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REPLICATORS AND INTERACTORS.
I believe that what Dawkins achieved with his meme concept was to call
serious attention to the existence of replicators other than genes. Yet,
his treatment of the subject is extremely naive, and the term "meme" in his
hands becomes synonymous with "elementary particle of culture" or something
like that (ideas, beliefs, desires, styles, all become examples of memes) .
The point is that, if we are to take advantage of the concept of
non-genetic replicators, the most important technical question is to be
*very specific* about their mode of replication. Dawkins adopted the term
meme because the mode of replication he had in mind was imitation . Yet,
the sounds, meanings, and syntactical constructions of human language (and
most of the other replicators that make human societies work, such as
contracts, laws etc.) are not entities that replicate through *imitation*
but institutional norms which replicate through *obligatory repetition*. I
personally would restrict the term meme to apply exclusively to patterns
of *behavior* transmited through imitation, such as bird songs or tool-use
in apes, or fashions and fads in humans. Since the key point is that we are
dealing with replicators here, the crucial thing is to get the *method of
replication* right, something one does not achieve by overgeneralizing.
After getting our replicators straight, that is, after correctly
identifying the different types of cultural genotypes (memes, norms
etc.), the next question is what corresponds to the phenotype . In other
words, in biology we do not simply deal with replicators but also with
interactors , not only with genes but with the enzymes that result when
genes become expressed. Enzymes are interactors in the sense that as
catalysts they *intervene in reality*, for example, by accelerating or
deccelerating a chemical reaction. One useful way of thinking about
catalysis (one abstract enough to carry over to other replicators, whether
memes or norms), is as an intervention in reality that switches a material
system (chemical molecules in the case of genes) from one stable state to
another (from unreactive to reactive, for example, thereby accelerating a
reaction). What could be the counterpart of this in human society? One
possibility for linguistic norms (not memes) is speech acts . Speech acts
refer to the things people *do* with words, make promises, give commands,
state judicial sentences. Now, these linguistic interventions do change
people from one state to another: from non-guilty to guilty, in the case of
a death sentence uttered by a judge. And, like genetic interactors, they
involve material and energetic considerations: a promise does not change my
social state (from uncommitted to commited) unless I belong to a social
network which can enforce the fulfillment of the promise (if only by
ostracism, or a lowered opinion on my honesty and hence less willingness to
interact this way with me.). A command in the military too, depends on
energetic discipline (hence to keep a chain of command functioning one need
to submit soldiers to constant drill).
The point is that unless we are very specific about both replicators and
interactors when talking about non-biological fields, we risk falling into
mere metaphor. (Not that metaphors are useless, they are not. But the point
that Dawkins is trying to make is precisely that the relation between
memes and genes is not one of metaphorical analogy but of *deep
isomorphism*. That is, the engineering diagram which describes the joint
action of genes, enzymes and natural selection can be instantiated in many
different ways. Another example may help clarify this. We one says, as
leftists used to say, that "class-strugle is the motor of history", one is
using the word "motor" in a metaphorical way. On the other hand, to say
that a hurricane is a steam motor is not to use the term metaphorically,
but literally: one is saying that the hurricane embodies the same
engineering diagram as a steam motor: it uses a reservoir of heat and
operates via differences of temperature circulated through a Carnot cycle.
The same is true of genetic algorithms, memes, norms etc, when treated with
the proper technical care.
