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This wonderful book (Jablonka & Lamb 2005) has opened up my thinking on evolution and thrown unexamined assumptions into disarray, for which painful intellectual turmoil I am grateful. The sections on memes are, however, confused and inadequate, and it is these I address here.
Unlike the first three dimensions, the fourth is largely restricted to one species – humans – and so its existence raises questions about the origin of human uniqueness. Jablonka & Lamb (J&L) argue that humans are unique because of the complexity and power of culture, and attribute this uniqueness, as have so many before them, to the acquisition of symbols. For the authors, the turning point in human evolution was something like Deacon's (1997) “symbolic threshold” – once this threshold has been crossed, the argument goes, a species can have symbolic culture that can evolve. This is why they call their fourth dimension the “symbolic inheritance system.”
Memetics, by contrast, does not depend on the notion of symbolism. For memetics, the turning point in hominid evolution was the appearance of imitation. Imitation is a kind of copying, and the information that is copied (memes) varies and is selected, which necessarily creates a new evolutionary process. Once this process got underway, the evolving culture could interact with genetic and epigenetic systems to transform the species in which it arose, resulting in modern humans along with their complex and powerful culture (Blackmore 2001). Memes are defined as “that which is imitated” (or more generally, whatever is copied; Dawkins 1976). So although many memes, including words, sentences, or diagrams, are symbolic, others, such as tunes, cars,...