Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Memes, cultural recipes, similarly depend on one physical medium or another for their continued existence (they aren’t magic), but they can leap around from medium to medium, being translated from language to language, from language to diagram, from diagram to rehearsed practice, and so forth. A recipe for chocolate cake, whether written in English in ink on paper, or spoken in Italian on videotape, or stored in a diagrammatic data structure on a computer’s hard disk, can be preserved, transmitted, translated, and copied. Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the likelihood of a recipe getting any of its physical copies replicated depends (mainly) on how successful the cake is. How successful the cake is at doing what? At getting a host to make another cake? Usually, but even more important is getting the host to make another copy of the recipe and passing it on. That’s all that matters, in the end. The cake may not enhance the fitness of those who eat it; it may even poison them, but if it first somehow provokes them to pass on the recipe, the meme will flourish.

This is perhaps the most important innovation in outlook permitted by recasting investigations in terms of memes: they have their own fitness as replicators, independently of any contribution they may or may not make to the genetic fitness of their hosts, the human vectors. Dawkins (1976) put it this way: “What we have not previously considered is that the cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself” (p. 200 of rev. ed.). The anthropologist F. T. Cloak (1975) put it this way: “The survival value of a cultural instruction is the same as its function; it is its value for the survival/replication of itself or its replica.”

Those who question whether “memes exist” because they cannot see what material thing a meme could be should ask themselves if they are equally dubious about whether words exist. What is the word “cat” made of? Words are recognizable, reidentifiable products of human activity; they come in many media, and can leap from substrate to substrate in the process of being replicated. Their standing as real things is not in the slightest impugned by their abstractness. In the proposed taxonomy, words are but one species of memes, and the other species of memes are the same kind of things that words are—you just can’t pronounce or spell them. Some of them you can dance, and some of them you can sing, or play, and others you can follow by making something out of the various building materials the world provides. The word “cat” isn’t made out of some of the ink on this page, and a recipe for chocolate cake isn’t made of flour and chocolate.