EVOLUTION BY IMITATION

Abstract

Meme theory confronts us with a rather unflattering image of ourselves. In Daniel C. Dennett's words, conscious selves are nothing but the ‘vehicles’ or ‘nests’ of the true heroes of the evolutionary story of culture, the memes. In the memetic view, cultural evolution is not about ‘us’, but about ‘them’: the units of culture such as the ones mentioned by Richard Dawkms: “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”. In this paper, I shall take a critical look at some premises of this memetic ‘shift of perspective’, which turn out to be highly problematic. In a first step, the memetic image of the self as a ‘meme nest’ shall be traced back to its neo-Darwinian origins. Meme theory is built directly on the model of genetic evolution (I). As some considerations concerning the ontology of memes shall reveal, there are fundamental differences between genes and memes which cannot be accounted for within the memetic view (II). In a third step, Gabriel Tarde's idea of ‘evolution by association’ shall be introduced as a convincing alternative to the memetic idea of cultural evolution. Writing almost a century before the term ‘meme’ was even coined, Tarde put forth a theory, which already contained much of the insights that make memetics attractive to the social sciences. More than that, Tarde was safe from the fatal memetic tendency to model cultural evolution too closely on genetic evolution (III). In the concluding section (TV), I shall come back to the initial question concerning the place of the self in society: what is our role in cultural evolution in a Tardean view?