torial in the British Spectatoronce urged the Conservative Party to
acquire more of that selfish gene that Professor Dawkins talked about.
... But one does not "acquire" a gene, it makes little sense to say that
someone has "more" of a gene than someone else, there is probably no
such thing as a gene that makes people selfish, and Dawkins never
meant that anyway. This distortion is not too surprising. It confirms
the popular perception that biology is all about the struggle for sur-
vival, Nature red in tooth and claw, the Hobbesian fight of all against
all, etc. (that this is in fact largely false is neither here nor there). So
the distortion happened, in this case, because people had a prior
notion that the phrase "selfish gene" seemed to match. The original [39]
explanation (the original meme) was completely ignored, the better to
fit that prior conception.
Cultural memes undergo mutation, recombination and selection
insidethe individual mind every bit as much and as often as (in fact
probably more so and more often than) during transmission between
minds. We do not just transmit the information we received. We
process it and use it to create new information, some of which we do
communicate to other people. To some anthropologists this seemed to
spell the doom of meme-explanations of culture. What we call culture
is the similarity between some people's mental representations in some
domains. But how come there is similarity at all, if representations
come from so many sources and undergo so many changes?
It is tempting to think that there is an obvious solution: some
memes are so infectious and hardy that our minds just swallow them
whole, as it were, and then regurgitate them in pristine form for oth-
ers to acquire. They would be transmitted between minds in the same
way as an E-mail message is routed via a network of different comput-
ers. Each machine stores it for a while and passes it on to another
machine via reliable channels. For instance, the idea of a moralistic
ancestor, communicated by your elders, might be so "good" that you
just store it in your memory and then deliver it intact to your children.
But that is not the solution, for the following reason: When an idea
gets distorted beyond recognition—as happened to the "selfish
gene"—it seems obvious that this occurs because the minds that
received the original information added to it, in other words workedon
it. So far, so good. But this leads us to think that when an idea gets
transmitted in a roughly faithful way, this occurs because the receiving
minds did notrework it, as it were. Now that is a great mistake. The
main difference between minds that communicate and computers that
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