certain set of notions and values (these would be the analogue
of the genes). They come in different versions. These variants
are communicated to people who grow up in a particular group
(this is the analogue of reproduction). These internal states
have external effects because people act on the basis of their
notions and values (in the same way as genes produce pheno-
typic effects). Over many cycles of communication, certain
trends can appear because of accumulated distortions—people
do not transmit exactly what they received—and biased trans-
mission—people may acquire or store some material better
than the rest. [ 35 ]Biologist Richard Dawkins summarized all this by describing cul-
ture as a population of memes,which are just "copy-me" programs, like
genes. Genes produce organisms that behave in such a way that the
genes are replicated—otherwise the genes in question would not be
around. Memes are units of culture: notions, values, stories, etc. that
get people to speak or act in certain ways that make other people store
a replicated version of these mental units. A joke and a popular tune
are simple illustrations of such copy-me programs. You hear them
once, they get stored in memory, they lead to behaviors (telling the
joke, humming the tune) that will implant copies of the joke or tune in
other people's memories, and so on. Now describing most cultural
phenomena in terms of memes and meme-transmission may seem
rather straightforward and innocuous. But it has important conse-
quences that I must mention here because they go against some deeply
entrenched ideas about culture.
First, meme-models undermine the idea of culture as some abstract
object, independent from individual concepts and norms, that we
somehow "share." A comparison with genes shows why this is mis-
guided. I have blue eyes, like other people. Now I do not have their
genes and they do not have mine. Our genes are all safely packed
inside our individual cells. It would be a misleading metaphor to say
that we "share" anything. All we can say is that the genes I inherited
are similar to theirs from the point of view of their effects on eye
color. In the same way, culture is the name of a similarity. What we mean
when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to
what we find in other members of the particular group we are consid-
ering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group.
This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if cul-
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