CULTURE AS MEMESThe notion that what we find in cultures is a residue or a precipitate
of many episodes of individual transmission is not new. But it
became very powerful with the development of formal mathematical
tools to describe cultural transmission. This happened because
anthropologists were faced with a difficult problem. They often
described human cultures in terms of "big" objects, like "American
fundamentalism," "Jewish religion," "Chinese morality," and so on.
Anthropology and history could make all sorts of meaningful state-
[34] ments about these big objects (e.g., "In the 18th century, the
progress of science and technology in Europe challenged Christian
religion as a source of authority.") However, this is a very remote
description of what happens on the ground, in the actual lives of
individuals. After all, people do not interact with such abstract
objects as scientific progress or Christian authority. They only
interact with individual people and material objects. The difficulty
was to connect these two levels and to describe how what happened
at the bottom, as it were, produced stability and change at the level
of populations.
A number of anthropologists and biologists (including C. Lumsden
and E.O. Wilson, R. Boyd and P. Richerson, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza and
M. Feldman, W. Durham) more or less at the same time proposed that
cultural transmission could be to some extent described in the same
way as genetic inheritance. Evolutionary biology has put together an
impressive set of mathematical tools to describe the way a certain gene
can spread in a population, under what conditions it is likely to be
"crowded out" by other versions, to what extent genes that are detri-
mental to one organism can still be transmitted in a population, and so
forth. The idea was to adapt these tools to the transmission of cultural
notions or behaviors.^9
TOOL KIT I:CULTURE AS MEMES
The equations of population genetics are abstract tools that can
be applied to genes but also to any other domain where you
have (i) a set of units, (ii) changes that produce different vari-
ants of those units, (iii) a mechanism of transmission that
chooses between variants. In cultural transmission we find aRELIGION EXPLAINED