Memes, Replication, and Application

While Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine) seem to think that meme replication through imitation and variation is a sufficient condition for cultural evolution to take place, the process is in fact much more complex than that.

Cultural evolution takes place largely through the application of memes rather than through mere replication of them. The process involves a self-conscious mind deliberately selecting a meme and applying it in a way that it has never been applied before. If mere replication is the goal, then not much cultural evolution will take place. An idea, custom, or practice will become more and more prevalent quantitatively, but no significant qualitative change will take place in the given culture. Errors in replication of the meme will not be sufficient to push the culture over the threshold of stasis. Stasis is the default value, but stasis is not of much use in evolution—cultural or otherwise. Innovation is what drives cultural evolution, and innovation is achieved by applying already existing memes to new situations such that new memes emerge. So-called “paradigm shifts” cannot occur merely by replication. Rather, they are generated by what might be termed “transapplication” (the application of a meme outside the sphere of its origin)—and transapplication goes well beyond mere variation through errors in imitation, as conceived in Dawkins’s and Blackmore’s scheme.

For example, early on in human history, our ancestors took the “self-preservation” meme from the biological realm and applied it to non-biological entities, especially corporate entities such as the tribe or nation, a given religion, or some other social institution. The application of the “self-preservation” meme to the tribe or nation gave rise to the “war” meme and that in turn gave rise to an entire panoply of weapons of war, each a meme in its own right. None of this could have been achieved through mere replication and the hope that errors would accidentally creep in in the process of imitation.

The use of fire for cooking is another example of a meme being applied outside of its original sphere. Whether the discovery that fire could make animal flesh (and some plants) more digestible to humans was accidental or deliberate, the conscious registering of this possibility in the minds of early humans almost certainly involved a “transapplication” operation. In other words, even if an early human had accidentally come upon the carcass of an animal that had died in a forest fire and had sampled some of its flesh and found it to be eminently palatable, the idea that he or she could replicate this effect had to have involved the notion of applying fire to a new purpose. (It is assumed here that the original “purpose” of fire, as a meme in human culture, was either the protection of humans against attacks by wild animals or the securing of warmth in cold climates.)

The very notion of application is itself a meme, and it is underpinned by yet another meme: the “metaphor” (or “analogy”) meme. While we are accustomed to thinking of metaphors as something poetic or, more broadly, literary (something abstract, existing only in the mind), the reality is that the vast majority of our behaviour is metaphorical or has its origins in metaphor (or analogy). Hunting is a "metaphor" for gathering; it is the "gathering" of animals rather than of plants. And, from a memetic point of view, it is fair to say that the hunting meme resulted from the transapplication of the “gathering” meme from the realm of plants to the realm of animals. This “leap” from one realm to the other is at its root identical to the leap that takes place in metaphorical thinking, where one routinely leaps across the boundary between one category of things and another. It is the sort of mental process that Edward de Bono called “lateral thinking.”

Darwin’s discovery of the process of natural selection came as a result of precisely this kind of metaphorical (or analogical, or lateral) thought process and the transapplication that it generates. In an intuitive leap worthy of a Shakespeare or a Milton, he applied the theories of Malthus, Adam Smith, and Charles Lyell from the fields of population dynamics, economics, and geology respectively, to the field of biology. The meme that resulted generated possibly the greatest “paradigm shift” in modern history. The feat that Darwin accomplished owed virtually nothing to mere replication by imitation and variation, and a great deal to deliberate transapplication of existing memes to new areas of human interest.