Meme

Meme is the proposed name for a cultural replicator: a unit of imitation that spreads between minds and undergoes its own form of evolution. The concept extends the book’s gene-centered account of replication into human culture, where ideas and practices reproduce through people, records, and media. Its force lies in the analogy—and in its limits: memes can be described as if they seek survival, but that language is metaphorical, not a claim that they possess intention.

Naming a cultural replicator

The chapter presents culture as a new replicator’s “soup.” Cultural transmission can preserve material while also changing it, and language offers a familiar example of evolution proceeding by non-genetic means, far faster than genetic change. The chapter also points to the saddleback, a bird living on islands off New Zealand, where young males acquire songs by imitating territorial neighbors rather than inheriting them genetically. A song repertoire forms a shared pool; occasional errors in imitation introduce new forms that can remain stable and pass to younger singers. This example makes cultural transmission visible outside humanity, though the chapter treats human culture as its more consequential instance.

To name a unit of that transmission, the chapter adapts the Greek-rooted “mimeme” to the shorter word “meme,” chosen to echo “gene”; it also associates the term with memory and specifies that it rhymes with “cream.” The examples range from tunes, ideas, and catch-phrases to clothing fashions and ways of making pots or building arches. The name gathers diverse cultural forms under one question: how do they get copied, persist, and spread?

Transmission and selection

Genes pass through bodies via sperm or eggs; memes, by analogy, pass through brains through imitation. A scientist who encounters an idea may circulate it among colleagues and students, then reproduce it in articles and lectures. If it catches on, its propagation can be traced from mind to mind. The analogy makes communication, rather than biological reproduction, the meme’s route of copying.

Not every replicating meme spreads equally. The chapter compares their differential success to natural selection and identifies longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity as relevant qualities. The survival of one copy may matter less than the continued existence of many copies: a person’s memory of “Auld Lang Syne” lasts only for a lifetime, and a printed copy in a songbook may not last much longer, yet versions of the tune may persist in minds and on paper for centuries. Fecundity is therefore especially important. The spread of a scientific idea could be approximated by how often journals refer to it across successive years; a popular tune by the number of people heard whistling it; and a shoe fashion by sales figures. Some songs and stiletto heels spread quickly but fade, whereas Jewish religious laws can persist for thousands of years, aided by written records.

Copying fidelity is less straightforward. An idea can change as it is passed on: the chapter’s account of R. L. Trivers’s ideas, for instance, describes them as reworked, blended with other ideas, and transmitted in altered form. This seems unlike the particulate transmission of genes and suggests continuous mutation or blending. Yet the chapter argues that recognizable shared content can still count as a meme. People who understand Charles Darwin’s theory need not hold identical versions of Darwin’s words; what they share is an essential basis of the idea. If a theory’s components are accepted separately, they can be treated as separate memes; components that usually travel together may be grouped as one.

Competition for minds and media

Memes have no direct equivalent of genes’ paired chromosomes and alleles, so their competition is not a contest for the same chromosomal slot. Instead, they compete for scarce resources. A brain, like a computer, has limited time and storage; it can attend to only one or a few things at once. A meme that occupies attention does so at the expense of rivals. Radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper columns, and library shelves also limit which ideas can circulate and remain accessible.

The chapter extends the comparison from competition to cooperation. Genes can form co-adapted complexes, and the chapter asks whether memes can likewise form mutually supporting sets. An organized church—with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition—is offered as a possible stable complex of associated memes. The threat of hell fire illustrates how one doctrine may reinforce observance: fear of torment after death can exert a powerful psychological effect. The chapter does not attribute this success to a deliberately engineered priestly plan; rather, it suggests that such a meme can persist because of its effects, without its cultural transmission requiring a conscious designer.

Agency as metaphor

The chapter warns against confusing the language of agency with literal purpose. Genes are not conscious agents trying to increase their numbers; saying that they do so is shorthand for the observation that variants whose effects increase their representation tend to become more common. The same caution applies to memes. Calling a meme selfish or ruthless can be a fruitful way to describe its spread, but does not make it a mind with intentions.

This distinction connects the meme concept to the book’s broader argument about replication. Gene-selected evolution produced brains, providing the setting in which memes could arise; once memes could copy themselves, cultural evolution could proceed at a pace that leaves genetic evolution far behind. The chapter presents that newer process as not necessarily subordinate to the older one. It also places memes within the wider claim that genes can influence outcomes beyond the bodies that carry them: genes favored for manipulating another organism can have extended phenotypic effects on the manipulated body. The parallel is structural, not a claim that memes are genes: in each case, replication is understood through the consequences that promote further copying, rather than through conscious purpose.