Daniel Dennett: Memes 101 | How Cultural Evolution Works | Big Think

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and what he proposed was that human culture was composed at least in part of elements, units that were like genes in that they were copied and copied and copied and copied and copied. It was the differential copying, the differential replication of these items, these memes, that accounted for the excellent design of so much in human culture.

This was a very repugnant and offensive idea to many people, especially in the humanities. They wanted to hang on to the idea of the Godlike genius Creator, who out of sheer conscious brilliant comprehension makes all these wonderful things, whether they're poems or bridges or whatever. He was saying, in effect, well yes, people do make amazing things, but if you look at the projects in detail, you see that they couldn't do that if they hadn't filled their head with all these informational things, which are like genes, which are also information.

But they're not passed down through the germ line. They're not passed down through the sperm and the egg. You don't get them with your genes; you get them from the ambient culture, from your parents, from your peers, from the society in which you're raised. It requires perception.

A lot of people think, wait a minute, there's a huge disanalogy here—genes or DNA. What's the DNA of memes? The first thing you have to appreciate is that no, genes aren't DNA. Genes are the information carried by the DNA. Genes are no more DNA than poems are made of ink. I mean, you can send somebody a poem that's written in ink, or you can say it aloud. There are many different ways of transmitting that poem or saving that poem from one place to another.

The same thing is true of genes. Once you get used to thinking of genes as not DNA but as the information carried by the patterns of the nucleotides in DNA, then you can see that there really is a nice parallel.

So then, what's playing the role of DNA in the land of culture? What are the physical implementations? Well, they're wonderfully various. There is ink on paper, there are lines carved into stones, there are lines drawn in the sand, there's skywriting, and of course there's what we're doing right now—there's audible language.

One of the great features of language, not sufficiently appreciated by those who aren't linguists, is that what makes language a potent medium for the transmission of information is that it's digitized in the same way that DNA is digitized. It's composed of fundamental elements: in the case of DNA, it's A, C, G, T for different nucleotides; in the case of language, it's 20 to 30 phones. We are designed to pick up the phones of our native language and then automatically to categorize incoming utterances by correcting them to the norm of whatever the phones in our language are.

It doesn't matter whether I say dog, or dog, or dog, or dog, or dog—all comes out as "dog." It doesn't take any effort to recognize that these are all tokens of the same type. That's digitization, and that's what makes it possible to transmit information from one person to another to another. The person in the middle doesn't have to understand what it means; all they have to do is copy the sequence of phones, and the message will get through.

It looks as if we're pretty stupid—we're just walking, breathing vectors that are carrying all these memes around in our heads, sort of like having a cold, you know, like viruses. And they are like viruses. The first memes were even more like viruses because they weren't particularly useful. They were just habits that were catchy in one way or another, and they spread or not. They didn't have to do any good; they just had to be not too harmful, and they kept as long as their vectors stayed alive.

If they spread them, then they could thrive—just like the cold virus. The cold virus isn't for anything except for making more copies of the cold virus. Early memes were just like that. But eventually, competition for utility arose. Now memes, whether they were words or other ways of doing things that actually were of benefit, would spread differentially because they were better ways of doing things that could be not even recognized.

It's just that those who adopted them fared better than those who didn't. Before you know it, you have competitive differential replication of cultural items, and that's what does all the heavy lifting of design work in getting culture—human culture—off the ground.

It's only very recently that we've had people who style themselves as meme creators, as designers of memes. Think about coined words. You have a vocabulary of 50, 60, 70 thousand words—very few of them were deliberately coined by anybody, yet they're all useful, and they are all robust enough to survive until they go extinct. Words go extinct all the time, and so it is with culture much more generally.

It's composed of elements which have histories; they have lineages. They can combine in ways that genes normally don't, but can. The result is this tremendous creative stew of differential replication, creating ideas that people latch on to and benefit from without having to understand why they're good or how they're good, and they never would have invented them themselves. That is a brilliant piece of engineering, and nobody invented it.