The theory of memetics is in it’s infancy, it may blossom in to a full and useful theory explaining the evolution of cultural evolution in terms of a second, non-genetic replicator, or it may perish like many unsuccessful theories before it. Until then it will undoubtedly be criticized in many different ways; I’m going to focus on just one of these.
A meme is any behaviour, song, story, idea, any cultural thing that passes from one person to another. The idea of a meme is therefore a meme itself. Now memes compete with each other over a common resource, something I call “mind-time”. Successful memes are those that manage to grab the attention of their hosts (us) and cause them to perform a behaviour that will likely result in someone else picking up that meme. For example a funny story is more likely to be remembered and re-told than a boring story. Now, this raises an interesting point, the truthfulness of the story is irrelevant, there’s no reason to suppose that a boring but truthful story is more likely to be passed on than a funny but untruthful story, in fact quite the opposite, it’s quite likely that the funny but untruthful story will do better in many cases. So, if the theory of memes is itself a meme, then it’s truth value is not important, ergo the theory of memes is not dependent on truth but on how successful it is at replicating.
This is a bizzare argument because this applies to every scientific theory that has ever been proposed. Memetics is a meme which exists in the selective environment which is science. It’s ability to replicate – it’s fitness – is based on it’s ability to explain phenomena, generate predictions and refute criticism. It it fails to do this scientists will drop the theory and it will cease to replicate. The scientific environment in which memetics finds itself ensures that it will only succeed if it contains some truth. The interesting question then becomes, where did this environment come from? Is the scientific method a meme, and if so why did it succeed over other memes?
