There is one final possibility we have not considered.
Perhaps the meme itself has been reading.
Not literally, of course.
We have spent ten essays insisting that memes are not little agents.
We should not undo the argument in the final paragraph.
And yet something rather curious has happened.
A concept entered the series.
It was named.
It was examined.
It was questioned.
It was placed in relation to other concepts.
It changed as those relations changed.
And by the end, it was no longer quite the concept with which we began.
Which sounds suspiciously like evolution.
The meme arrived carrying a particular inheritance.
It came from biology.
It brought with it the gene, replication, copying, variation and selection.
It offered us a way of imagining culture as a population of things that could persist by being reproduced.
We accepted the invitation.
Then we began asking questions.
What exactly is being copied?
What does "replication" mean here?
Where is the agent?
What happens to the metaphor when we look closely at its grammar?
What is inherited when the instance is never identical to what preceded it?
What role do symbols play?
What role do practices play?
What does participation contribute?
Where does meaning reside?
What kind of system makes cultural continuity possible?
By the time we reached the end, the meme had changed.
Perhaps we should say that the meme had been instantiated.
Not replicated.
That distinction now matters.
The word meme entered a new semiotic environment.
It encountered SFL.
It encountered grammatical metaphor.
It encountered participation.
It encountered semiotic systems.
It encountered ecology.
It encountered conceptual naturalism.
It encountered a rather persistent suspicion of nouns pretending to be agents.
And, like any cultural form entering a new environment, it did not remain entirely unchanged.
Its meaning shifted.
Its relations changed.
Its affordances changed.
It became capable of doing different conceptual work.
The meme that emerged at the end was therefore not the meme that entered at the beginning.
This is perhaps the final irony.
We began by asking whether memes reproduce.
But what actually happened to the meme in this series was much more interesting.
We participated in it.
We interpreted it.
We reconstructed it.
We altered its relations.
We placed it in new contexts.
We inherited something and made something else from it.
In other words, we treated the meme not as a replicator but as a participant in an ecology of meaning.
Of course, it was not literally a participant.
We were.
But that distinction is precisely the point.
And perhaps this gives us one last way of understanding Dawkins.
He did not need to have been wrong for the meme to have been insufficient.
The concept performed an important historical function.
It made cultural inheritance visible.
It gave a name to a problem.
It opened a field of inquiry.
And then the field began to outgrow the conceptual machinery that had opened it.
That is not a failure.
It is what intellectual inheritance often looks like.
A concept gives us a way to see.
We use it.
It reveals something.
We discover its limits.
We modify it.
Sometimes we abandon it.
Sometimes we keep it, but differently.
The concept has participated in its own supersession.
Perhaps ideas evolve like this more often than we notice.
Not by copying themselves perfectly.
Not by competing as independent entities.
But by entering new relations.
A concept moves from one context to another.
Someone asks a new question of it.
Someone places it beside an unexpected idea.
Someone notices that its grammar encourages a particular construal.
Someone discovers that what seemed like a natural category was partly an artefact of the metaphor used to describe it.
The concept changes.
And because the concept changes, the questions that can be asked with it change.
That is conceptual evolution.
So perhaps the meme has earned the last word.
We can imagine it sitting quietly at the end of the series.
It has lost its agency.
It has lost its biological passport.
It has lost its status as a cultural particle.
It has discovered that replication was never quite what we thought.
It has been told that symbols do not remember.
It has learned that practices are inherited through participation.
It has been introduced to semiotic ecologies.
It has been warned about grammatical metaphor.
It has even encountered the furrow.
And after all this, perhaps it turns to us and says:
"I thought I was the explanation."
And we reply:
"No. You were the question."
That may be enough.
Because the meme was never the destination.
It was a way of beginning.
And perhaps that is what good concepts do.
They do not necessarily survive unchanged.
They make further thinking possible.
They open a path.
They create a furrow.
And once the furrow exists, the next ploughing does not begin on untouched ground.
It follows what has already been made—
sometimes obediently,
sometimes reluctantly,
sometimes cutting across it—
and in doing so makes the next furrow.
The history of ideas may be less like the copying of objects than the changing of paths through a field of possibility.
The past does not dictate the future.
But neither does the future begin from nowhere.
It inherits the furrows.
And then, inevitably,
the plough moves on.
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