The most audacious move in Dawkins's theory of the meme was not the suggestion that ideas can spread.
People had known that for a very long time.
Ideas spread.
Stories spread.
Songs spread.
Religions spread.
Technologies spread.
Languages spread.
The interesting move was to suggest that such phenomena might belong to the same broad family of processes that Darwinian biology had taught us to call evolution.
That proposal changes the question.
Instead of asking why one particular idea has become popular, we can ask how cultural forms persist, vary and change across generations.
Instead of treating culture as something that merely accumulates, we can ask how it develops a history.
Instead of imagining biology as the only domain in which inheritance matters, we can ask whether inheritance might occur in more than one kind of system.
This was the great conceptual escape that memetics attempted:
evolution might not belong exclusively to biology.
Whether the meme provides the right account of that possibility is another matter.
But the possibility itself is worth taking seriously.
Evolution escapes its birthplace
There is a useful distinction between a theory's historical origin and the range of phenomena to which its conceptual resources might eventually apply.
Evolutionary theory emerged from biology.
Darwin was trying to understand the diversification of living forms.
The mechanisms he identified—variation, inheritance and differential reproductive success—belonged to biological populations.
But a theory can sometimes reveal a pattern whose significance extends beyond the circumstances in which it was first recognised.
Once we have learned to think in terms of inheritance and variation, we may begin to notice similar structures elsewhere.
The question then becomes:
Is the similarity superficial, or does it indicate a deeper commonality?
This is exactly the question raised by cultural evolution.
Cultures clearly change over time.
But not all historical change is evolutionary in any interesting sense.
A building can be demolished.
A government can collapse.
A fashion can disappear.
A language can acquire a new word.
The mere fact that something changes does not make the change evolutionary.
What makes the evolutionary comparison interesting is the combination of continuity and transformation.
Something persists across generations while changing in the process.
That is what makes inheritance relevant.
And culture appears to contain an extraordinary abundance of such phenomena.
Culture has lineages
Consider a language.
No individual invented English.
No generation receives English in a finished form.
Yet there is continuity between the English spoken today and earlier forms of the language.
Words are inherited.
Grammatical patterns are inherited.
Genres are inherited.
Ways of organising experience are inherited.
But they do not remain unchanged.
Pronunciations shift.
Meanings shift.
Grammatical patterns change.
New expressions emerge.
Old ones disappear.
Different communities develop different conventions.
The language persists through transformation.
The same can be said of musical traditions.
A musical form can be inherited from predecessors and altered by performers.
A genre can remain recognisable while its conventions change.
A composer can inherit a tradition and radically transform it.
The transformation may become the basis for further inheritance.
Something similar happens with scientific traditions.
A theory is taught.
Its concepts are acquired.
Its methods are practised.
Its distinctions become familiar.
Then someone changes one of them.
The alteration becomes a new resource for subsequent work.
The tradition persists by changing.
These examples make the evolutionary analogy tempting.
There are lineages.
There is inheritance.
There is variation.
There is differential persistence.
And there is cumulative change.
But there is also something that makes cultural evolution profoundly unlike a simple extension of biological reproduction.
The inherited forms are meaningful.
Meaning changes the problem
A gene does not have to be interpreted in order to participate in genetic inheritance.
A cultural form does.
At least, that is true of much of what we ordinarily mean by culture.
A word must be understood—or misunderstood—in order to function as a word.
A ritual must be recognised as a ritual, at least by some participants.
A musical convention must be learned as a convention.
A scientific concept must be used within practices that give it its significance.
A gesture can become meaningful only within some system in which that gesture has a place.
This does not mean that cultural inheritance is entirely conscious.
Much of it is not.
Children acquire patterns of language without explicitly formulating the grammar they are learning.
People reproduce social practices without being able to explain them.
Musicians can follow conventions they could never state in theoretical terms.
Institutions can preserve assumptions that nobody remembers choosing.
But meaningfulness remains part of the organisation of the system.
Culture is not simply a population of physical objects being copied.
It is organised through semiotic resources.
That makes the evolutionary problem considerably more interesting.
The semiotic world
This is where the SFL conception of culture becomes important.
Culture can be understood as a semiotic system: a system of meanings and meaning-making possibilities that is realised through language and through other semiotic systems.
Language is not the whole of culture.
Nor is culture reducible to language.
But language is a central semiotic resource through which cultural meanings are made available, negotiated, preserved and transformed.
Other semiotic systems operate alongside it and interact with it.
Visual forms can distinguish, classify and represent.
Gesture can organise interpersonal relations.
Architecture can embody distinctions between public and private, sacred and ordinary, accessible and forbidden.
Dress can construe identities and relationships.
Diagrams can make complex relations available for reasoning.
Mathematical notation can provide a highly specialised semiotic resource for constructing certain kinds of knowledge.
Technologies can organise what kinds of semiotic action are possible.
The cultural world is therefore not a single stream of information.
It is a multimodal organisation of meaning-making resources.
And that changes what cultural inheritance might mean.
From things to potentials
The meme encourages us to ask:
What cultural thing is being replicated?
A semiotic perspective suggests another question:
What meaning-making potential is being inherited?
Consider language again.
When a child acquires English, the child does not receive a copy of the English language.
There is no cultural object called English that is transferred intact from one generation to another.
Instead, the child gradually acquires the ability to participate in a system of meaning.
The child learns ways of construing experience.
Ways of enacting relationships.
Ways of organising discourse.
Ways of distinguishing possibilities that the culture has made significant.
In SFL terms, the system provides a potential.
Actual utterances are instances of that potential.
The distinction matters.
A language can remain recognisably the same system even though no two speakers produce exactly the same set of utterances.
And the system itself can change as speakers continually instantiate its possibilities in new circumstances.
This gives us a different picture of cultural continuity.
The system persists not because its instances are copied identically, but because its potential remains available for further instantiation.
Reproduction is not replication
This may be the point at which the meme begins to look less satisfactory.
Suppose a child learns a song.
The child sings it.
Another child learns it from them.
Perhaps the melody remains recognisable.
But the tempo changes.
The pronunciation changes.
A phrase is altered.
A new verse is added.
The song is moved into a different cultural context.
Perhaps its emotional significance changes.
Has the song been replicated?
In one sense, certainly something has been reproduced.
But the reproduction is not necessarily a matter of copying an invariant cultural object.
What persists is a pattern of possibilities from which further performances can be generated.
The same is true of a genre.
A genre persists because new texts can be produced that instantiate its conventions.
No individual text is the genre.
The genre is a systemic potential realised in an ongoing series of instances.
And the instances can themselves modify the system.
A sufficiently innovative text can become a model for later texts.
A new convention can emerge.
A boundary can shift.
A previously marginal possibility can become central.
The system changes because it is being used.
This is a very different picture from a population of little entities attempting to reproduce themselves.
The inheritance of possibility
There is a deeper consequence here.
If culture is a semiotic system, then what is inherited may be less like content and more like possibility.
A culture does not merely tell people what to think.
It provides resources through which things can be thought, said, shown, enacted and valued.
It makes some distinctions readily available.
Others may be difficult to formulate.
Some categories become obvious.
Others may require conceptual innovation before they can even be articulated.
Some relationships become naturalised.
Others become difficult to imagine.
The inherited system therefore does not simply contain meanings.
It organises a potential for meaning.
This gives us a particularly interesting interpretation of cultural evolution.
A cultural system changes when the range, organisation or relative accessibility of its meaning-making possibilities changes.
A new word can make a distinction easier to articulate.
A new genre can make a new kind of experience expressible.
A new notation can make a previously difficult relation manipulable.
A new musical form can make a different kind of affective organisation available.
A new institution can stabilise a new pattern of social relations.
A new conceptual distinction can open a new region of thought.
In each case, cultural change can involve the transformation of what can be meaningfully done.
That is a richer problem than the replication of cultural objects.
But Dawkins was still onto something
At this point it would be easy to declare victory for semiotics.
We should resist that temptation.
Dawkins's insight remains.
Cultural forms do exhibit persistence.
They do undergo variation.
They do spread differentially.
Some forms become extraordinarily successful.
Some disappear.
Some are copied with remarkable fidelity.
Some mutate rapidly.
Some combine with others.
Some become entrenched in institutions.
Some prove exceptionally resistant to change.
The evolutionary vocabulary remains illuminating.
What we should question is not whether culture evolves, but what kind of evolutionary system culture is.
The meme may have identified a genuine phenomenon while offering an overly narrow account of its mechanism.
That is a much more interesting conclusion than simply saying that memetics is wrong.
Perhaps Dawkins discovered the question of cultural inheritance without discovering its ultimate unit.
Perhaps the analogy works at the level of process while failing at the level of ontology.
Perhaps cultural evolution is genuinely evolutionary without requiring cultural genes.
That possibility deserves careful attention.
Selection without a selector
There is another reason the biological analogy is tempting.
In biology, natural selection does not require a conscious selector.
There is no external judge deciding which organism deserves to survive.
Differential reproductive success emerges from the interaction between inherited variation and environmental conditions.
This can produce remarkably structured outcomes.
The absence of intention does not imply the absence of selection.
That insight transfers surprisingly well to cultural phenomena.
Ideas, practices and symbols do not need to possess intentions in order for some to persist more successfully than others.
A practice may persist because it fits an institutional structure.
A story may persist because it is memorable.
A phrase may persist because it is rhetorically compact.
A technology may persist because infrastructures make it convenient.
A scientific concept may persist because it integrates effectively with an existing body of knowledge.
A ritual may persist because it is embedded in a social institution.
No cultural form needs to want anything.
Its persistence can emerge from the conditions in which it participates.
Here again, however, the analogy should not be pushed too far.
The cultural environment is itself semiotically organised.
Human beings interpret.
They teach.
They deliberately select.
They argue.
They reject.
They transform.
They preserve.
They institutionalise.
The environment in which cultural forms persist is therefore not merely an external physical environment.
It is itself partly constituted by meaning.
This creates a feedback loop that has no straightforward equivalent in the simplest versions of the biological analogy.
The organism is not the only environment
There is another lesson to be drawn from the gene-centred perspective.
Dawkins encouraged us to see the organism partly as an environment within which genes persist.
When the idea is transferred to culture, we might be tempted to imagine human minds as the equivalent environment for memes.
The meme enters the mind.
The meme reproduces.
The human becomes its host.
This is a neat analogy.
It is also potentially misleading.
A human being is not simply a container for cultural material.
Human beings participate in cultural systems.
They interpret the forms they encounter.
They modify them.
They combine them.
They teach them.
They reject them.
They institutionalise them.
And, crucially, they do so through already inherited semiotic resources.
The relationship is therefore reciprocal.
People participate in culture.
Culture organises the possibilities through which people participate.
The distinction between host and inhabitant begins to break down.
We are no longer dealing with an organism containing a parasite-like cultural object.
We are dealing with participants embedded in a system of meaning.
The strange inheritance of language
Language provides perhaps the clearest illustration.
Imagine that English were a meme.
What would the meme be?
The vocabulary?
The grammar?
The phonology?
The pronunciation of particular speakers?
The meanings of particular words?
The conventions of particular genres?
The whole system?
The question rapidly becomes unstable.
But the instability is informative.
It tells us that language does not behave like a population of discrete objects.
A language is a system of options.
Speakers continually instantiate those options.
Some choices become conventional.
Some innovations spread.
Some disappear.
Some become associated with particular social groups.
Some become marked.
Some become unremarkable.
The system changes through its own use.
And because the system is semiotic, the changes can alter not merely what people do but what they can readily mean.
This is cultural inheritance at its most interesting.
A speaker inherits a system that precedes them.
But their use of the system becomes part of the history that later speakers inherit.
The inheritance therefore runs in both directions:
the past constrains the present, and the present modifies what the future can inherit.
That is evolution without replication in the narrow sense.
Parallel semiotic systems
The same principle becomes even clearer when we look beyond language.
A culture can preserve and transform meaning through many semiotic systems at once.
A religious tradition may be inherited through:
verbal texts;
ritual actions;
architecture;
images;
clothing;
bodily practices;
spatial arrangements;
objects.
None of these is simply a copy of another.
Yet they can participate in a larger cultural organisation.
A scientific tradition may involve:
specialised language;
mathematical notation;
diagrams;
instruments;
laboratory procedures;
conventions of representation;
institutional practices.
Again, there is no single cultural object being replicated.
There is a network of semiotic resources that together make a particular way of knowing and acting possible.
This makes cultural inheritance profoundly distributed.
A cultural form can also move between semiotic systems.
An idea expressed verbally can be diagrammed.
A diagram can inspire a mathematical formulation.
A mathematical relation can be embodied in a technological device.
A technological practice can generate new vocabulary.
A musical convention can acquire social meaning through language.
A ritual can be represented visually and then transformed by that representation.
The cultural process is therefore not merely the copying of units.
It involves continual reconstrual and reorganisation across semiotic resources.
Escape, but not escape from materiality
There is one further caution.
To say that cultural evolution escapes biology does not mean that culture escapes materiality.
Culture is enacted by biological organisms.
It depends upon bodies, brains, voices, hands, tools, institutions and physical environments.
Language requires material processes.
Music requires sound.
Writing requires inscriptions.
Images require surfaces or screens.
Ritual requires bodies moving through space.
Technology requires physical infrastructures.
The point is not that culture exists in some immaterial realm.
It is that the organisation of cultural meaning cannot be reduced to the biological processes that provide its material conditions.
This is a distinction worth preserving.
Culture is biologically embodied without being biologically reducible.
Its semiotic organisation emerges through forms of participation that have their own histories and dynamics.
The biological substrate matters.
But it does not exhaust the explanation.
This is the real sense in which evolution can escape biology.
It does not leave biology behind.
It becomes organised at another level.
A second evolutionary domain?
We can now return to the original proposal.
Is culture an evolutionary domain?
Perhaps.
But if it is, its evolutionary dynamics may differ profoundly from those of biological populations.
Its inherited forms are meaningful.
Its participants interpret.
Its environment is partly constituted by the system itself.
Its variations can be deliberate.
Its innovations can be taught.
Its inherited resources can be consciously reconstructed.
Its transformations can become objects of reflection.
And its persistence can depend upon institutions that deliberately preserve particular forms.
None of this invalidates evolutionary thinking.
It tells us that evolutionary thinking must be adapted to the domain in which it is being used.
That may be the deeper lesson of the meme.
Dawkins wanted to liberate evolutionary theory from the organism.
Perhaps we need to liberate the idea of cultural evolution from the replicator.
The first liberation was conceptual.
The second may be semiotic.
From inheritance to participation
We are therefore beginning to see a different picture.
Culture does not merely transmit things.
It provides systems within which people can participate in meaning-making.
The inherited system is available as a potential.
People instantiate that potential in particular acts.
Those acts may reproduce familiar patterns.
They may also modify them.
Some modifications remain local.
Others become conventional.
Some become institutionalised.
Some transform the possibilities available to subsequent participants.
The process is cumulative.
But the cumulative object is not necessarily a growing collection of memes.
It may be a changing semiotic ecology.
That is a much more complicated object.
It is also much closer to the phenomenon we are trying to understand.
For if culture evolves through participation, then the participant is not merely a vessel carrying a cultural unit from one generation to another.
The participant is part of the mechanism through which the inherited system is reproduced and transformed.
And this gives us a new question.
If cultural inheritance is not primarily the transmission of objects, what exactly is it that symbols make possible?
That question takes us to the next stage of our investigation.
The meme asked us to look for the cultural equivalent of the gene.
The semiotic perspective suggests that we should instead look at the conditions under which meaning can be inherited at all.
Perhaps the crucial cultural technology is not the replicator.
Perhaps it is the symbol.