DNA and the Meme

In 1976, a young evolutionary biologist published a book that set out to explain life from the gene's point of view, and in its final chapter, almost as an afterthought, he committed an act of intellectual smuggling that has outlasted the book's main argument in the popular imagination.

The biologist was Richard Dawkins. The book was The Selfish Gene. And the smuggled idea, introduced in a closing chapter titled "Memes: the new replicators," was that the gene is not the only thing on Earth that copies itself, competes, and evolves. There is a second replicator, younger and faster and stranger, and it lives not in the body but in the mind.

He needed a name for it. He wanted a monosyllable that rhymed roughly with "gene" and carried the sense of imitation. He reached back to the Greek mimema — that which is imitated — clipped it short, and produced a word that would, with an irony he could not have foreseen, go on to colonize the very internet that did not yet exist.

He called it the meme.

What a meme actually is

The word has since been flattened into something trivial — a captioned cat, a recycled joke — and that flattening has obscured how radical the original idea was. So it is worth recovering Dawkins's meaning precisely, because this entire book depends on it.

A meme, in his definition, is a unit of cultural transmission: an idea, a tune, a phrase, a fashion, a technique, a belief — anything that can pass from one mind to another by imitation. And his claim was not that culture is like evolution in some loose, poetic way. It was the harder, more literal proposition that culture is an evolutionary system, running on the same underlying logic as biology, because it contains the same essential ingredient: a replicator.

A replicator is simply something that makes copies of itself. Dawkins argued that any replicator, anywhere, will be subject to the same ruthless arithmetic. Copies vary. Variants compete for limited resources. The variants better suited to survive and spread do so; the others vanish. This is natural selection, and Dawkins's insight — which he later folded into a principle he called Universal Darwinism — was that it is not a fact about biology specifically. It is a fact about replicators as such. Wherever you find copying, variation, and selection, you will find evolution, whether the thing copying itself is made of DNA or of ideas.

Genes are the replicators of the body. They are copied with extraordinary fidelity, they vary by mutation, they compete across generations, and the successful ones — the ones that build bodies good at surviving and reproducing — fill the world. This took, for any meaningful complexity, billions of years. The pace of the previous chapter's story, the slow climb from microbe to mind, is the pace of genetic evolution: glacial, measured in geological epochs.

Memes are the replicators of culture. And the thing to understand about them, the thing that changes everything, is their speed.

Two inheritances, two clocks

Here is the proposition at the heart of this chapter, and the reason it sits so early in the book. Human beings are the only species on Earth that runs on two inheritance systems at once.

Every living thing inherits genes. A salmon, an oak, a beetle, a chimpanzee — each receives from its parents a packet of DNA and passes a packet to its offspring, and that is the whole of what crosses the generational gap. Whatever an individual animal learns in its lifetime dies with it. The clever crow's particular tricks, the old wolf's hard-won caution — gone, when the body fails. The genetic channel is the only channel, and it carries nothing a creature acquires during its life. It is, in the language of biology, almost perfectly faithful and almost perfectly blind.

Humans inherit genes too. But we inherit something else, through a second channel that no other species possesses to any comparable degree: we inherit memes. We are born into a torrent of accumulated culture — language, technique, story, law, mathematics, the painted bison on the cave wall — and we absorb it, modify it, and pass it on. A human child receives not only its parents' DNA but the distilled knowledge of every ancestor who managed to write something down or teach something out loud. The genetic inheritance took four billion years to assemble. The memetic inheritance, riding on top of it, can transform a civilization in a single generation.

This is the literal mechanism behind the previous chapter's painter. When that person set the bison on the wall, they were doing something no salmon and no wolf could do: depositing knowledge into the memetic channel, where it could be inherited by minds not descended from their body. The painting was a meme in Dawkins's exact sense — a unit of cultural information, copied from mind to mind by imitation, surviving the death of its originator. Genetic inheritance flows only down the bloodline. Memetic inheritance flows to anyone who can see the wall.

Two clocks, then, ticking at wildly different speeds. The slow clock of the genes, which built our bodies over eons. The fast clock of the memes, which builds and rebuilds our world in decades. And the gap between those two speeds — the fact that our culture now evolves incomparably faster than our biology — is the engine of nearly everything that makes the modern human condition feel like a sprint down a corridor whose end we cannot see.

"We can rebel"

Dawkins ended The Selfish Gene on a note that has stayed with readers for half a century, and it bears directly on where this book is going.

Having spent three hundred pages arguing that we are, at bottom, machines built by our genes to propagate themselves, he closed by insisting that we are not therefore enslaved to them. "We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines," he wrote, "but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

It is a stirring line, and it contains a quiet vertigo that is easy to miss. Dawkins is saying that the meme-machine — the mind stuffed with inherited culture — can turn against the very forces that built it. The created can defy the creator. Knowledge, accumulated in the cultural channel, can rise up against the biological imperatives that made knowledge possible in the first place.

Sit with the shape of that claim, because we are going to meet it again in a form Dawkins did not intend. A replicator builds a vehicle to carry it. The vehicle, growing complex enough, develops the capacity to act against the replicator's interests. The creature outgrows its creator's purposes.

We are, in Dawkins's telling, that creature with respect to our genes. The question this book will eventually force is whether we are about to become the creator on the other side of the same equation — whether the knowledge we have spent forty thousand years pouring into ever-better vessels is now building a vehicle of its own, one that may, in time, develop the capacity to turn against our purposes, exactly as Dawkins says we turned against the purposes of our genes.

An honest caveat

Intellectual honesty requires a pause here, because the meme concept is not settled science, and a book that leaned on it without saying so would be cheating.

From the start, serious thinkers pushed back. The philosopher Mary Midgley attacked the idea almost immediately; others, including the philosopher David Stove and more recently John Gray, have dismissed memetics as pseudo-rigor — Gray memorably likening memes to phlogiston, the imaginary substance that pre-modern chemists once invoked to explain fire. The core complaint is fair: a meme has no physical substrate as crisp as the gene's DNA, no clean unit, no obvious mechanism of copying you can point to under a microscope. Even sympathetic encyclopedias note that the concept "remains largely theoretical."

I do not need memetics to be a complete and validated science for this book's purposes, and I will not pretend it is. What I need is the core observation, which survives every reasonable objection: that human beings transmit acquired knowledge across generations through a cultural channel, that this channel operates far faster than genetic inheritance, and that it accumulates. You do not have to believe memes are particles to believe that. You only have to notice that you know how to read, and that no gene taught you.

Whether or not "meme" is the right word for the unit, the phenomenon is undeniable, and it is the phenomenon this book is built on: knowledge, once it escaped the single skull and learned to ride the cultural channel, began to evolve on its own clock — and that clock has been accelerating, without pause, from the cave wall to the present sentence, toward a vessel that will not merely carry our inherited knowledge but think with it.

We have followed the painter who put knowledge on the wall. We have named the channel that knowledge travels. Now we must trace the vessels themselves — the long, ingenious sequence of containers humanity built to hold its mind outside its body, each one faster and more capacious than the last, climbing toward the present. That is the next chapter, and the staircase it describes does not stop where you might expect.

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Sources

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Source

"Meme" coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), final chapter "Memes: the new replicators"; from Greek mimema, "that which is imitated"	Encyclopædia Britannica, "meme"; The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976); The Marginalian, "How Richard Dawkins Coined the Word Meme"
Meme defined as a unit of cultural transmission / unit of imitation; replicator analogous to the gene	Britannica, "meme"; Wikipedia, "Memetics"; LitCharts, "Meme" analysis in The Selfish Gene
Memes undergo variation, competition, selection, retention; "many memes compete for the attention of hosts"	Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press), quoting Dawkins's definition
"Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission…" (Dawkins, 1976, p.203)	Quoted in "Dawkins' Theory of Memetics" (somr.info critique PDF)
Universal Darwinism (selection applies to any replicator)	Wikipedia, "Memetics"
Dawkins's inspirations: Cavalli-Sforza, F. T. Cloak, J. M. Cullen	SlideShare educational summary citing Wikipedia, "Meme"
Closing passage: "We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines… we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators"	The Selfish Gene (1976), final chapter; quoted in LitCharts
Critiques of memetics (Mary Midgley, David Stove, John Gray's "cod-science of memes" / phlogiston comparison); concept "remains largely theoretical"	"Neil Thomas on 'The Dawkinsian Mythology'" (Goodreads author blog); Britannica, "meme"