The golden meme

摘要

Why do humans behave the way they do? Ask a group of biologists and you'll probably be told that evolution has shaped our thoughts, actions and institutions. Not so, the social scientist will argue: we are uniquely moulded by the culture in which we grow up. Nature? Nurture? It's the same tired old debate. You'd think that people would be pleased to have an alternative, a third way that combines both biology and the social sciences. So how come the idea of memes has mostly been met with indifference or outright hostility? The word "meme" was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to describe units of culture such as fashions, customs, technologies and ideas, which, he argues, evolve in much the same way as genes. Only the fittest memes survive, while the rest go to the wall as selection weeds them out. The notion that natural selection acts on elements of culture has a respectable pedigree that goes back to Darwin. In making the case for the evolution of language, for example, he wrote: "A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue."