DISTORTION IS OF THE ESSENCE
The notion of human culture as a huge set of copy-me programs is
very seductive and it is certainly on the right track, but it is only a
starting point. Why are some memes better than others? Why is
singingLand of Hope and Glory after hearing it once much easier than
humming a tune from Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire? What exactly
makes moralistic ancestors better for transmission than immoral
ghosts? This is not the only problem. A much more difficult one is
that i f we look a bit more closely at cultural transmission between
[38] human beings, what we see does not look at all like replication of
identical memes. On the contrary, the process of transmission seems
guaranteed to create an extraordinary profusion of baroque variations.
This is where the analogy with genes is more hindrance than help.
Consider this. You (and I) carry genes that come from a unique
source (a meiotic combination of our parents' genes) and we will
transmit them unchanged (though combined with a partner's set) to
our offspring. In the meantime, nothing happens; however much you
may work out at the gym, you will not have more muscular children.
But in mental representations the opposite is true. The denizens of
our minds have many parents (in those thousands of renditions of
Land of Hope and Glory, which one is being replicated when I whistle
the tune?) and we constantly modify them.^11
As we all know, some memes may be faithfully transmitted while
others are hugely distorted in the process. Consider for instance the
contrasting fortunes of two cultural memes created by Richard
Dawkins, one of which replicated very well while the other one under-
went a bizarre mutation. The idea of "meme" itself is an example of a
meme that replicated rather well. A few years after Dawkins had
introduced the notion, virtually everybody in the social sciences and
in evolutionary biology or psychology knew about it and for the
most part had an essentially correct notion of the original meaning.
Now compare this with another of Dawkins's ideas, that of "selfish
genes." What Dawkins meant was that genes are DNA strings whose
sole achievement is to replicate. The explanation for this is simply that
the ones that do not have this functionality (the ones that build organ-
isms that cannot pass on the genes) just disappear from the gene pool.
So far, so simple. However, once the phrase selfish gene diffused out
into the wide world its meaning changed beyond recognition, to
become in many people's usage "a gene that makes us selfish." An edi-
RELIGION EXPLAINED