The Mythology of Memes

Move over Plato and Aristotle. Move over Descartes, Nietzsche and Freud. There is a new solution to the age-old riddle of human behaviour. The answer is 'memes'—virulently infectious ideas. Originally the brainchild of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the concept of memes has gained wide credence in recent years. University courses on 'memetics' have begun to appear and Psychology Professor Susan Blackmore has devoted an entire book, The Meme Machine, to the subject. Meanwhile there are web pages that proclaim the 'real truth' about memes—how they spread like viruses through society, and how you too can make money by learning about them and using them to your advantage. There are even those who would argue that memes are the glue that holds human culture together. As one popular science magazine put it: "Memes R Us!"

So the memes concept itself has finally come to resemble the kind of mind infection that it purports to describe, and seems set to spread, evolve and diversify—just like a virus.

Its birth however, was very different. When Dawkins first mooted the proposition a quarter of a century ago in his seminal book The Selfish Gene, it was as an afterthought, for this was a book primarily devoted to explaining that genes were the sole determinants of form, function and behaviour in all species of Earthly life. It followed from that central argument that a gene's biological host, be it a bacterium, a boab tree, or a human being, was nothing more than a heavily armoured space vehicle specifically designed to ferry genes safely into the future, and to preserve them long enough to allow them to fulfil their sole purpose in life: replication.

'Now they [genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. ... we are their survival machines.' (The Selfish Gene.)

Towards the end of his book however, Dawkins made an uncharacteristic concession to traditional philosophy: "We are built as gene machines . . . but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." And this extraordinary capacity, he claimed, made us vulnerable to an entirely new spectrum of invisible forces: contagious ideas. He called these 'mind infections' memes. Religions were the most obvious, virulent and successful of these infections, he said. Most other memes were more ephemeral and epidemic by nature. Cults, fads, fashions, political movements and childish crazes fell into this category.

'…the "craze'' is a striking example of behaviour that owes more to epidemiology than to rational choice. Yo-yos, hula hoops and pogo sticks, with their associated behavioural fixed actions, sweep through schools, and more sporadically leap from school to school, in patterns that differ from a measles epidemic in no serious particular. Ten years ago, you could have travelled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous.

To sustain the concept of memes however, Dawkins was forced to invoke the oldest mythology of all: the belief that we humans are fundamentally different from the other 30–100 million on this planet in that we are capable of overriding our animal heritage by means of our superior intellect.

This belief, that human beings are special, perhaps even central on a cosmic scale, is known as anthropocentrism, and it is founded on the perception that we are able to exercise free will in tailoring our behaviour to make the best of our physical and cultural environment. Such beliefs have prevailed in all cultures since the dawn of history, and few have dared to challenged that perception. The In fact the proposition that we do not possess free will is so universally unpalatable that even the redoubtable Charles Darwin confined such thoughts to his notebook and ventured nothing of them in print. 'Thought, however unintelligible it may be, seems as much a function of organ, as bile of liver,' he noted to himself. "This view should teach one profound humility, no one deserves credit for anything. [N]or ought one to blame others."

But however apparent such a revolutionary concept might have been to Darwin, to most people it constituted gross heresy. It threatened to 'set us back among the animals' even more unequivocally than Darwin's other proposition—that humans were descended from apes. So he wisely kept his little jewel to himself, while his theory of evolution by natural selection went on to become the most illuminating and productive idea the world has known.

Towards the end of the twentieth century however, science began to unlock the door to the reality that Darwin intuitively recognised so long ago, and new challengers to the mythology of free will and human specialness began to risk their reputations in print. The latest challenge surfaced only last year. It came from two British psychologists, Peter Halligan and David Oakley, in an article entitled "The Greatest Myth of All" (New Scientist, 18 November 2000, pp 34-39). They described a process by which all human decisions are negotiated and finalised at an unconscious level of the brain. These decisions are then relayed to the conscious regions of the brain where they are attractively packaged for private and public consumption. According to Halligan and Oakley: 'In the process of outing, any thoughts, ideas, beliefs, perceptions and acts become "yours" and are automatically linked to the idea of free will.' Yet consciousness awareness of those decisions clearly occurs far too late to have any effect on the outcome.

Faced with mounting laboratory evidence for this, Halligan and Oakley proposed that the brain's workshop and its central executive are both housed in the older structures in the unconscious basement of the brain. Here sensory data is assembled and each decision is negotiated. Those decisions are then transmitted to the highly self-conscious marketing division on the top floor where the copy-writing department, known as Broca's area, turns them into saleable items. Here, they are gift-wrapped in attractive explanatory text and released for consumption, both private and public.

One of the more convincing pieces of evidence in support of this hypothesis is the 'delayed solution' syndrome in which we are frequently able to solve the most difficult problems either unconsciously or while asleep. Similarly, a fully hypnotised brain can be rendered deaf, blind, or unaware of pain at a conscious level, yet remain able to respond appropriately to various verbal or sensory stimuli at an unconscious level. In other words, you can turn off the lights in the marketing division upstairs, but it's business as usual in the basement, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

There is also a curious time discrepancy between the application of an external stimulus and our awareness of it. As Halligan and Oakley suspected, they found virtually no delay between a stimulus and the first sign of a neuronal response in the unconscious core of the brain. Yet subjects consistently failed to become consciously aware of the stimulus until a significant portion of their cortical circuitry crackled into life some 500 milliseconds later.

Our illusion of free will is maintained by the conscious brain's extraordinary capacity for 'creative editing'. We see, hear and feel roughly what we expect—or want—to see, hear and feel. This makes reason and logic thoroughly malleable attributes, and means that all our decisions are 'justifiable' at the time. Memory too, contributes mightily to our delusions, being even more malleable and untrustworthy than our least rational perceptions. A growing list of laboratory experiments, and the conflicting evidence of countless 'eye-witnesses' testifies to this fact on a daily basis in law courts all around the world .

To summarise, we are not the rational creatures we fondly imagine ourselves to be. All our decisions are taken behind the locked doors of our unconscious and are routinely negotiated by the same old genes that have helped to govern humankind for a million years or more. And this means that our perception of free will is merely a propaganda device concocted by the publicity department in the flashy cortical penthouse on the brain's top floor. If this were not so, and if, during the past 200,000 years, our bulging rational cortex had indeed snatched the behavioural reins from our genes—as is commonly supposed—then it would have amounted to a coup d'etat by evolutionary amateurs, and that, I believe, would have set us on the fast lane to extinction long before now.

Fortunately however, our genes merely enlarged the brain's PR department and commissioned it to conceal the fact that the old board of directors was still holding court in the basement. This guaranteed that we would remain free from the leaden handicap of rational thought when it came to matters of evolutionary consequence, such as mating, striving for tribal status, and risking our lives for family, tribe or territory in time of threat. Evidence for this ancient primate behaviour is scattered liberally throughout our lives. Whenever the chips are down, emotion steps in to disable the rational cortex so that the iron-fisted directors in the basement can get on with the real business of life, genetic survival via reproduction.

In an attempt to deny the genetic origins of behaviour, it is commonly argued that we overrule our genes on a daily basis. Contraception is usually cited as conclusive proof, since it appears to deny fulfilment of the most basic genetic imperative of all.

Unfortunately, such argument is founded on a flawed and simplistic view of the nature of genes. It hinges on the common belief that particular genes 'code for' particular behaviour. If this is so, the argument runs, then human behaviour cannot be genetic because we do not possess enough genes to account for its astonishing range. In fact of course, genes do not 'code for' behaviour at all; they merely prescribe proteins that become incorporated in neurotransmitters, hormones, enzymes and other cell products. Behaviour is an emergent property that arises from the chaotic (in its Lorenzean sense) interaction of the effects produced by these cell products. And given the size of the human genome (currently believed to contain approximately 30,000 genes), a chaotically determined process must inevitably afford us vastly greater complexity and flexibility in our behaviour than even 300,000 genes could possibly achieve on a gene-for-behaviour basis. In view of this it is hardly surprising that our most primal urge is malleable to the extent of contraception. After all, contraceptives do not themselves prevent fulfilment of the primal drive to mate, they merely ease a variety of contingent fears.

So, where does that leave memes then? Are they indeed new and mysterious evolutionary agents that are able to invade and manipulate us like the good and evil spirits of old? Or are they merely genetic ploys that happen to resonate particularly well with other members of our gene pool. Since 'memes', by definition, produce behaviour that is tribal, and therefore genetically productive, then Okkams razor demands that we accept the simpler explanation: 'memes' are genetic baits, cultural 'lollies' if you like, that are greedily snapped up by related genes. In other words, the young warrior who wears his baseball cap backwards has not been infected by a 'meme', he is merely flying the twin flags of exclusive tribal membership and fearless non-conformity, the flags that ambitious youngsters have always flown to advertise their leadership potential and genetic desirability.

Similarly, if a belief in memes appears to offer membership of a new and esoteric tribal group, then philosophers, psychologists, and even geneticists will climb aboard in droves. And when the unconventional becomes conventional, a fresh outlet for genetic display will be 'discovered'.

There is, however, an intriguing corollary to all this. It is evolutionarily essential that the genetic explanation for 'memes' be disbelieved by the vast majority of readers. Our genes 'need' us to believe that our behaviour has other drivers—gods, devils, parents, morality, even 'memes'—anything will do, provided it keeps us on the genetically productive path of human culture.

If, like Darwin, we became aware that our behaviour was 'as much a function of organ as bile of liver,' and aware that free will was just a genetically useful illusion, then the dynamos of mystical belief that drive all human endeavour would be starved of fuel, and our viability as a species would instantly decline.