The theory of the selfish meme was introduced, some chapters ago, with a challenge: what does it contribute to our understanding of cultural change? I said then that my approach would be to focus on the underlying structure of Dawkins's hypothesis: to examine whether it could be true, is internally coherent and could form a solid basis for any empirical applications. What have those enquiries revealed?

The Meme Hypothesis

Ideas and customs develop at a pace that is far too great to be picked up at the level of biological evolution, and sociobiology's attempts to show how the evolution of the body could account for changes within our culture are therefore bound to fail. Richard Dawkins's suggestion is that we should look instead to evolution within culture itself, and he has proposed that this might occur via “memes”, which are (roughly speaking) the mental analogues of genes. On this view Darwinism is an example of a general type of theory which we should not artificially restrict to the realm of biology. Its essential features can be extracted and their domain of influence extended: whatever the type of replicator involved, their variation under conditions of restricted resources would lead to a form of evolution, and memes are simply cultural replicators. This is not to say that they will be tied to the particular pattern of development that genes have followed, for they are a different form of the type of process that Darwinism exemplifies – the term “analogy” should be used with great care in this context.