The Case for Memetics
Everyone hates it, but it has to be true
For my mid-week post this week, I’d like to share an excerpt from an interview I did with Pablo Malo about my book The Ape That Understood the Universe. In the excerpt, I outline the memetics approach to cultural evolution, and the position I argue for in the book - namely that memetics offers an overarching theory of cultural evolution that embraces the other available theories but also goes beyond them. As you’ll see, while I have serious misgivings about memetics, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there must be something to it.
Pablo Malo: “It has been a surprise seeing you talking about memes and defending this approach to cultural evolution (I’m a big fan too). There was a boom a while ago about Dawkins’ idea with Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and others – but as you mention, The Journal of Memetics disappeared, and it seems that no scientist has been able to do science with the meme idea. Do you think that memetics can fly?”
Steve Stewart-Williams: Not sure! The material on memes is a lot more speculative than the material on evolutionary psychology, where I largely tried to stick to the best-established theories and findings. And I have mixed feelings about the prospects for a science of memetics.
As many readers no doubt know, memetics is the brainchild of the biologist Richard Dawkins. A meme, on Dawkins’ view, is a unit of culture: an idea, a behavior, a tool – anything that can be passed on via social learning. The key idea in memetics is that memes, like genes, are subject to natural selection, and that the memes most likely to survive are not necessarily those that are good for us or our groups, but those that are good for themselves.
What does it mean to say that a meme is good for itself? It means that it has properties that in some way or another help it survive in our minds and in our cultures: They’re memorable; they’re catchy; they’re fun to share with our friends. Memes may also be good for us - that’s one way they can increase their chances of surviving. But they’re not necessarily good for us. Sometimes they survive despite being bad for us, just because they’re good at surviving. Think smoking and junk food.
On the one hand, there’s a sense in which this almost has to be true: The memes that survive have to be those that have properties that somehow increase their chances of surviving, at least as a general rule (sometimes they might just get lucky). On the other hand, I do worry that if a statement is true but doesn’t lead to any empirical research, then perhaps it’s a trivial or overly general truth – almost a definitional truth – rather than a useful claim with enough specificity to do any serious scientific work.
But is it actually the case that the memetic perspective hasn’t led to any empirical research? I don’t think it is. It certainly hasn’t led to much, but it has led to some. For example, a very interesting 2019 paper by Steije Hofhuis and Maarten Boudry, recently expanded into a book by Hofhuis, looked at witch hunts in early modern Europe, and made a persuasive case that the “witch-hunt meme” propagated purely because it was good at propagating, rather than because it was good for us in any sense.
That’s the claim that distinguishes memetics from other approaches, which tend to focus on how elements of culture benefit individuals or their groups. Perhaps 95% of cultural evolutionary science can be conducted without mentioning the good-for-the-meme claim, because 95% of the time our interests coincide with the “interests” of our memes: What’s good for them is also good for us. Once in a while, though, there’ll be examples like witch hunts where this isn’t the case, and we’ll need to invoke the idea that the ultimate criterion for meme survival is that they’re good for themselves, not for us.
If that’s right, then the implication would be that the meme’s-eye view is the better theory, as it explains not only the 95% that the other theories can explain as well, but also the last 5% that they can’t. Time will tell!
You can read the whole interview here.
You can read more about my approach to memetics in The Ape That Understood the Universe.
Addendum
After publishing this piece, my colleague Quinton Temby emailed me the following observation:
On memes, isn’t the entire approach [to cultural evolution] led by Boyd, Richerson, Feldman, [and] Cavalli-Sforza basically a population memetics approach, but using the term “cultural variant” instead? Sometimes Richerson and Boyd use it interchangeably with meme…
So the stealth memetics research program is very productive!
It’s a great point - and “stealth memetics” is a great phrase!
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Steve
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You're really taking off in 2025 - Steve ;-)! Kudos for all the work you put into your Substack while writing your book!
I've occasionally been intrigued by memetics, but I don't think it's a scientifically testable theory. Hofhuis and Boudry's article on witch hunts doesn't change my mind. They conclude that witch hunts had no intelligent designer. Even if that's true, and I'm skeptical, how does it establish that memes themselves have interests that are different from those of the humans that the memes inhabit? How could one test whether any cultural phenomenon reflects the interests of human beings or the interests of autonomous memes? What empirical observation could disprove the memetic theory?