The meme metaphor.

Abstract

In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, arguing that natural selection must be understood from the perspective of the genes because they alone—not individuals, not groups, not species—are the replicators on which selection ultimately acts. He also stressed that the concept of the replicator, not the gene per se, is the key to this understanding: “The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others” [1]. In his concluding chapter, Dawkins speculated that human culture might actually be hiding another such replicator, which he dubbed the “meme,” a neologism combining memory and mimetic with gene to suggest “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” [1] Dawkins was by no means the first or last theorist to speculate about an entity akin to a social gene [2]. However, his coinage has proved the catchiest, and the meme-gene analogy as he presented it is not only memorable, but ideologically appealing: on the one hand, it holds out the tantalizing prospect of an elegant, universal theory of cultural evolution; on the other, it evades genetic determinism by offering a parallel cultural process with interests of its own. The meme provides a second replicator, which, though as “selfish” as any replicator, is at least independent of the interests of our selfish genes. As a “just-so story,” it comforts us: “So that’s why we’re different from the other animals. So that’s why we feel like we exercise a measure of precarious control over our bodies. So that’s why we do such counterproductive things and feel so ill-at-ease in our own skins. We’re the product of a conflict of interest between our memes and our genes.” Still, the concept of the meme didn’t really blossom until the 1990s. Its championing by cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett in a pair of books (1991’s Consciousness Explained and 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), cou-