Does Culture Really Evolve Like Organisms Do?
It’s become common to think about cultural change the same way we think about biological evolution—so common that it may obscure whether the comparison really works. Though there remain many questions yet to answer about biological evolution, it’s a process that’s well-understood. We know, in great detail, how variations emerge, how they’re passed on hereditarily, and how natural selection and other forces push organisms toward change. Evolution is integrated with almost everything else we know about biology.
It’s been much harder to pin down the exact workings of how ideas change, which has led some scientists to wonder just how deep and literal and proposed the analogy in 1976, in his famous book . Some researchers tried to extend the analogy, arguing that the study of memes was a bona fide field of science. But after many years, “memetics” remains stuck at square one, unable to overcome some existential questions: What is (and is not) a meme? Where does one meme stop and the next start? How do memes accumulate errors, the analog of genetic mutations? Until would-be memeticists can answer those central questions, memes are appropriate informal descriptions , not for rigorous studies.
