The Science of Discworld II

who set the memes loose may have had overt intentions, but the memes themselves don’t. Those that perform well, leading human minds to pass them on in quantity, thrive; those that do not, die out, or at best live on as small, isolated pockets of infection. The spread of a meme is much like the spread of a disease. And just as you can protect yourself against some diseases, by taking the right precautions, you can also protect yourself againstbecoming infected with a meme. The ability to think critically, and to question statements that rest on authority instead of evidence, are quite effective defences.
    This is our message to you. You need not be a victim of the power of story, like Vorbis the Quisitor, smitten by an earthbound tortoise, the Wrath of Om. You can be a Granny Weatherwax, sailing through story-space like a master navigator, attuned to every breath of narrative wind (and a lot of it is, mark you), tacking against the gale like a maverick, avoiding the Shoals of Dogma and the Scylla and Charybdis of Indecision …
    Sorry, we got carried away. What we mean is: if you understand the power of story, and learn to detect abuses of it, you might actually deserve the appellation Homo sapiens .
    Blackmore’s book argues that many aspects of human nature are explained much better by memetics, the mechanisms whereby memes exist and propagate, than by any existing rival theory. In our terminology, memetics illuminates the complicity between intelligence and extelligence, between the individual mind and the culture of which it is but one tiny part. Some critics counter that the memeticists can’t even say what the basic unit of a meme is. For example, are the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (dah-dah-da DUM) a meme, or is the meme really the whole symphony? Both replicate successfully: the second in the minds of music-lovers, the first in a weird variety of minds.
    However, this kind of criticism never carries much weight when a new theory is being developed. Not that this stops the critics, of course. By the time a scientific theory can ‘define’ its concepts with complete precision, it’s dead. Very few concepts can actually be defined completely: not even something like ‘alive’. What, precisely, does ‘tall’ mean? ‘Rich’? ‘Wet’? ‘Convincing’? Let alone ‘slood’. If it comes to the crunch, the basic unit of genetics has not been defined in any convincing way, either. Is it a DNA base? A DNA sequence that codes for proteins, a ‘gene’ in the most limited sense? A DNA sequence with a known function – a ‘gene’ in its broadest sense? A chromosome? An entire genome? Does it have to exist inside an organism? Most DNA in the world contributes nothing genetic to the future: there’s DNA indead skin flakes, falling leaves, rotting logs …
    Dawkins’s famous phrase ‘It is raining DNA outside’, applied to downy seeds of the willow tree at the start of chapter 5 of The Blind Watchmaker , is poetic. But very little of that DNA leads anywhere; it’s just another molecule to be broken down as the falling seeds rot. A few seeds survive to germinate; fewer still produce plants; and most of those die or are eaten before they grow into a willow tree and produce the next rainfall of seeds. DNA has to be in the right place (in sexual species, eggs or sperm) at the right time (fertilisation) before it propagates itself in any genetic sense. None of this stops genetics being a real science, and a very exciting and important one. So the fuzziness of definitions is not a good stick with which to beat the memetic dog, or indeed any dog that has anything going for it.
    In his original discussion, almost as an aside, Dawkins suggested that religion is a meme, which goes something like ‘If you wish to avoid the everlasting fires, you must believe this , and pass it on to your children’. 2 The popularity of religion is no doubt more complicated than that; nevertheless, there is the germ of an idea here, because that sentence does correspond rather closely to the central message of many – not all – religions. The theologian John Bowker was sufficiently disturbed by this suggestion that he wrote Is God a Virus ? to shoot it down. The fact that he bothered shows that he saw it as an important (and from his viewpoint dangerous) question.
    Blackmore recognises that a