The Meme Machine (2000)

Book Review from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. Oxford University Paperback.

The concept of a “meme”—a word invented by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene to describe what might possibly be another, but non-biological, “replicator” (something that copies itself) like the gene—is a highly dubious one, especially when starting, as Blackmore does, from the same premise as Dawkins that “memes” are just as “selfish” as genes. All the same, its introduction into the debate on what governs human behaviour does undermine the views of the socio-biologists (who say that even our behaviour in society is governed by our genes) and of the evolutionary psychologists (who argue that we still have the psychology of hunter-gatherers that humans were when we first evolved). This is because a “meme” (which appears to be a fancy name for what used to be called an “idea”), as a unit of cultural as opposed to biological inheritance, allows culture as well as biology to be taken into account as an influence on human behaviour.

And not just behaviour but even the later stages of the biological evolution of homo sapiens. Engels, in his essay The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, had already suggested that the hominid capacity to make and use tools would have had an effect on the biological evolution of humans. Blackmore makes the same point in relation to language. Once language began to be used by early forms of homo, whether in tool-making and using or to express complex social relationships, it would have led, through the normal operation of natural selection, to the evolution of a bigger and bigger brain capacity. In other words, the later stages of the biological evolution of our species were not driven purely by biological factors but by the interaction of these with non-biological, cultural factors.

Once this is admitted, as Blackmore rightly insists it should be, it is no longer possible to talk in terms of our physical anatomy, let alone our behaviour in society, being shaped entirely by the action of so-called “selfish genes”. In fact, it rather undermines the theory of the selfish gene, which should rather be replaced by that of the stupid gene, since, in evolving homo, genetic evolution led to a life-form that was capable of affecting genetic evolution and has ultimately led to the evolution of another life-form (us) which is not only capable of using non-biological criteria for choosing a mate (and does) but also of manipulating genes through genetic engineering. A rather counter-productive end-result of evolution supposedly driven by genes whose only concern is supposed to be their own survival.

Not that this Blackmore’s view. Far from it. She’s a great admirer of Dawkins (who writes the Foreword to her book) and her aim is to supplement his theory of the so-called selfish gene with that of the “selfish meme”. We are, she says, the puppets not just of our selfish genes as socio-biologists claim but also of our selfish memes which in fact have taken over from our genes:

 “The pace of memetic evolution is now so fast, relative to that of human genetic evolution, that we can safely ignore the latter for most purposes. The genes cannot keep up” (p. 162).

Expressed more conventionally, what she is saying is that human evolution is now social and cultural and no longer biological. Our behaviour is not governed by our genes, but by our ideas. Blackmore believes that these ideas (which she calls memes) have an autonomous life of their own (apparently they pushed humans to invent the internet so they could spread more), but in fact our ideas reflect our material conditions and it is changes in these material conditions that lead to changes in our ideas.

Socialists will find the underlying idealism of The Meme Machine annoying, and will disagree even more with the Buddhist conclusion that we should just lie back and let things take their course as nothing is that important, but it is interesting that the milieu of socio-biology should have produced a writer who undermines their views. If they won’t take it from us perhaps they’ll take it from her that human behaviour is socially determined.

Adam Buick