What Makes Us Human? Edited by Charles Pasternak. Published by Oneworld Publications. Trade Paperback. Table of Contents Rave and Reviews. About The Book. Product Details. Raves and Reviews. Mass Market Recommendation — Publishing News. The argument, briefly, is this. All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied with variation and selection. Most living things on earth are the product of evolution based on the copying, varying and selection of genes. However, once humans began to imitate they provided a new kind of copying and so let loose an evolutionary process based on the copying, varying and selection of memes.
This new evolutionary system co-evolved with the old to turn us into more than gene machines. We, alone on this planet, are also meme machines. We are selective imitation devices in an evolutionary arms race with a new replicator. This is why we are so different from other creatures; this is why we alone have big brains, language and complex culture. There are many contentious issues here; the nature and status of memes, the validity of the concept of a replicator, the difference between this and other theories of gene-culture co-evolution, and whether memetics really is necessary, as I believe it is, to explain human nature.
I shall outline the basic principles of memetics, show how memes could have driven human evolution, and consider some of these questions along the way. The new replicator Fundamental to all evolutionary processes is that some kind of information is copied with variation and selection Campbell, As Darwin first pointed out, if you have creatures that vary, and if most of them die, and if the survivors pass on to their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must, on average, be better adapted to the environment in which that selection took place than their parents were.
It is the inevitability of this process that makes it such an elegant and beautiful explanation of the origins of biological design.
But it should not be confined to biology. Universal Darwinism Dawkins, ; Plotkin, is the idea that the same principles apply to any system which has the three requisites — variation, selection and heredity. With these in place you must get evolution. Arguably it is the only process that produces design for function.
Our most familiar replicator is the gene; a replicator that builds itself vehicles Dawkins, or interactors Hull, in the form of bodies that protect the genes and carry them around. Selection may take place at the level of the organism and possibly at other levels too but individual bodies die — it is the replicator that is copied reasonably intact through successive replications and is the ultimate beneficiary of the evolutionary process.
This is why replicators are called selfish. Genes are not selfish in the sense that they have human-like desires and intentions obviously not — they are just information in chemicals. Rather, they are selfish in the sense that they will be copied and proliferate if they can, without concern for the organism that carries them, or indeed for anything else, unless it affects their own likelihood of being copied.
In explaining Universal Darwinism, Dawkins wanted to get people out of the habit of thinking only about genes and so he provided a new example of a replicator. He argued that whenever people copy skills, habits or behaviours from one person to another by imitation, a new replicator is at work. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches Dawkins, , p.
So other examples include gestures and games, urban myths and financial institutions, scientific theories and complex technologies. It is important to note that not everything you know or think about is a meme. So the skills you learn by yourself and for yourself are not memes, nor are your memories of places you have seen or people you know, nor are emotions that cannot be accurately conveyed to anyone else. But every word in your vocabulary, every story or song that you know, and every idea you got from someone else is, and when you combine these to make new stories or inventions to pass on then you have created new memes.
Central to the idea of memes is that because they are replicators evolution will happen for the benefit of the memes themselves rather than for their carriers or for anything else. As Dennett emphasised, the ultimate beneficiary of any evolutionary process is whatever it is that is copied. Everything that happens, and all the adaptations that appear, are ultimately for the sake of the replicators.
This idea is what distinguishes memetics from related theories in sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and gene-culture co-evolution theory. Perhaps more surprisingly it is still largely true now. Wilson still argues that myths and social contracts evolved because of their benefit to genes rather than to themselves Wilson, , as does Durham The bottom line here is that for all these theories culture is an adaptation, created by and for genes.
But for memetics culture is not, and never was, an adaptation. Imitation was an adaptation, allowing individuals to learn from each other, but the memes it unintentionally let loose were not.
Culture did not arise for our sake, but for its own. It is more like a vast parasite growing and living and feeding on us than a tool of our creation. It is a parasite that we cope with — indeed we and our culture have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship. But it is a parasite nonetheless.
We try to select true ideas over false ones, 5 Imitation Makes Us Human and good over bad, but we do it imperfectly, and we leave all kinds of opportunities for other memes to get copied — using us as their copying machinery.
In other words, there is an evolutionary arms race between us and the memes that we find ourselves copying. There are many useless, false, or even harmful memes that survive very well. Simple examples are self-replicating viral sentences, chain letters and various kinds of email virus, such as those that make impossible threats and demand that you pass them on to warn your friends.
People infected with such a religion are exhorted to pass on their beliefs by converting others, bringing up lots of believing children, or punishing apostates.
Many religions use the altruism trick Blackmore, by which people are made to feel good by believing. This is particularly ironic since religious belief may be bad for societies. Evidence from comparing developed nations suggests that the more religious a country is, the higher are its rates of suicide, murder, teenage pregnancy, and abortion — precisely the things that most religions rail against Paul, Believers must also spend much time praying, singing or reading holy works, and must give money not just to the poor but to build more churches, mosques, or synagogues that will inspire further meme hosts.
Thus do memes make believers work for their propagation. This is understandable given the importance of maladaptive cultural traits but it is important to remember that memes range from the completely viral through to the indispensable, and everything in between. In fact viral memes may be in a minority, with most of our 6 What Makes Us Human?
These include our languages, the built environment, transport systems, communications technology and scientific theories. Without memes we could not speak, write, enjoy stories and songs, or do most of the things we associate with being human. Memes are the tools with which we think, and our minds and cultures are a mass of memes.
We can now take that big mental flip and see the world in a completely new way. Look out at the streets around you, the building you are in, or the cars passing by and now see them — all of them — as parts of a vast evolutionary system in which they are the winners in the competition to get copied and survive.
Why is that house the way it is? Because those windows, that door, that style of roof, and all the many details that make it what it is, have won in the competition to get an architect to draw them, a builder to construct them, or an owner to buy them.
Houses that people like fetch higher prices and so more like them get built. And so it goes on. Step back a bit and think about a whole city. It is a spreading mass of copied memes — housing estates expanding; roads, railways and bus routes growing; the whole thing gobbling up resources, using humans as the willing meme machines that do the work. Now step back a bit further and look at the whole planet. You might be looking down from an aeroplane at night, seeing those dense patches of lights, with curious streams of moving lights within them, or stretching out to other distant patches.
They look like living creatures, and according to memetics that is precisely what they are. They were built on the basis of memes rather than genes, but the same principles apply. Its power lies in its ability to unify all creative processes, both biological and cultural, within the same Darwinian framework. Yet after more than thirty years memetics is still not a thriving science.
There are many reasons for this. First, there are legitimate criticisms of memetics and many difficulties to be overcome Aunger, ; Distin, ; Jablonka and Lamb, Second, there are repeated misunderstandings which cause people to abandon memetic explanations, such as thinking that memes must always exist as units, thinking that memetic inheritance is Lamarckian and therefore 7 Imitation Makes Us Human cannot occur, or thinking of memes as some kind of entity that may or may not exist rather than as the actual songs, stories or whatever is copied Aunger, ; Midgley, ; Richerson and Boyd, Finally, some people seem to find memetics deeply unsettling in the way that it undermines free will, and the power of human creativity and consciousness Midgley, ; Donald, I shall return to this point but for now simply note that fear is not a good reason for rejecting any theory.
In my opinion memetics provides the best explanation of what makes us human. How we got our big brains One of the mysteries of human evolution is why our brains are so big. These outsize organs are expensive to build, dangerous to give birth to, and use a lot of energy to run, even during sleep.
So there needs to be a very good reason. Nearly all conventional theories start by assuming that the big brain was an adaptation i. Memetics provides a completely different argument: that the increase in brain size was driven by and for the memes, as they transformed an ordinary brain into a meme machine. I have called this process memetic drive Blackmore, , and suggested that it would naturally begin as soon as our hominid ancestors were capable of imitating with sufficiently high fidelity to create the first memes.
It does not matter what these were — possibly new ways of hunting, or lighting fires, or wearing clothes — but whatever they were they would change the environment in which human genes were being selected and give an advantage to individuals who could copy them. Imagine a group in which someone discovered a new trick and some individuals were capable of copying it while others were not. If the trick was useful then the imitators would fare better, not only acquiring more useful survival tricks but higher status as others tried to copy them.
They might also attract better mates and pass on genetically whatever it was that made them better imitators in the first place.
Since imitation is a difficult skill which is why most animals cannot do it , it is reasonable to assume that it requires a larger brain. The result would be that brain size would increase. As imitation ability in the population increased more memes would flourish putting more pressure on individuals to be able to copy them. This process could continue until it became too costly. Thus far the argument is not very different from many others.
It becomes different when we think of memes as a second replicator evolving in its own right. So the presence of memes has another effect.
I assumed that the first successful memes were useful ones that is useful to the people who carried them or to their genes but once imitation ability improved all sorts of memes would be copied, and people would have to choose what to copy and what not to copy. Seriously dangerous memes, like jumping off cliffs for fun or setting fire to yourself, would kill off their carriers and probably not get passed on although, like martyrdom, they might , but plenty of neutral or even slightly harmful memes might easily thrive, giving an advantage to people who could select effectively between memes.
This suggests the beginnings of an arms race between the two replicators, with genetic pressure to keep the brain small and best at copying biologically useful memes, and memetic pressure to produce a brain capable of copying as many memes as possible as accurately as possible. It is this competition that makes a memetic explanation for the increasing brain size so different from other explanations.
The resulting brain is not just larger but has been turned into a selective imitation device whose properties depend on the results of memetic competition. The difference becomes even more obvious when we consider not just the size of the brain but the things it is best at copying — such as language. The origins of language All other theories of the origins of language — and the question has been hotly debated for centuries — assume that language is an adaptation.
For memetics language is not an adaptation but a parasite turned symbiotic partner; an evolving system in its own right that fed off the humans who selected, remembered and copied sounds. Let us suppose that our hominid ancestors began imitating the sounds each other made, perhaps the sort of sounds that other primates make — food calls, mating calls, danger signals, and so on.
In a society where imitation was prized, the number of sounds being made would increase and soon people would have to choose which to copy. So which would be copied most? A general principle is that higher fidelity replicators do better. There is nothing magic about this rule. It simply means in this example that sounds that are more accurately copied will tend to survive unchanged for longer, and so increase in the meme pool. Once again, individuals capable of high fidelity imitation will gain higher status, attract more desirable mates and so pass on any genes responsible for their superior copying ability.
So fidelity of copying will generally increase. This example shows memetic drive at its clearest, and emphasises the difference between this and other theories. Because the sounds are a replicator in their right, dependent on their living copying machines, they will evolve into a more complex system with higher fidelity sounds as time goes by.
But according to the vagaries of circumstance they might evolve in different ways and — here is the critical point — according to which direction memetic evolution took, so genetic evolution would have to follow. If certain sounds became popular then brains would, over time, begin to get better at copying those kinds of sound.
In other words the brain would gradually be transformed into one that was designed to copy the very kinds of sounds that had evolved in the meme pool. In fact the redesign of the human larynx, throat and brain for language was quite dramatic and is one of the features that most distinguishes us from other apes.
According to memetics this redesign was driven by pressure from the memes. Of course language is more than just meaningless sounds; those sounds refer to things and people and actions.
This would come about as people copied the sounds that others made while they were looking at a particular object or doing a particular action, or watching someone else perform an action. If this all seems too speculative or far-fetched it is at least clearly testable. In fact very soon after that such robots were built. After many iterations of a copying game, not only did the robots begin to agree on certain sounds, but the space of possible vowel sounds became split into sounds they did and did not use, and words that referred to the things they were looking at emerged too.
Interestingly no observer could tell just what they were saying, but clearly the beginning of language was evolving from a very simple copying system. There have since been studies of the emergence of grammar and syntax in robots Steels et al.
It appears that the capacity for imitation really is something very special. Art, music and the lure of religion Language makes us unique, but there are many other curious aspects of human nature that require explanation.
Unlike other animals we seem to love music and singing, dance and theatre, painting and sculpture. Yet none of these provides an obvious survival advantage. He cites evidence that men are more artistic, and that women prefer to mate with creative men.
I have suggested that sexual selection plays a part in memetic drive, but the theories are otherwise quite different. By contrast, according to memetics, artistic creations are memes that compete with each other and evolve. Dennett gives the beginnings of a memetic 11 Imitation Makes Us Human explanation by imagining how music might have begun — a just-so story about the first infectious sounds.
One day one of our distant hominid ancestors sitting on a fallen log happened to start banging on with a stick — boom boom boom. For no good reason at all. This was just idle diddling Now introduce some other ancestors who happen to see and hear this drummer.
They might Dennett goes on to describe how drumming was copied and some drummings proved more infectious than others. He goes on to imagine that humming memes spread in the meme pool, the competition heated up, and hummings had to get more catchy, easier to hum, or more likely to gain attention, in order to get copied.
By this time everyone lived in a music-filled culture. The next step, which Dennett does not consider, is memetic drive. If drumming and humming became popular, and people who were good at them acquired status, then the pressures on hominid genes would change.
It would then pay to have a brain that was good at copying drumming and humming, when previously it did not. Any genes that contributed to that ability would be favoured and so, gradually, hominid brains would be redesigned. The co-evolutionary process could continue indefinitely. If this is how music evolved we can easily understand why modern humans have the sort of brains and ears and hands that help us enjoy making and listening to music.
We are like that, not because music serves any biological function, but because musical memes long ago infected our ancestors and forced their brains to be redesigned.
The same argument applies to any kind of art. So, for example, if techniques of cave painting or body decoration or singing evolved in competition with each other, then brains would be driven in the direction of getting better at copying the particular techniques that were successful. In other words, the direction taken by memetic evolution would drive the direction the genes had to take in building our bodies and brains.
Another related mystery is why we are so fond of religion and ritual. The answer could be that religious memes were highly successful 12 What Makes Us Human? If this is so it suggests a reason why, in spite of education and rational thought, and in spite of the harm done by religious war and oppression, it seems generally hard for people to live without religion.
This is really a general argument about the design of human nature. Whichever direction memetic evolution happened to take in the past, we humans would become better able to copy the memes that were successful — whether those were words, music, paintings, rituals or anything else. Our modern brains therefore carry the traces of all our past memetic evolution. Human creativity Creative design has always seemed to be somehow magical or special. The way it seems is that clever designs need something even cleverer to design them.
As he points out, you never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith or a pot making a potter. So it seems obvious that design requires a designer, and that the designer must be something cleverer than the design. We now know that there is no need for a designer in biological design: evolution works from the bottom up by the mindless power of natural selection. Turning to human thought and creativity, these too have been described as evolutionary processes James, ; Popper, , especially in the field of evolutionary epistemology Campbell, Yet the intuition remains strong that somewhere inside ourselves there must be a designer, a conscious mind which originates novel ideas and creative output.
Could we be wrong about this? I think so. Indeed I think it likely that all design works from the bottom up — human creativity included.
Memetics shows how. Think about all the memes that have bombarded you today, from the words on your cereal packet and the news on the breakfast radio, to the ideas you dealt with at work, the e-mails, the phone calls, the letters and faxes, your favourite TV programme or bedtime reading. All day long memes are 13 Imitation Makes Us Human competing to get into your head.
Those that succeed have some effect on your memory. They may be stored intact or twisted, but more importantly they get mixed up with all sorts of other memes.
A human mind is a veritable factory for new memes. Every word in your vocabulary is a meme and you routinely mix them up to produce unique new sentences, but so are all the more complex ideas you come across.
This is, indeed, a creative process. This is all that is happening as I write these words. All my ideas about evolution and memes have come from taking old ones and putting them together in new ways. It is certainly a creative process but not, I think, one that requires a conscious creator inside my head.
Or think of a painter or sculptor or potter who trains for years in techniques developed by others, practices for more years in putting paint to canvas or hands to clay, and then finds novel and exciting products emerging. In this context it is worth reflecting that artists are often surprised by their own creations. All this fits with the idea of human creativity as an evolutionary process working through human meme machines.
Self and consciousness Who then am I? One of the deepest mysteries of human nature is that we seem to be something like an inner conscious self who inhabits a body, rather than being the body. This has to be false. It has to be false because there is no room in the brain for an inner self; there is no central place where the self could sit and receive impressions or from where it could send out the instructions to its arms and legs and mouth.
Not only is there no place for a self, but there is no need for one. Although most people are dualists of one kind 14 What Makes Us Human? The interesting question then becomes — if dualism is false why are we so easily deluded? If there is no inner self why does it seem as though there is? Once again people have attempted biological explanations, for example arguing that it helps our survival to believe in a self who has to be protected.
This does not work for the simple reason that the mystery is not why we protect our own bodies — every animal does that with or without belief in a soul — but why we think we are so much more than our physical shell, why it seems as though we are something that controls that body with our own free will, and may even survive after it is dead.
Memetics provides a possible answer by asking whether it would benefit the memes to construct a false idea of self and free will. I think it could. Imagine a child growing up and learning to speak. Living life as a meme machine What makes us human? In the beginning it was imitation and the appearance of memes. Now it is the way we work as meme machines, living in the culture that the memes have used us to build. Is it depressing to think of ourselves this way — as machines created by the competition between genes and memes, and in turn creating more genes and memes?
We have got used to the idea that we need no God to explain the evolution of life, and that we humans are part of the natural world. Now we have to take a step further in the same direction and change yet again the way we think about 15 Imitation Makes Us Human ourselves, our consciousness and free will Blackmore, But this is precisely what makes it so exciting being human — that as meme machines we can, and must, reflect on our own nature. References Aunger, R.
Oxford, Oxford University Press. Aunger, R. New York, The Free Press. Blackmore, S. Cybernetics and Systems, 32, — Hurley and N. John Brockman ed. Campbell, D. Psychological Review, 67, — Chalmers, D. Christiansen, M. Csikszentmihalyi, M. London, Murray. Dawkins, R. Oxford, Oxford University Press new edition with additional material, Dahlbohm ed. Dennett and his Critics: Demystifying Mind. Oxford, Blackwell. Deacon, T. London, Penguin.
Dennett, D. Boston, Little, Brown. Charles Simonyi Lecture, Oxford, February 17, Distin, K. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Donald, M. New York, Norton. Dunbar, R. Durham, W. Hull, D. Plotkin ed. The Role of Behaviour in Evolution. Jablonka, E. James, W. London, MacMillan. Lumsden, C. Midgley, M. Rose and S. Rose eds. Alas, Poor Darwin. London, Cape, 67— Miller, G. London, Heinemann. Paul, G. Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 1— Pinker, S.
Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin. Plotkin, H. Popper, K. Richerson, P. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Steels, L. Volume eds. Schoenauer, et al. Berlin, Springer-Verlag. Wray, et al. Wilson, E. New York, Knopf. Corballis and Thomas Suddendorf Introduction Natural selection is inevitably oriented toward the future.
Many of the characteristics that are selected have to do with the ways in which animals behave — how they feed, fight, flee, and mate, or how they construct niches for successful living.
If one animal, say a warthog, spends time digging a burrow whereas another does not bother, the first has a safe haven for the future survival of a lion attack and the second does not.
Behaviour itself is complex, and selected at many different levels. The way ants behave, for example, is rather different from the way an African lion disports itself on the savanna, or the way people behave on the New York Stock Exchange — although there are no doubt similarities as well as differences. In this chapter, we start by proposing a hierarchy of behavioural adaptations, culminating in an adaptation that may help explain behavioural characteristics unique to our own species. This adaptation is mental time travel, and is based on the recording of specific events in the past, and the imagining of specific events in the future.
Mental time travel is responsible for many human attributes, such as the ability to individually plan our futures in detail, and perhaps for phenomena such as religious belief and ideas about life after death. We argue that our ability to transcend time may lie at the heart of another capacity generally regarded as uniquely human. That capacity is language. Behavioural adaptations: a hierarchy At the most fundamental level, behaviour is dependent on bodily characteristics.
For example, bodies built for strength or speed may have better chances of survival than those not so endowed, although this may be balanced against metabolic costs. There may be a trade-off between strength and speed, with predators specialized for attacking strength, their prey for speed or efficacy of escape. Cheaper substitutes for strength in attack may include deadly venoms or stings, and spikes may substitute for speed in defence.
Size is another bodily characteristic, and selection may again lead to opposite adaptations; compare, for example, the ant and the hippopotamus. A large, heavy body may render an individual relatively impervious to attack or threat of injury, while a small, light body may offer more means of escape from predation, by climbing trees or hiding under rocks.
Specific adaptations, like wings for flying or fins for swimming, may extend the range of habitats an animal might occupy, and so enhance reproduction and the survival of offspring. At the next level of behavioural adaptation, animals may evolve specific patterns of behaviour. These can be quite complex, as in the building of webs or nests, or in migratory or hoarding behaviours.
Many such behaviours are tuned to predictable regularities, such as the day-night cycle, the fluctuations of the seasons, or even the phases of the moon. Such instinctive patterns of behaviour are relatively fixed, and largely independent of learning or experience. A hibernator, for example, may hoard food for an impending winter even if it has never experienced a winter. Such instinctive behaviours may ensure reproductive fitness so long as the environmental pattern persists, but cannot deal with changes in long-term regularities, such as climate change, or with relatively unpredictable day-to-day events.
Learning may serve in part to fine-tune instinctive mechanisms, as in such phenomena as imprinting, or parameter setting. Other forms of learning are relatively independent of instinct except insofar as learning itself may be regarded as an instinct , and operate at the level of the individual rather than the population. Classical conditioning, for 19 Memory, Time and Language example, may serve to elicit appropriate emotional or anticipatory responses to situations, animals, or objects that pose threats or promise rewards, and through operant conditioning animals develop behaviours that ensure reinforcements or escape from harm.
These mechanisms are still relatively inflexible, and predictable according to quantitative laws of learning. Behaviour itself may not always be predictable, though, since behavioural modification, like evolutionary adaptation, depends on variations that allow the selection of those behaviours that prove adaptive Skinner, Memory systems may permit still more flexible adaptation.
Modern theories of memory recognize different levels of memory that themselves vary in flexibility. Figure 1 shows the now classic distinction between declarative and nondeclarative memory sometimes known as implicit and explicit memory, respectively , and within declarative memory the distinction between semantic and episodic memory Squire, Nondeclarative memory refers to the stimulus-driven, unconscious memory systems that drive such phenomena as procedural skills and habits, priming and perceptual learning, and simple classical conditioning.
Declarative memory is so named because it can be declared. Indeed, we suggest below that declarative memory provides the basis for language itself. Declarative memory provides more flexible adaptation to the world than does simple learning or nondeclarative memory. First, it 20 What Makes Us Human? We know precisely where we live, the neighbourhoods, the geographical areas in which we work, play, and travel. As humans, we have a huge array of facts at our disposal that enable us to make precise plans for the future, and meet different obligations and contingencies.
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