Memes and Analogies

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here.

Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas.

Given "Surfaces and Essences" (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior that genes have but "memes" actually don't? Does it lead us closer to understanding the essence of what an idea is?

Such questions lead us to suspect that we can do without the "meme" analogy.

How are genes and memes different?

• Genes are discreet entities, encoded in actual physical sequences of DNA. Memes are fuzzy and seem to be defined only in the mind of the speaker. What, exactly, is the "meme" of God?
• Genes survive (according do Dawkins) by means of competition. What accounts for the "survival" of memes? S&E would say that any idea survives because it is an apt, more or less essential "name" for a common situation. We don't know exactly how the brain decides that a particular name is appropriate, but it's fast and automatic. "Survival" doesn't seem to come into it. "Competition" for the appropriate word or phrase takes place in the brain all the time and we tend to come up with the best one available, but this doesn't imply that we forget the alternatives. The "winner" pops up where it fits.
• Genes are communicated from generation to generation. Analogies are communicated because the speaker and listener share a common understanding of the situation -- usually experiences or concepts that are "like" one another. How humans decide that one situation is "like" another is mysterious and astonishing. There is no evident similarity to "communication" in the sense of some "thing" being handed from one person to another.

The most serious problem with the "meme" analogy is that it leads us to think about ideas at the wrong level of culture. "Memes" and the analogies studied in "Surfaces" "infect" the shared language of a culture and only indirectly the thought processes of an individual. A child starts to use the word "God" without any idea of the vast baggage and extensive mythology ("memeplex") that comes along with that single word. The "meaning" of the word is "out there" in the culture, to be discovered and gradually assimilated (or not) as the child learns (or fails to learn) to think for himself.

Bottom line: the "meme" is a special case of an analogy, which is a special case of pattern recognition. It's not a very good analogy and it's been made worse by common use that divorces it from its roots (it's now just a pretentious way to say "idea").

If we are to persist in using the word "meme', we need to drop the original analogy of the meme "infecting" our brains and taking over evolution. A "meme", if it is anything at all, is a powerful and commonly-understood idea shared by a culture or a language. Memes grow and evolve as a shared project of a culture as the language itself evolves and grows. This includes the constant elaboration of important myths that underlie the culture, along with the bottomless enthusiasm we all have for a good story.

One of the things that career atheists miss about religion is the way it "morphs" rapidly in response to our shared talent for improving on a good story. There is no inherent reason why our stories should compete with each other or be somehow logically consistent. When we use the word "meme", we conjure up a rather static picture (like a virus). In fact, "memes" are dynamic creatures, never the same at any one time, any one culture or in any one mind.