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The Problem of ‘Darwinizing’ Culture (or Memes as the New Phlogiston)

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Evolution 2.0

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

The neologism ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins as a cultural counterpart to the gene. While the meme has not been widely adopted in the social sciences, neither has it gone away, having survived (‘memically’ its supporters might say) despite significant philosophical and anthropological objections. This may be because the concept seems to promise to ‘Darwinize’ culture, providing an understanding of human life in reductivist terms, that is, terms consonant with neodarwinian selection and inheritance theory. It is suggested here that culture, far from being understandable memically, can be uncontroversially understood as one of those factors extending beyond natural selection that Darwin himself believed also operated. Here, various meme concepts are outlined along with objections to them. An alternative view is proposed that focuses on material technology, which, it is argued, although it has a biological dependency in historic and prehistoric perspective, is irreducible to biology and capable of subverting its logic. Implications for the orthodox views of human evolution are signalled. (The title of this article references Robert Aunger’s balanced edited work Darwinizing Culture: the Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000). The subtitle is also slightly second-hand (although unwittingly so when I presented the paper): Alister McGrath, in Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, calls memes ‘the new ether’(Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p. 133), having made the comparison to other fictional concepts including ‘calorific’ and ‘phlogiston’ a couple of pages earlier.)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I should clarify at the outset that this is not intended as an admission of dualism; as a materialist concerned with material causes, I am concerned with the distinctive patterns and – potentially – the de facto autonomous logics of the nested ontological levels of material existence. What is at issue here are the ways that cultural objects, whatever they consist in, may bring patterning into the world, and what sort(s) of patterning it is.

  2. 2.

    This is not the place to discuss the complexities of the potential relationship between, or partial identity of, behavioural plasticity in humans and the emergence (or definition) of free will.

  3. 3.

    The question of canine reduction in hominins, known to long precede the appearance of chipped stone technologies, may well indicate an extensive phase of expedient use of found objects as tools, as emerging data from East Africa suggests.

  4. 4.

    It may be worth reiterating at the close that this does not signal my dismissal of any and all Darwinian approaches in archaeology; many fruitful and fascinating avenues are opened by such research (see [35], for a useful overview); simply, memetics does not appear to me to be one of them.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife Sarah Wright for constructive criticism and masters students Emily Fioccoprile and Michael Copper; the shades of two former mentors – Ernest Gellner and Rodney Needham – are discernible.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, University of Bradford, BD7 1DP, Bradford, UK

    Timothy Taylor

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  1. Timothy Taylor
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Correspondence to Timothy Taylor .

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  1. , Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Bradford, Great Horton Road, Bradford, BD7 1 DP, United Kingdom

    Martin Brinkworth

  2. Dept. of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Bradford, Great Horton Road, Bradford, BD7 1DP, United Kingdom

    Friedel Weinert

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Taylor, T. (2012). The Problem of ‘Darwinizing’ Culture (or Memes as the New Phlogiston). In: Brinkworth, M., Weinert, F. (eds) Evolution 2.0. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20496-8_6

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