Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Exacerbating these problems are other problems of meme individuation. Should the (English) word “windsurfing” be seen as distinct from the (language-neutral) windsurfing meme? Are these two memes or one? Do styles, such as punk and grunge, count as memes before they have names? Why not? Joining forces with a name-meme is no doubt an excellent fitness advantage for almost any meme. (An exception could be a meme that depends on spreading insidiously; the coining of a name-meme, such as male chauvinism, may actually hinder the spread of male chauvinism by sensitizing something like an immune reaction in potential vectors.) It is probably true that as soon as any human meme becomes salient enough in the environment to be discerned, it will thereupon be named by one of its discerners, tightly linking the two memes thereafter: the name and the named, which typically have a shared fate, but not always. (The musical characteristics identifiable as the blues include many robust instances that are not called the blues by those who play and listen to them.) Undiscerned memes can also flourish. For instance, changes in the pronunciation or meaning of a word can move to fixation in a large community before any sharp-eared linguist or other cultural observer takes note. There are more than a few people—comedians as well as anthropologists and other social scientists—who earn their living detecting and commenting on evolving trends in cultural patterns that have heretofore been at best dimly appreciated.

Until these and other problems of initial theoretical orientation are resolved, skepticism about memes will continue to be widespread and heartfelt. Many commentators are deeply opposed to any proposals to recast questions in the social sciences and humanities in terms of cultural evolution, and this opposition is often expressed in terms of a challenge to prove that “memes exist”:

Genes exist [these critics grant] but what are memes? What are they made of? Genes are made of DNA. Are memes made of neuron-patterns in the brains of enculturated people? What is the material substrate for memes?

There are some proponents of memes who have argued in favor of an attempt to identify memes with specific brain structures—a project still entirely uncharted, of course. But on current understandings of how the brain might store cultural information, it is unlikely that any independently identifiable common brain structures, in different brains, could ever be isolated as the material substrate for a particular meme. While some genes for making eyes do turn out to be identifiable whether they occur in the genome of a fly, a fish, or an elephant, there is no good reason to anticipate that the memes for wearing bifocals might be similarly isolatable in neuronal patterns in brains. It is vanishingly unlikely, that is, that the brain of Benjamin Franklin, who invented bifocals, and the brains of those of us who wear them, should “spell” the idea of bifocals in a common brain-code. Besides, this imagined path to scientific respectability is based on a mistaken analogy. In his 1966 book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, the evolutionary theorist George Williams offered an influential definition of a gene as “any hereditary information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change,” and as he went on to stress in his 1992 book, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, “A gene is not a DNA molecule; it is the transcribable information coded by the molecule” (p. 11).

Genes, genetic recipes, are all written in the physical medium of DNA, using a single canonical language, the nucleotide alphabet of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine, triplets of which code for amino acids. Let every strand of smallpox DNA in the world be destroyed; if the smallpox genome is preserved (translated from nucleotides into the letters A, C, G, and T and stored on hard disks on computers, for instance), smallpox is not truly extinct; it could have descendants someday, because its genes still exist on those hard disks, as what Williams calls “packages of information” (1992, p. 13).