WHO IS IN CHARGE?

Evolutionary theory not only aspires to describe a pattern of change as variational (i.e. as a sorting process leading to frequency changes of cultural units), but also wants to explain the frequency changes. This involves two kinds of questions: how does an item originate, and why does it spread and persist in a population? Whether the origination of cultural novelty is analogous to Darwinian evolution has been addressed in Chapters 3–4. This chapter will be concerned with the second question. At issue is the process of diffusion of cultural units.

The egoism analogy

Memeticists do not point towards memes only because they want to draw an ontological analogy. In analogy to gene selectionism, memeticists have also claimed that the ontological units of culture are the units of cultural selection, the selfish replicators, the ultimate beneficiaries and causal agents of culture. Gene selectionism considers organisms as mere consequences of the selfish, replicative and organism-building power of the replicators. Gene selectionism is thus mirrored by meme selectionism. Humans carry around memes and their minds are a mere consequence of the meme's selfish, replicative and mind-building power. This also means that those memes that are selfish (i.e. have a high fitness of their own) will spread well and others will not. The survival of the fittest meme is meant to explain the pattern of diffusion we find in a culture.