither an autonomous origin nor a passive vehicle.
The participant is a participant.
That word has done increasing amounts of work for us throughout this series.
Perhaps it is time to notice why.
Participation is the missing middle
The replicator model tends to oscillate between two poles.
There is the cultural object.
And there is the person who supposedly copies it.
Participation gives us a middle.
A person does not simply receive a cultural form.
They enter a practice.
The practice is already organised.
The person acquires competence.
They instantiate its possibilities.
They encounter other participants.
They interpret.
They modify.
The altered practice becomes part of the environment encountered by subsequent participants.
The process is therefore neither transmission from object to mind nor spontaneous creation by individual.
It is participatory reproduction and transformation.
The future is made from inherited possibilities
This also explains why cultural evolution can be cumulative.
Each generation begins with resources it did not create.
But it does not begin from the same point as the previous generation.
The inherited system has already changed.
New distinctions have appeared.
New technologies exist.
New institutions have formed.
New practices have become conventional.
Old possibilities may have disappeared.
New possibilities may have emerged.
The future therefore inherits not merely the past's contents but the past's transformed field of possibilities.
Each generation receives a changed world and changes it again.
Evolution is cumulative because the conditions of subsequent participation have been altered.
Selection without a selector
The language of selection remains useful here too, but it must be handled carefully.
A cultural form may persist while another disappears.
A practice may spread.
A convention may become dominant.
A concept may become central.
But this does not require a cultural agent called "selection" deciding what survives.
Persistence emerges from relations.
A form may fit a practice.
A practice may solve a problem.
An institution may support it.
Participants may find it intelligible.
A technology may amplify it.
A community may value it.
Other forms may become less useful.
Selection is therefore an emergent property of the ecology.
The question is not simply:
Which meme is fitter?
but:
What configuration of relations allows this possibility to persist?
Evolution without a unit
This may be the point at which we can finally let go of the assumption that evolution requires a single privileged unit.
Biological evolution can be usefully described at the level of genes.
But cultural evolution need not have a cultural gene.
The fact that two processes are evolutionary does not entail that their mechanisms must be structurally identical.
Cultural evolution may involve simultaneous changes in:
symbols;
practices;
concepts;
institutions;
technologies;
bodies;
environments;
and relations among participants.
There may be no single entity that carries the whole process.
The process may instead be distributed.
Its unit may be the wrong question.
From objects to relations
This is perhaps the deepest conceptual movement of the series.
At the beginning, we looked for things.
The gene.
The meme.
The replicator.
Then we began looking at processes.
Replication.
Instantiation.
Interpretation.
Transmission.
Practice.
Eventually, the processes themselves led us to relations.
Between participants.
Between signs.
Between practices.
Between institutions.
Between meanings.
Between inherited possibilities and present circumstances.
Between systems and environments.
The evolutionary phenomenon is increasingly visible not as the persistence of an object but as the continuity of organised relations through transformation.
The metaphor did its work
Seen this way, we need not condemn the meme.
The metaphor did useful work.
It made cultural inheritance visible.
It encouraged us to take cultural evolution seriously.
It provided a conceptual scaffold for asking how cultural forms persist beyond individuals.
Its limitation was not that it was metaphorical.
All our theories use metaphors.
Its limitation was that the metaphor could become too literal.
The meme became a thing.
The replicator became an agent.
Copying became the central process.
Variation became deviation from an imagined original.
Culture began to look like a population of little biological entities.
Unpacking the metaphor does not leave us with nothing.
It leaves us with a much richer problem.
What replaces the meme?
Perhaps the answer is:
nothing.
Or rather, nothing of the same kind.
There is no need to replace one cultural particle with another.
No "sememe."
No "cultural gene."
No more sophisticated replicator hiding inside the symbol.
The better move may be to abandon the search for a single cultural unit.
What we need instead is an account of the system that makes cultural inheritance possible.
That system includes semiotic potential, material forms, practices, institutions, participants and environments.
Its dynamics include instantiation, interpretation, learning, variation, selection, stabilisation, innovation and transformation.
Its continuity is historical.
Its organisation is relational.
Its medium is meaning.
What remains of the evolutionary analogy?
Quite a lot.
There is inheritance.
But what is inherited is often a structured potential for participation.
There is variation.
But variation is constrained by semiotic systems and practices.
There is differential persistence.
But persistence emerges through ecological relations.
There is cumulative change.
But the changing system alters the conditions of subsequent change.
There is adaptation.
But participants can also reflect upon and deliberately transform the practices in which they participate.
There is transmission.
But transmission is not enough.
The inherited resource must become usable within a new context.
Evolution therefore remains an illuminating concept.
What changes is the model of what evolves.
Culture evolves by making possibilities available
We can now formulate a positive account.
Culture evolves because human communities continually inherit, instantiate, interpret, modify and reorganise systems of meaning-making possibilities.
Symbols provide durable access to inherited resources.
Language and other semiotic systems organise those resources.
Practices enact them.
Institutions stabilise them.
Participants transform them.
Material environments afford and constrain their use.
The altered configuration becomes the environment inherited by those who come next.
Nothing in this process needs to be imagined as a cultural particle struggling for survival.
The evolution is in the changing organisation of possibilities.
The furrow and the plough
There is an image that now seems particularly apt.
When a field has been ploughed repeatedly, the furrow makes subsequent movement easier in certain directions.
The furrow does not command the plough.
Nor does the plough create the field from nothing.
The existing configuration makes some paths more probable than others.
But the plough can also deepen, redirect or erase the furrow.
The field and the plough therefore participate in a recursive history.
Something similar happens in culture.
Inherited practices create affordances.
Affordances guide subsequent participation.
Participation reinforces or alters the inherited pattern.
The altered pattern guides what comes next.
The path is neither predetermined nor arbitrary.
It is historically channelled.
Perhaps that is a better image for cultural evolution than the replicator.
After the meme
So what comes after the meme?
Not another meme.
Not a better replicator.
Not a cultural particle with more sophisticated properties.
What comes after the meme is a different question.
We ask how systems of meaning persist.
How practices are inherited.
How symbols preserve access to the past.
How semiotic systems organise possibility.
How institutions stabilise patterns.
How participants transform what they inherit.
How environments shape and are shaped by cultural activity.
How conceptual changes reorganise the possibilities available to future participants.
And how all of these processes become historically cumulative.
The question has changed from:
What reproduces itself?
to:
What makes continuation possible?
That is a much larger question.
The answer is not an object
Perhaps the most important lesson is that the answer is not a thing.
Culture does not need a little engine inside it called the meme.
It does not need a cultural gene.
It does not need an agent hiding inside a grammatical metaphor.
It needs relations through which meaning can persist and change.
A child needs to enter a language.
A musician needs to enter a tradition.
A scientist needs to enter a discipline.
A citizen needs to enter institutions.
A participant needs to enter practices.
And once inside, they can do something that no replicator metaphor quite captures.
They can understand.
They can ask why.
They can reinterpret.
They can refuse.
They can invent.
They can teach.
They can transform.
The inherited system becomes the medium of its own transformation.
Culture inherits itself
This gives us perhaps the strangest formulation of all.
A culture does not merely pass something from one generation to another.
It continually reconstructs the conditions under which it can continue.
Each generation inherits a semiotic environment.
It learns its practices.
It acquires its distinctions.
It uses its symbols.
It inhabits its institutions.
And through doing so, it changes the environment.
The next generation inherits that changed environment.
Culture therefore becomes, in a real sense, an inheritance that modifies the conditions of its own inheritance.
That is a far more dynamic picture than replication.
It is also more faithful to the peculiar creativity of human cultural life.
The evolutionary question survives
Dawkins asked a question that remains worth asking:
How can forms of culture persist, vary and spread beyond individual lifetimes?
Our answer has become very different.
But the question has become better.
Cultural inheritance is not the replication of discrete units.
It is the historical continuity of semiotically organised possibilities for participation.
Cultural evolution is not the competition of autonomous cultural agents.
It is the transformation of practices, meanings, institutions and environments through participation.
Symbols do not remember.
People remember through symbols.
Practices do not act.
People act through practices.
Memes do not want to survive.
Cultural forms persist when the relations of a community continue to make their use, interpretation or transformation possible.
And concepts do not evolve in isolation.
They evolve within ecologies of meaning in which changing one distinction can alter the possibilities of many others.
After the meme, the question becomes larger
Perhaps this is where we should leave the meme.
Not discarded.
Not worshipped.
Not replaced.
Simply placed in its history.
It was one way of making cultural inheritance thinkable.
It helped us see that something genuinely evolutionary was happening beyond biological reproduction.
But the further we followed the question, the less adequate the unit became.
The meme led us to the symbol.
The symbol led us to practice.
Practice led us to participation.
Participation led us to ecology.
Ecology led us to semiotic systems.
And semiotic systems led us back to a deeper question about what it means for a community to inherit a world of possibilities.
The answer is not that culture contains things that reproduce themselves.
It is that culture provides ways of making meaning that can be inherited, instantiated, transformed and inherited again.
That is why culture can be cumulative without being mechanical.
Why it can be conservative without being static.
Why it can be creative without beginning from nothing.
Why traditions can survive by changing.
And why human beings can inherit a past that they never experienced and nevertheless make something genuinely new from it.
Perhaps, then, the most important thing that survives from the meme is not the meme itself.
It is the question it forced us to ask.
And perhaps the question, after all these transformations, is now something like this:
How does a community inherit the possibilities through which it can become something it has never yet been?
That is no longer a question about cultural particles.
It is a question about meaning.
And about history.
And about participation.
And perhaps, ultimately, about what it means for a culture to have a future.
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