Richard Dawkins on Memes, the Internet and Why Wrong Ideas Spread

Lex opens with The Selfish Gene. The gene-centred view of evolution, as he reads it, lets us think of physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics, and of our ideas, propagates. So he asks Dawkins to start with the basics: in this context, what does the word "meme" mean?

Dawkins answers that a meme is the cultural equivalent of a gene: whatever plays the role the gene plays, but in the transmission of culture and of ideas in the broadest sense. And the word is only useful if something Darwinian is going on. Culture is obviously transmitted; the question is whether there is something like a gene that becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population.

Can it replicate, Lex asks. It clearly does replicate, Dawkins says; there is no question about that. The question is whether it replicates differentially, in a Darwinian fashion. Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they are successful in the meme pool? In a trivial sense, he says, you can.

The more interesting question goes further. An animal body is modified and adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes. Is it also a machine for propagating memes? Could you say that something about the way a human being is has been modified, adapted, for the function of meme propagation?

Lex calls it a fascinating possibility: that it isn't only about genes, which seem more comprehensible as things of biology, but that culture, or ideas broadly defined, operate under the same mechanisms. Dawkins adds that even morphology, even anatomy, evolves by memetic means. Hairstyles, styles of makeup and circumcision are actual changes in the body form. They are not genetic, yet they get passed on from generation to generation, or sideways like a virus, in a quasi-genetic way.

But it becomes really interesting, Lex says, when you drift away from the physical, into the space of ideas, ideologies and political systems. So are memes more of a metaphor, or is there something fundamental to them, an almost physical presence?

Dawkins thinks they are a bit more than a metaphor. Bodily characteristics are a bit trivial, but take the propagation of religious ideas. They travel longitudinally, down the generations, and transversely, in a sort of epidemiology of ideas: when a charismatic preacher converts people, that resembles viral transmission. The longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent to child is more like conventional genetic transmission.

Lex finds that a beautiful idea, especially today, and asks about social networks, where the viral spread of ideas is what gave the word "meme" its new everyday use.

The internet, Dawkins says, provides an extremely rapid method of transmission. When he first coined the word, the internet did not exist, and he was thinking in terms of books, newspapers, broadcast radio and television. Now an idea can leap around the world in all directions instantly. The internet is a step change in how easily memes propagate.

Lex offers an image. As late as the 1970s, ideas lived like species on the Galapagos Islands, each on its own island; the internet let all those species globalize. In seconds you can spread a message to millions of people, and these memes can breed, evolve and mutate, with selection at work and groups forming around them. He asks whether Dawkins's work, focused on life on Earth, should be taken further in this direction.

Dawkins does think it would be a good idea to think about this in a Darwinian way. We conventionally picture the transmission of ideas among our ancestors as limited to villages and small bands where everybody knew each other. Ideas could propagate within the village, hop to a neighbouring village occasionally, and perhaps eventually reach a neighbouring continent. It was a slow process.

Nowadays, villages are international. In what has been called echo chambers, people live in a sort of internet village whose members may be spread all over the world but happen to share the same interests, the same terminology and jargon, the same enthusiasms. The Flat Earth Society doesn't live in one place, Dawkins says; its members find each other and talk the same language to each other, "the same nonsense". It is a distributed version of the primitive village where people propagated ideas locally.

Lex asks whether there is a Darwinian parallel: did villages serve an evolutionary purpose? Dawkins wouldn't use a phrase like "evolutionary purpose" here. Villages just emerged; that is the way people happened to live. And he agrees that societies of ideas like the Flat Earth Society emerge in the same way in digital space.

Could a Darwinian perspective fully explain the dynamics of social interaction on these networks, Lex asks, or does something much more complicated need to be developed? A Darwinian selection approach, Dawkins answers, would investigate which ideas spread and which don't. Some ideas can't spread: a few people believe in Flat Earthism, but it won't spread because it is obvious nonsense. Other ideas, even wrong ones, spread because they are attractive in some sense.

So for spreading and selection, Lex sums up, an idea just has to be attractive in some sense, not necessarily the way animals attract each other.

Yes, says Dawkins: all that is needed is for it to spread, and it doesn't have to be true to spread. Truth is one criterion that might help an idea spread, but there are others. As Lex says, attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival. The famous peacock's tail doesn't help the peacock survive; it helps it pass on its genes. In the same way, an idea that is actually rubbish, but which people find very attractive and don't know is rubbish, will spread the way the peacock's genes spread.

Lex takes a small sidestep. He recently read an argument that in some species of birds, aspects of the feathers serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever, and that some of the beauty animals display may be its own purpose. Does that ring a bell, he asks, or does it sound ridiculous?

"I think it's a rather distorted bell," Dawkins replies. When Darwin coined the phrase sexual selection, he didn't feel the need to argue that what females found attractive (usually it is males attracting females) had to be useful. It was enough that females found it attractive. The trait could be, and probably was, completely useless in the conventional sense, yet not at all useless for reproducing, though Darwin didn't call them genes.

Others, starting with Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, didn't like that idea. They wanted sexually selected characteristics such as the peacock's tail to be useful in some sense, for survival, which Dawkins calls a bit of a stretch. Others have run with that idea and brought it up to date, so there are two schools of thought on sexual selection, still active and about equally supported: those who follow Darwin in saying it is enough to be attractive, and those who follow Wallace in saying it has to be useful somehow.

Asked which camp he is in, Dawkins says he is open-minded: both could be correct in different cases, and both have been made mathematically more sophisticated than when Darwin and Wallace first discussed it. Lex has a preference. "I'm Russian. I romanticize things," he says, so he favours Darwin's side, where beauty itself, attraction, is a powerful force in evolution.