Is the Mind Just a Vehicle for Virulent Notions?

By Unmesh Kher

Dawkins' memes have proved nearly as controversial as Darwin's ideas about natural selection once were. Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press), which goes so far as to suggest that we are our memes, is sure to escalate the war of words that periodically rages on the pages of the New York Review of Books and the Boston Review.

Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has long battled what he calls "Darwinian fundamentalism," dismisses the meme as a "meaningless metaphor." H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, isn't much nicer. "I think memetics is an utterly silly idea," he complains. "It's just cocktail-party science."

Natural selection, Orr points out, applies beautifully to random processes such as gene mutations but would fall apart if animals could deliberately upgrade their young. Ideas, on the other hand, are often consciously modified before they're transmitted. Meme evolution, unlike gene evolution, isn't random. "When Newton invented calculus," says Orr, "he didn't do it by generating a million random ideas and choosing the best one." Darwinism, say the critics, has no relevance under these conditions.

This does not deter memeticists, who, for technical reasons of their own, regard such objections as profoundly misguided. Indeed, Blackmore, taking the theory to its logical conclusion, suggests memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, in Blackmore's scheme of things, is little more than a nest of memes.

She's not alone in this view. Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett, an enthusiastic and prolific memeticist, acknowledges that it's an unsettling philosophy. "People are terribly afraid that this is going to rob them of authorship and creativity, that it will be the swallowing up of the self." That fear, he speculates, may account for some of the vehemence of the opponents of memetics. "The view of the self that emerges from a proper evolutionary account," he says, "is different enough from the tradition that it can get people fairly upset." One advantage of memetics over tradition, Dennett points out, is that it can explain consciousness without resorting to a little man in the back of the head calling all the shots.

But there is dissent even within the "ultra-Darwinist" ranks. M.I.T. linguist Steven Pinker finds the ideas of memetics intriguing and occasionally even useful but doesn't quite believe it's a science. Nor does he accept the nest-of-memes view of consciousness. "To be honest, I don't even know what that means," admits Pinker. The problem, he says, is that memetics assumes the brain is essentially passive, like a Petri dish awaiting infection. It doesn't account for the self that responds subjectively, that feels sensations such as love, envy and pain. "Babies are conscious," he points out. "That's why we don't operate on them without anesthesia. And their minds have not been infected by memes."

--By Unmesh Kher