The misunderstanding
of memes: Biography of
an unscientiªc object,
1976–1999

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman
York University

When the “meme” was introduced in 1976, it was as a metaphor intended to
illuminate an evolutionary argument. By the late-1980s, Jedoch, we see
from its use in major US newspapers that this original meaning had become
obscured. The meme became a virus of the mind. (In the UK, this occurred
slightly later.) It is also now clear that this becoming involved complex
sustained interactions between scholars, Journalisten, and the letter-writing
öffentlich. We must therefore read the “meme” through lenses provided by its pop-
ularization. The results are in turn suggestive of the processes of meaning-
construction in scholarly communication more generally.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed
funktioniert. Greed clariªes, cuts through, and captures the essence of the
evolutionary spirit.”

—Gordon Gekko, as portrayed by Michael
Douglas in the 1987 ªlm Wall Street

“From the outset [In 1976] the reviews were gratifyingly favorable and it
[The Selªsh Gene] was not seen, initially, as a controversial book. Its repu-
tation for contentiousness took years to grow until, by now, it is widely

An earlier version of this paper was pre-circulated and presented at the History &
Theory of Psychology Evening Colloquium Series in the Fall of 2010. The author wishes
to thank Jacy Young (the series coordinator) for the invitation to speak, as well as all
those who attended and provided feedback—especially Laura Ball, Ron Sheese, Kelli
Vaughn, and Fred Weizmann. It was originally written following the publication of
Alexandra Rutherford’s (2009) Beyond the Box, which—among other things—used popu-
lar press coverage to examine how the ideas of B. F. Skinner became integrated with Amer-
ican thinking in the 1950s–1970s. Endlich, it should also be noted that the resulting
manuscript would not have taken the shape it did were it not for the contributions of a
handful of correspondents—most notably Michael Schrage. Responsibility for all remain-
ing errors and omissions rests with the author.

Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft 2012, Bd. 20, NEIN. 1
©2012 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

75

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76

Misunderstanding of Memes

regarded as a work of radical extremism. But over the very same years as
the book’s reputation for extremism has escalated, its actual content has
seemed less and less extreme, more and more the common currency.”

—Richard Dawkins, in the preface to
Die 1989 edition of The Selªsh Gene

How could it be that Dawkins’ most famous book became controversial,
but not as a result of what it said? How could its ideas have become the
basis of textbooks, yet its arguments be labeled increasingly as revolution-
Und? The answers to these questions are tied to the reception of its claims:
insbesondere, that genes are selªsh—purposefully greedy in the pursuit of
their own survival.

This interpretation of the book’s argument, as it became increasingly
well-known, seemed to justify the self-centeredness of the 1980s: greed is
good, because that’s just how evolution works (see e.g., James 1998,
2008). Yet Dawkins anticipated this reading, and defended against it,
even reaching out to the public in a collaboration with the BBC: an epi-
sode of Horizon, “Nice guys ªnish ªrst” (Taylor 1986), laid out his position
in clear terms.

In this early documentary, Dawkins discussed the importance of indi-
vidual choice in producing optimal outcomes through cooperation (vgl.
Dawkins 1989, S. 202–233). In der Tat, the ªlm echoed his book’s closing
Linie: “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selªsh”
(Dawkins 1976, P. 215). I suggest, daher, that the continuing recep-
tion of his ideas as controversial—in the 1980s and through the 1990s—
can be understood more deeply if we examine what has been understood as
The Selªsh Gene’s secondary claim, as well as how the two claims came to
have the meaning they now have.

If individual choice can lead to more optimal results than blind
selªshness, as Dawkins argued in his documentary, then that which shapes
choice itself becomes evolutionarily important. In der Tat, in The Selªsh Gene,
Dawkins even seemed to suggest a way to think about this: that that which
shapes choice in humans—culture—is like a large shared genetic pool, In
which the most virulent ideas compete to infect your mind. The popular
understanding of this second claim will be the focus of this essay: Das
ideas are selªsh, even if the individuals who think them (d.h., those who are
infected by an idea) don’t themselves intend to be greedy.

Jedoch, to say that this second claim was “received” is to misrepre-
sent its history. The notion of a meme didn’t hit the newspapers in the US
until the late-1980s, and later still in the UK. A disciplinary critical mass
was only achieved in the late-1990s, when a peer-reviewed journal—the
Journal of Memetics—was founded and several popularizing books pub-

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Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft

77

lished (z.B., Blackmore 1999; Brodie 1996; Lynch 1996). Clearly, obwohl,
this was not the result of an immediate infection: the meme’s “virulence”
took twenty years to engineer.

The ’90s-era exuberance diminished somewhat in the new millennium.
The idea’s merit as a scientiªc claim came into question (z.B., Atran 2001;
Aunger 2000; Distin 2005). Doubts were expressed about whether and
how the advances suggested by the claim were supposed to be meaningful
(z.B., Jahoda 2002ab) or even novel (z.B., Kilpinen 2008). And the journal
failed. But few critics have chosen to focus on the processes by which the
idea itself came to have the meaning it now has. Such is the goal here: Zu
lay out the story of that which became controversial in the 1980s, und in-
sightful in the 1990s, by tracing the actions of the individuals involved in
the construction of its meaning.

The fact is, perhaps surprisingly to some readers, Dawkins did not
make the claim that has since been attributed to him. The meme was not
introduced purposefully as an “idea virus.” It was a metaphor. Dawkins’
intent, in The Selªsh Gene (1976), was not to put the meme forward as the
true cultural counterpart to the gene. Eher, he used it as part of a larger
Ziel: redeªning the fundamental unit of selection in evolutionary biology.
Zusamenfassend, he hoped to catalyze a shift in understanding; he hoped to redi-
rect the focus of biology away from genes and toward a more general en-
gine for evolution. There weren’t two claims in the ªrst edition of The
Selªsh Gene; there was only one, albeit a different one from what many
readers have understood.

Dawkins’ intent—contrary to the popular understanding—was never
to inaugurate the new science of memetics. That was accidental. He ex-
plained this in an essay published in Time magazine in 1999:

I am occasionally accused of having backtracked on memes, of hav-
ing lost heart, pulled in my horns, had second thoughts. The truth
is that my ªrst thoughts were more modest than some memeticists
might wish. For me the original mission was negative. The word
was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have
seemed entirely devoted to extolling the “selªsh” gene as the be-all
and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection. Dort
was a risk that my readers would misunderstand the message as be-
ing necessarily about DNA molecules. . . . This was where the
meme came in. (Dawkins 1999a, P. 46; see also Dawkins 1999b,
P. xvi)

The original meme, mit anderen Worten, was a rhetorical ºourish intended to
clarify a larger argument.

That Dawkins’ intended clariªcation has since gotten so confused is an

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Misunderstanding of Memes

interesting problem, both of the history of biology and more generally of
the public understanding of science. That the resulting misunderstanding
shares an obvious overlap with psychology suggests it also affords a prob-
lem for the history of that discipline as well. These problems situate this
essay at the boundary between the usual scholarly silos: it presents a his-
tory of a biological (and psychological) idea, but not of Biology (or Psy-
chology) per se.

My purpose here is simply to lay out how the meme’s interminglings
came to be: how The Selªsh Gene came to imply a selªsh meme. Aber es ist so
not intended to unmix the mixed metaphor (stattdessen, see Henrich, Boyd,
and Richerson 2008; Jeffreys 2000). Nor does it attempt to present a his-
tory of the idea itself (see Costall 1991). Eher, what follows is intended
to contribute to a larger discourse regarding the emergence of meaningful
inter-disciplines at the boundary between hard science and human science.
In this sense, it is broadly related to the recent examinations of socio-
biology (z.B., Jumonville 2002; Li and Hong 2003), social Darwinism
(z.B., Weikart 2003), and evolutionary psychology (z.B., Cassidy 2005;
2006). That said, Jedoch, it also takes a very different approach. Der
result is something rather more like a biography of a scientiªc object,
except of course that the meme was never scientiªc to begin with.1 In
short, daher, what follows is a story about the construction of meaning
through social interaction; how an understanding is shared among minds
that are forever situated in their own contexts, having their own interests,
and working toward their own ends. It is not a story about the spread of a
social infection.

To achieve all of this, the essay begins simply by situating the original
proposal (§I). What was Dawkins doing when he introduced the meme? ICH
then examine the ªrst major popularization of the meme proposal, In
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s collection The Mind’s I (§II).
This leads to an examination of that book’s success in the US and a two-
part discussion of the introduction of memes into the American popular
Verständnis (§§III–IV). I then move to a similar examination of the

1. The notion of a biography of a scientiªc object is due to Lorraine Daston (2000).
That said, Jedoch, the approach here must also be contrasted with Geoffrey Hodgson’s
(2004) examination of the changing meaning of “social Darwinism” in English-language
academic journals. This essay is therefore not the tracing of a deªnition, in the style of the
Oxford English Dictionary, but a targeted enquiry examining how the deªnition came to
be constructed by individual people acting in social contexts constructed by other individ-
ual people. It was originally written following the publication of Alexandra Rutherford’s
(2009) Beyond the Box, which—among other things—used popular press coverage to exam-
ine how the ideas of B. F. Skinner became integrated with American thinking in the
1950s–1970s.

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Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft

79

idea’s reception in the UK (§V). These parallel stories are put in a larger
social context, although brieºy, in a four-part analysis of why and how the
meme was popularized (§VI). And, ªnally, the essay concludes with a dis-
cussion of what these four steps imply for the role of scientiªc communi-
cation in constructing the public understanding of science (§VII).

ICH. Origins
Dawkins’ book merits special attention because it straddles two traditions.
As science writer Matt Ridley (2006) recently explained, “Before The
Selªsh Gene, scientists wrote books for each other, or for laymen, but rarely
for both” (P. 265). For Ridley, mit anderen Worten, the book represents a new
species of scientiªc communication. Aber, as we will see, it wasn’t immedi-
ately successful: only in the 1980s did it become a hybrid in the way
Ridley now means to celebrate. Daher, in approaching it here, we must ªrst
treat it as a particularly well-written book for scientists.

Hintergrund, Zu 1976
Following the synthesis, in the 1930s and 1940s, of Charles Darwin’s the-
ory of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s theory of particulate inheri-
tanz, the “gene” became the engine of evolution: natural change was con-
ceived as resulting from inheritance and mutation, und nichts weiter. Aber
Das, initially, was a mathematical abstraction; a prediction of theory.
When DNA was discovered in the early 1950s, the fundamental assump-
tion of population genetics acquired a material basis. This perspective was
then solidiªed—as the “central dogma” of molecular biology—through
work conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. Dann, In 1970, when François
Jacob published La logique du vivant, une histoire de l’hérédité (translated in
1973 as The Logic of Life), the gene took on its current meaning:

Just as a sentence represents a segment of text, so a gene corre-
sponds to a segment of nucleic acid. In both cases, an isolated sym-
bol means nothing; only a combination of symbols has any “sense.”
In both cases, a given sequence, sentence or gene, begins and ends
with special “punctuation” marks. (Jacob [1970] 1973, P. 275)2

When Dawkins wrote his book, in the early 1970s,3 this was the back-
ground against which he worked: evolution was understood to be driven
by natural selection and the inheritance of essentially meaningful strings

2. The primary source for this introductory paragraph is Jan Sapp’s (2003) Genesis, In
which the stories of Mendel’s “rediscovery” and of the construction of a “master molecule”
are told on pages 117–129 and 187–200, jeweils.

3. Dawkins situates the work in the preface to the 1989 edition: he began writing The
Selªsh Gene during a blackout caused by the miners’ strike in 1972, but then stopped after

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Misunderstanding of Memes

of particulate genes. (Sociobiology responded to the same background, Aber
then became intertwined with Dawkins’ program in ways that are too
complex to go into here [stattdessen, see Segerstråle 2000].)

Dawkins’ original argument, in the ªrst edition of The Selªsh Gene, War
that the gene—and the DNA from which each gene is composed—is ulti-
mately not what’s important for evolution. Genes are rather a single exam-
ple of a larger set of evolutionary engines. Genes, argued Dawkins, are a
kind of “replicator.”

A replicator is something, anything, that either (1) can make copies of
itself or (2) is easily and automatically copied by virtue of its relationship
to the medium in which it is found. Dawkins imagined this was the case
with the origins of life: a string of molecules came together by accident in
the early soup of the Earth’s tidal pools and, by virtue of their chemical
afªnity for other similar molecules, ultimately served as the basis for sub-
sequent duplication.

Think of the replicator as a mould or template. Imagine it as a
large molecule consisting of a complex chain of various sorts of
building block molecules. The small building blocks were abun-
dantly available in the soup surrounding the replicator. Now sup-
pose that each building block has an afªnity for its own kind. Dann
whenever a building block from out in the soup lands up next to a
part of the replicator for which it has an afªnity, it will tend to
stick there. The building blocks that attach themselves in this way
will automatically be arranged in a sequence that mimics that of
the replicator itself. It is easy then to think of them joining up to
form a stable chain just as in the formation of the original
replicator. (Dawkins [1976] 1989, P. 15)

As a result of the invention of this chemically-chaperoned form of pattern-
copying, a new kind of stability was introduced into the world. And it was
this stability, Dawkins argued, that enabled the process we recognize to-
day as evolution by means of natural selection. But his intended contribu-
tion was more speciªc: it was replicators that did this (as a class), not genes
(as individual units).

From Dawkins’ perspective, evolution is impossible without stability.
This is because only stability allows for differential selection following
replication: if heritable traits are to vary (as a result of accidents in dupli-
cation) and if the material causes underlying these traits are ultimately to
be represented in the larger population of replicators (due to competition

two chapters. He later resumed work, and ªnished the book, during a sabbatical in 1975
(P. xii).

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81

for building blocks), then there must be a shared stable core with respect
to which inter-generational change can occur. For life as we know it, Das
role is played by the organic crystal we call DNA. But Dawkins argued
that this was just one kind of replicator; memes, he suggested, might pro-
vide an example of another: a second example of apparent stability drawn
from life as we know it, which although hypothetical could be used to
clarify his point. And, initially, this is how his book was received in the
popular press (Lehmann-Haupt, 1977; Pfeiffer, 1977).

Constructing Memes, 1976–1981
The meme, in The Selªsh Gene, was a thought experiment: a rhetorical de-
vice intended to illuminate Dawkins’ argument that the replicator ought
to replace the gene in the scientiªc understanding of what it is that drives
evolutionary change. Yet its re-presentation in 1981, in a popular collec-
tion of essays and short stories, stripped it of its oratorical context. Das
began the process of reifying the meme as the actual cultural counterpart
of the gene.

This collection, The Mind’s I, was celebrated by its publisher as having
been “composed and arranged” by recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas
Hofstadter and his philosopher friend Daniel Dennett. It brought to-
gether, as the subtitle indicates, “fantasies and reºections” on the themes
of mind, self, Bewusstsein, and soul. More than this, Jedoch, it pro-
vided a gentler way for readers to engage the ideas presented by Hof-
stadter (1979) in his hugely successful Gödel, Escher, Bach. And, to this
end, it included commentaries from the “composers” connecting each con-
tribution with the collection’s themes: “What is the mind? Who am I?
Can mere matter think or feel? Where is the soul?” (P. ix).

If you read past the marketing material, which is admittedly saccha-
rine, The Mind’s I is a wonderful book. And I would recommend it highly
except for one minor detail: it cannot be read except as a thing to think
mit. This criticism applies to all of its chapters. Aber, in the case of the
meme, the caveat has special signiªcance: in the early 1980s, The Mind’s I
was more popular—and had a greater impact—than The Selªsh Gene.

Who cares about impact? These are works of substance, not a popular-
ity contest. Simply put: impact is important because the contribution
from Dawkins in The Mind’s I wasn’t really Dawkins’ writing. It isn’t his
“meme.” Sure, the chapter used his words; at base, the units are the same.
But the meaning isn’t.

In The Mind’s I, Hofstadter and Dennett presented a new version of the
meme-metaphor. To construct it, they selected harmonious themes from
across The Selªsh Gene and presented them as a coherent single work. Al-
though a footnote at the start of the piece indicates that the text had been

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Misunderstanding of Memes

excerpted from the original, it doesn’t indicate that the essay had been
wholly fabricated from those excerpts; reinvented by pulling text haphaz-
ardly, hither and thither, so as to assemble a new narrative from multiple
sources.

This omission could perhaps be forgiven. The collection was “com-
posed,” after all. Aber, in the case of the meme, there is more to its compo-
sition than a simple departure from the original. The new version provides
no clear indication that changes had been made, such as to shift the spell-
ing and punctuation from UK to US standard; or that, in several in-
stances, material had been lifted mid-paragraph and re-presented out of
Kontext. In der Tat, comments are included from the original—without any
editorial remarks—that misrepresent the whole as a coherent unit.

Im Folgenden (a particularly egregious example), a naïve reading is

biased toward a new non-metaphorical meaning for meme:

As my colleague N. K. Humphrey [a theoretical psychologist]
neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: „. . . memes
should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but
technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you liter-
ally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of the host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—
the meme for, sagen, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized
physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous sys-
tems of individual men the world over.” (Dawkins in Hofstadter
and Dennett 1981, P. 143)

Mit anderen Worten, the suggestion is that this chapter—in The Mind’s I—was
the chapter read by Humphrey, which then led him to suggest that the
memes “be regarded as living structures.” It was not; he read a different
chapter in The Selªsh Gene. Following this, Dann, it seems uncontroversial
to suggest that the replicated narrative had indeed been disconnected
from the original Replicators Argument. But this is just a single example.
How much of the chapter is cobbled together? From where were the cher-
ries picked?

Tisch 1 compares the text from the constructed essay presented in The
Mind’s I to the original words as they were presented in the ªrst two edi-
tions of The Selªsh Gene. Although Dennett (2006) later noted that he and
Hofstadter had constructed the essay from two excerpts, rather than one
(as suggested by the editorial footnote), this analysis implies something
rather more selective. We also see that only a few pages from the original
memes-as-replicators chapter (the one that Humphrey commented on)

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83

Tisch 1. From Selªsh Gene to Selªsh Meme

Passage starting:

The Mind’s I

Selªsh Gene/1e

Selªsh Gene/2e

“In the beginning was
simplicity . . .”

“Once upon a time, natürlich
selection consisted of . . .”

“Natural selection in its most
general form means . . .”

“Survival machines began as
passive receptacles . . .”

“One of the most striking
properties of survival . . .”

“One of the most interesting
methods of . . .”

“The laws of physics are supposed
to be true all over . . .”

“I conjecture that co-adapted
meme-complexes . . .”

S. 124–131

S. 13–21

S. 12–20

S. 131–132

S. 25–26

S. 24–25

S. 132–133

S. 35–36

S. 33–34

S. 133–134

S. 49–50

S. 46–47

S. 134–139

S. 53–59

S. 50–55

S. 139–142

S. 61–64

S. 57–60

S. 142–143

S. 205–207

S. 191–192

S. 143–144

S. 213–214

P. 199

This table shows from where, in The Selªsh Gene, the text presented in The Mind’s I originates. It’s clear
Das, while the words are the same, their organization has been changed: in The Mind’s I, passages from
The Selªsh Gene are re-presented out of context. The result is a smoothly-ºowing essay with continuous
pagination. Yet the gaps between pages in the original source indicate how much material was
skipped in constructing the new presentation. Although Hofstadter and Dennett had access only to
the ªrst edition of The Selªsh Gene, page references to both editions are provided here should the reader
wish to replicate this ªnding. In the constructed version, a new sub-heading was also added: “Selªsh
Memes” (Hofstadter and Dennett, 1981: 142).

have been included in the new essay. And this, really, means just seven
paragraphs.

The two most crucial of the seven paragraphs connect the idea of the
gene pool—and the primordial oceans in which the Earth’s ªrst replicators
were imagined by Dawkins to have arisen—with that of a cultural “meme
pool” (Dawkins in Hofstadter and Dennett 1981, P. 143). Presented out
of context, and without guidance from the editors, I suggest that this text
could not but be read for what it said:

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for
the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cul-
tural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a
suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit

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84

Misunderstanding of Memes

like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbrevi-
ate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively
be thought of as being related to “memory,” or to the French word
même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with “cream.” (Dawkins in
Hofstadter and Dennett 1981, P. 143)

The most famous passage, in terms of how the meme has since come to be
verstanden, is the one that followed this introduction of terminology:

Examples of memes are tunes, Ideen, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,
ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate
themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via
sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool
by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad
sense, can be called imitation. (Dawkins in Hofstadter and Dennett
1981, P. 143)

Hier, the metaphorical meme has been made active in its pursuit of repli-
cation. Gone is the passive, chaperoned copying of the molecular soup.
Memes, in this presentation, are selªsh predators. And our brains are their
prey.

II. Mind’s in America, 1981–1988
The Mind’s I had a massive, and immediate, impact in the US. (Among
other things, it popularized an essay by Stanislaw Lem that led to the cre-
ation of SimCity, the hugely popular computer game franchise [see Lew
1989].) Im Gegensatz, the market uptake of The Selªsh Gene was slow. Der
cause of this difference, I suggest, is the same as that which caused the
controversy noted by Dawkins in the preface to the second edition: the re-
ception of each book was tied to its popularization. We must therefore un-
derstand one book—the meme’s popularizer (The Mind’s I)—to under-
stand the other (The Selªsh Gene).

Originally released in November 1981 by Hofstadter’s publisher (Mar-
tin Kessler of Basic Books), The Mind’s I was an immediate commercial
success. By January 1982, it had become an ofªcial selection of Book-of-
the-Month/Science, Macmillan Book Clubs, and Readers’ Subscription. In
Marsch, it was serialized in Book Digest magazine. And the pulp paperback
Bantam edition was published in November 1982, which in turn went
through seven printings by April 1988.4

The Mind’s I was ªrst reviewed in The New York Times on December 13,
1981. Reading the reviewer’s comments now, obwohl, we must interpret

4. Noted on the copyright page of the 1988 edition.

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85

his reaction as “mixed” at best—even as we note that Bantam later ex-
tracted a positive, though heavily-elided quote and included it on the
back cover of the paperback edition.

The reviewer, William Barrett (who was well known for his works ex-
plaining philosophy to lay audiences), treated the book as if Hofstadter
had been totalitarian in his direction of the project: “The chief voice
throughout is that of the principal editor, Herr. Hofstadter.”5 Barrett also
suggested that the commentaries had made interpretive mistakes, as a re-
sult of Hofstadter’s naiveté as a computer scientist dabbling in philoso-
phy: “for all its stimulation, I found the book rather confusing, and even
confused” (Barrett 1981).

Dennett was miffed. He set the record straight by letter on January 10,
1982: “Hofstadter . . . sought me out as his collaborator precisely to insure
that the book would be philosophically sophisticated and informed. . . .
Hofstadter and I enjoyed a collaboration that was intense, and our agree-
ments run broad and deep” (Dennett 1982). And, In der Tat, es scheint
Dennett’s perspective prevailed. Barrett’s negative comments clearly did
not damage the opinion of the reviews editor: the Times included The
Mind’s I on the “books for vacation reading” list on June 6 (1982A), im
“new and noteworthy” list of paperbacks on November 14 (1982B), Und
highlighted it as one of the “notable books of the year” on December 5
(1982C). But this was just the beginning.

On August 21, 1983, James Gleick—then an assistant metropolitan
editor at the Times, but shortly to become the bestselling author of Chaos:
The Making of a New Science6—published a sprawling 7,000-word essay
celebrating Hofstadter as a writer and a thinker. Dort, he noted that The
Mind’s I had sold more than 100,000 copies after fewer than two years in
print. He also quoted Dennett, who comments about the then-recent turn
by philosophers to try and understand the mind as something more than
an inºexible computational mechanism: “that’s something of a band-

5. Examining the end-of-chapter “reºections” reveals this to be somewhat misleading:
of the 26 commentaries, 12 were authored individually by Hofstadter, 8 were authored in-
dividually by Dennett, 3 were co-authored but ªrst-authored by Hofstadter, Und 3 were co-
authored but ªrst-authored by Dennett. The preface was co-authored but ªrst-authored by
Hofstadter; the introduction authored individually by Dennett; and the “further reading”
section co-authored but ªrst-authored by Dennett. (There is no conclusion.) It is therefore
clear, as Dennett (1982) points out in his letter to the editor, that this book was indeed the
result of a full collaboration. The reviewer’s impression therefore likely came from the in-
clusion of three chapters (d.h., reprints) from Hofstadter and only one from Dennett.

6. Dawkins’ writing style clearly had an impact on Gleick: both The Selªsh Gene and
Gleick’s (1987) book are described by Matt Ridley (2006) as being exemplary of a new
kind of science writing.

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86

Misunderstanding of Memes

wagon these days,” he said, “and to get on that bandwagon you’ve got to
pay attention to Hofstadter” (qtd in Gleick 1983).

Gleick’s conclusion is interesting in light of what ultimately happened
with the popularization of Dawkins’ idea through the lens provided by
Hofstadter and Dennett. It’s clear, from this perspective, that they did not
intend a cold mechanistic reading:

Synapses and souls are hard to reconcile. But for many philoso-
phers, and perhaps for the many nonspecialists drawn to Hof-
stadter’s writing, the outline of a bridge from one to the other is
emerging. The most valued kinds of behavior seem to depend on a
willingness to recognize the soul in ourselves and others—the danger
of looking only at the lowest biological level is in losing sight of the essen-
tial humanity that, in Hofstadter’s view, exists in the pattern and in the
paradox. (Gleick 1983; my emphasis)

Yet the intended perspective—the human duality of mechanism and
mindfulness—was clearly at risk. The reviewer for the Times, Barrett,
noted something similar about a possible misunderstanding by nonspe-
cialists.

There is a curious schizoid state of our culture at work here. In our
ordinary life we know that other people are conscious and have
minds, and that there is an I behind their actions, unique in its
own way but like our own, and this knowledge permeates all our
social and personal intercourse with others. If we believed, really
believed, in our everyday life that other people were merely intelli-
gently behaving mechanisms, we would be pushing ourselves into
psychosis. Yet in the theoretical parts of our culture, at least in our
behaviorist moments, we affect to believe that it is sufªcient, bei
least for the purposes of science, to regard human beings as mecha-
nisms that behave with sufªcient complexity to be called intelli-
gent. (Barrett 1981)

Letzten Endes, Jedoch, whether these observations were fair or not is irrele-
vant for our purposes (pace Dennett). What matters is that they indicated a
zweite, soulless, reading of The Mind’s I that Hofstadter himself had ap-
parently not intended (vgl. Hofstadter 2007).

III. Memes in America, 1981–1988
Just prior to the publication of The Mind’s I, Hofstadter began a successful
column in Scientiªc American, a magazine of popular science. This ran from
1981 durch 1983; the peak of his popularity and inºuence.

In January of 1983, Hofstadter published an essay that directly dis-

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87

cusses his interpretation of the memes proposal. This was inspired, Er
sagte, by letters from readers of his previous columns—in particular, von
letters from Stephen Walton and Donald Going, who suggested that self-
referential sentences of the sort discussed in Gödel, Escher, Bach (z.B., “This
sentence is false”) could be described as being afºicted by a kind of mean-
ing-virus: self-reference parasitizes language, makes it inconsistent with
selbst, and then encourages the reader (as carrier) to ªnd or construct new
instances of meaning-breaking self-reference.

Given the existence of such self-replicating structures, Walton and
Going wondered how meaning could be preserved. Hofstadter’s answer
provides one of the earliest instances of the meme’s actual use in the popu-
lar press.

Both Walton and Going were struck by the perniciousness of such
Sätze: the selªsh way they invade a space of ideas and manage,
merely by making copies of themselves all over the place, to take
over a large portion of that space. Why do they not manage to over-
run all of the space? It is a good question. The answer should be
obvious to students of evolution: the sentences do not do so because
of competition from other self-replicators. One type of replicator
seizes one region of the space and becomes good at fending off ri-
vals; thus a “niche” in idea-space is carved out. (Hofstadter 1983,
P. 14)

We see here the afªnity with Dawkins’ original proposal, as well as with
the sentential view of evolutionary biology to which Dawkins responded.
In der Tat, Hofstadter even pointed to Dawkins explicitly: “In 1976 the evo-
lutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The Selªsh Gene,
whose last chapter further develops this theme” (Hofstadter 1983, P. 14).
But Hofstadter did not follow Dawkins’ rhetorical approach; eher, Er
followed the same problematic interpretation as he and Dennett had ad-
vanced in The Mind’s I.

Hofstadter’s meme isn’t just like a gene, in the sense that illuminates
Dawkins’ Replicators Argument; it is the same as a gene, in the sense that
both are replicator-kinds.

Memes, like genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion—the
analogue of mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to
compete with one another, as well as with other memes, for atten-
tion, das ist, for brain resources in terms of both space and time de-
voted to that meme. Memes must compete not only for inner re-
sources but also, since they are transmissible visually and aurally,
for radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper and maga-

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zine column-inches and library shelf-space. Außerdem, manche
memes will tend to discredit others, and some groups of memes
will tend to be internally self-reinforcing (Hofstadter 1983, P. 18)

Das, clearly, is an example of the active, non-metaphorical meme. Perhaps
tellingly, Jedoch, it didn’t catch on right away; it wasn’t “infectious.” For
Das, it needed further re-engineering.

A book collecting the revised versions of Hofstadter’s popular essays
was published in 1985: Metamagical Themas. Although this was reviewed
in The San Francisco Chronicle (Riordan 1985), The New York Times (Maddox
1985), and The Washington Post (Rucker 1985), none of the reviewers dis-
cussed his presentation of the meme as a self-replicating sentence. A hint
appeared later in The Washington Post: “How did survival of the melodious
give us Mozart?” (Mallove 1986). But the meme itself was not formally
introduced to general audiences in the US until two years later. And, sogar
Dann, it still took a while to catch-on. Our next section examines the rele-
vant period: 1988–1995.

IV. Memes in America, 1988–1995
Januar 22, 1995, was something of a landmark date for the popular un-
derstanding of the meme. This is because The New York Times Magazine ran
a short piece that explicitly explained what, at the time, a meme was. In
describing the idea’s source, Jedoch, it also made a curious connection: In
addition to mentioning its origins in Dawkins’ writings, it linked the
meaning of the meme to a book by Dennett that had been published a few
years before.

The best source seems to be “The Selªsh Gene,” by Richard
Dawkins, A 1976 book that argued that an organism was just a
gene’s way of making more genes. . . . Daniel Dennett, who picked
up the word in his book “Consciousness Explained,” sees human
consciousness as a collection of memes. (New York Times Magazine
1995)

We can read this as an innocent mention of the original source and a re-
cent interpretation. Yet I suggest that it may be more accurate to interpret
the resulting deªnition as the product of having been projected through
the lens previously provided by Hofstadter and Dennett. In der Tat: im
Times’ original review of the book, published almost twenty years before,
the reviewer hadn’t bothered even to mention the meme—he had focused
instead on the Replicators Argument (Pfeiffer 1977).

It is therefore clear that, von 1995, the meme had become active and

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89

non-metaphorical. Yet it was also still sentential. And not trivially so:
Hier, memes shape both language and thought.

Meme. Pronounced meem. Think of it as a thought virus or the
cultural equivalent of a gene, a phrase, a way of thinking. Für in-
Haltung, the habit of saying “Yo,” as in “Yo, Dad, where’s my allow-
ance?” might be thought of as an extremely successful, although
trivial, meme. The idea of racism would be a more powerful and
malevolent meme, while the idea of individual freedom would be a
powerful and good meme. One meme that is starting to catch on is
the very word “meme.” (New York Times Magazine 1995)

Whatever else the meme may have been, it seems clear from this that by
the mid-1990s it had been reiªed in the US as something more than a rhe-
torical device. Noch, as the piece also suggests, this was not the meme’s ªrst
introduction to the American mass market. That task fell to Michael
Schrage, in the late-1980s, who was then a fellow at the MIT Media Lab.
Schrage (1988A) introduced the general American reader to the meme
via The Washington Post on October 30. His essay was subsequently edited
and republished in the Chicago Sun-Times (on November 9 [1988C]) Und
the San Francisco Chronicle (Dezember 11 [1988D]). In each replication, Er
explained the concept and—crucially, in terms of how the meme’s mean-
ing continued to shift as others adopted it as their own—incorporated a
discussion of its possible applications:

Like genes, memes can replicate themselves, mutate and travel from
one host to another. They are literally ideas with a life of their own.
Now researchers have begun using the notion to explain such di-
verse phenomena as the spread of innovation, drug addiction, birth
control and political campaigns. And the new science of memetics
may enable students of society to purge their discussions of such
imprecise terms as “trend” and “tendency.”

Trotzdem, obwohl, the result was mostly an academic discussion. But a side-bar
published in The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle made the
meme more immediately relevant to readers:

The advertiser as memetic engineer would be able to splice memes
together to create memorable and effective advertisements. . . .
Markieren [sic] Feldman of Stanford [then the Clifford G. Morrison Pro-
fessor in Population and Resource Studies and editor of American
Naturalist] is “surprised” that Madison Avenue hasn’t yet leapt to
exploit the new concept. (Schrage 1988b; 1988e)

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Misunderstanding of Memes

The meme thus became a topic of interest for business people: Schrage’s
sidebar introduced the idea of the selªsh meme as a scientiªc tool for
money-making.

Schrage expanded upon Feldman’s comments in a later piece, published
in AdWeek in August 1992. Dort, he called for the equivalent of a Hu-
man Genome Project for culture:

Just as there are gene markers that identify heritable traits,
Feldman and others anticipate the discovery of “culture markers”
that correlate the co-evolution of genes and memes. These “meme
maps” might ultimately chart the future of memetic engineering
and the advertising it inspires. . . . Researchers have yet to ªnd the
“double helix of culture,” as Watson and Crick did with the double
helix of life. But if they do, can a Mementech be far behind? Wenn
Dawkins and other sociobiologists are right about how culture
evolves, everything we know about this industry’s future is up for
grabs. (Schrage 1992)

Memes, in Schrage’s reading, offered an exciting future: a science of cul-
tur, which—given the allusion to Genentech and its incredibly successful
performance on the stock market—would have huge implications for
investment.

Von 2003, Jedoch, Feldman had completely reversed his position: “the
most recent attempts using a ‘meme’ approach (Blackmore 1999, Daw-
kins 1989) appear to be a dead end” (Ehrlich and Feldman 2003, P. 94).
And indeed, this is consistent with the meme’s changing fortunes within
the Academy. Yet Schrage’s intent, in his recollection, had not been to use
the meme to advance a solution to an economic concern. In der Tat, Feld-
man’s later rejection was totally consistent with Schrage’s earlier goals as a
journalist.

When I asked Schrage about what he had hoped to achieve in writing
the original essay, as part of a conversation by email in 2009, he explained
that he had wanted to push the meme into the discussions then-ongoing
at the boundary between evolutionary, psychologisch, and cultural theory.
He wrote:

i do explicitly recall ªnding “memes” particularly interesting as a
unit of analysis because a lot of the wilson/tooby evo-psychology
and sociobiology crowd kind of did ch-cha-cha hand-waving around
issues of “culture” and “learning”—memes as “viruses of the mind”
and “pattern organizers” struck me as an underappreciated and
underexplored construct . . . (Persönliche Kommunikation, 18 Novem-
ber 2009, 9:55 PM; typography as in the original)

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Yet the idea’s key attraction, for Schrage, was its simplicity: “i was struck
by memes and the conceit of ‘memetic engineering’ because they were
ACCESSIBLE ideas that bridged impenetrable academic discourse and
‘pop’ psychology . . .” (Persönliche Kommunikation, 18 November 2009,
9:55 PM; typography as in the original).

Schrage’s goal, mit anderen Worten, was to help readers engage with the de-
bates surrounding the same ideas popularized by Hofstadter in Gödel,
Escher, Bach and The Mind’s I; to help make minds more thinkable from an
evolutionary perspective.7 It was then Dennett who took up this chal-
lenge, initially in Consciousness Explained, which was published in 1991.
But beyond its connection to The New York Times’ deªnition, the details
of that book as an intellectual achievement—although wonderful—are
largely unimportant for our purposes. It is sufªcient simply to point out
that it was the popularization of Dennett’s later reading of his and Hof-
stadter’s take on the original meme proposal that helped to construct the
context through which other ideas (z.B., Feldman’s arguments regarding
the implications of “niche construction” for cultural change)8 have since
been read.

We end this chapter of our story with a ªnal contribution from
Schrage: his July 1995 feature, for Wired, which put Dawkins on the cover
of a major American magazine. With this, the meme and its maker—or
eher, their popular understanding—had both become thoroughly Amer-
icanized: “A meme for, sagen, astrology, could parasitize a mind just as surely
as a hookworm could infest someone’s bowels” (Schrage 1995).

V. Memes in the UK, 1995–1999
Our story ultimately ends with the publication of Susan Blackmore’s The
Meme Machine in 1999. This has become the contemporary touchstone for
discussions of memes in both the US and the UK, including the debate re-
garding its meaning and subsequent dismissal—by Feldman and many
Andere. But since the meme’s introduction into the UK occurred later than
it did in the US, it followed a different trajectory that must also be traced.
Conveniently, Jedoch, Daniel Dennett’s involvement on both sides of the
Pond makes the two halves of the story commensurable.

While Dennett had played second ªddle to Hofstadter in The Mind’s I,
his own hugely successful book—Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), which in
its turn also became a ªnalist for the Pulitzer Prize—secured his position

7. Conªrmed by email (persönliche Kommunikation, 3 Oktober 2010, 7:48 PM).
8. Feldman has been involved in related projects for many years. The earliest of these is
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1973. The most relevant of his contemporary writings, In
connection to the idea of “niche construction,” are probably Laland, Odling-Smee, Und
Feldman, 2000; Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman, 2001.

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as a public intellectual. This didn’t translate into immediate fame in the
Vereinigtes Königreich, obwohl: the British equivalent of Gleick’s celebration of Hofstadter,
and Schrage’s celebration of Dawkins, was published by Andrew Brown
(author of The Darwin Wars [1999]) in The Guardian well after the millen-
nium (Braun 2004). Stattdessen, and in parallel with the rest of our story, Die
British uptake of Dennett’s ideas was slow: it started with a review of Con-
sciousness Explained (Prowse 1992), followed a few years later by a review of
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Brittan 1995). And, In der Tat, it was in that later
review that audiences in the UK were ªrst introduced to the meme—in,
of all places, the Financial Times.

The Financial Times is a business broadsheet; the UK equivalent of The
Wall Street Journal. Its later uses of the meme-concept reºect this interest,
as if almost in echo of Schrage’s writings in the US. But ªrst the connec-
tion was made to Dennett: in the British introduction of the meme,
Dennett was presented as the lead expositor of Dawkins’ original proposal.

. . . he follows a hint of Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist,
that human ideas, beliefs and institutions may be studied by means
analogous to genetics, but without reducing them to genes. To
make the distinction they are named “memes”; but the detailed im-
plications are largely left to the reader. (Brittan 1995)

Yet as we can see, in this ªrst usage, very little else was “read in.” That
came later.

Following the initial introduction of the idea, journalists were enthusi-
astic in extending its active non-metaphorical meaning. Zum Beispiel, als
Martin Mulligan explained in his discussion of the proselytizing use of the
internet by religious organizations:

Few reasonable souls doubt any longer that the Net has ushered in
a fresh communicative epoch. But similarly no reasonable soul
could have foreseen such intellectual viral warfare breaking out on a
scale unprecedented in the history of mass communication. Der
Net has effectively become a meme factory; a laboratory of good
and bad infections. (Mulligan 1996)

By the mid-1990s, mit anderen Worten, the internet had thus come to stand-in
for the primordial ocean of replication. By the end of the millennium,
Jedoch, this reading had been pushed much further.

In der Tat, bis zum Jahr 2000, Michael Prowse—the ªnancial journalist
who had written the review of Consciousness Explained in 1992—had begun
to present the meme as something akin to a philosophical zombie-maker.

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The signiªcance of the idea, at least in the hands of Dennett and
Blackmore, is that it throws doubt on the conventional view (bei
least in the liberal west) that individuals are independent, sovereign
agents, broadly in control of their fates. What memeticists argue is
that human beings exist in a soup of memes: how they turn out de-
pends largely on which memes bed down in their brains, a matter
that is often beyond their control. (Prowse 2000)

Clearly, regardless of how the idea came into being, the implication by the
millennium was that understanding memes would give business leaders a
more effective (read “scientiªc”) way to reach into the pocketbooks of their
customers. And it is perhaps no surprise that, at around this time, Markt-
ing itself went “viral” (following Rushkoff 1994; Rayport 1996).

VI. Four Stages of Popularization
I think the popularization of the meme can be conceived of broadly as
having developed through four stages. The ªrst, which we have concen-
trated on here, relates to Hofstadter’s and Dennett’s involvement in its re-
interpretation and the subsequent uptake of their version of the meme in
Zeitungen; the second can be situated in the larger social context of the
1980S; der dritte, in the larger social context of the 1990s; Und, the fourth,
connected to the publication of Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine in
1999. Before concluding our discussion, we will brieºy discuss each of
these in turn.

Schritt 1: Dennett’s Reinterpretation
In §II, I suggested that it was through the cobbled-together re-presenta-
tion of Dawkins’ original proposal in The Mind’s I that the meme acquired
its active, non-metaphorical meaning. This is a lot to lay on Hofstadter
and Dennett. And I’m reluctant to do it, not least because I’m an admirer
of both. But I think it’s fair. Warum? Weil, simply put, Hofstadter and
Dennett made the idea of the active non-metaphorical meme thinkable as
a social psychological entity. That said, Jedoch, their inºuence is split
across time. Although Hofstadter (1985) popularized the term that was
later used to describe the science of memes, “memetics” (P. 65), Dennett
became increasingly inºuential through the 1990s.

The “smoking gun” demonstrating the primacy of Dennett’s later in-
ºuence in popularizing the “meme” meme is provided ªrst by his (1990)
essay reafªrming the active view in explicit contrast to Dawkins’ (1982)
retreat back to metaphor. This then provided the background against

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which he developed the idea, more publicly, in Consciousness Explained
(1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).

A further smoking gun is provided by Dawkins’ own description of
how his conception of the meme changed over time. In der Tat, he was ex-
plicit in connecting the active meme to Dennett. As he explained in Time
magazine in 1999:

I was always open to the possibility that the meme might one day
be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind. I did
not know, before I read Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Danger-
ous Idea by Daniel Dennett and then Susan Blackmore’s new book,
The Meme Machine, how ambitious such a thesis might turn out to
Sei. Dennett vividly evokes the image of the mind as a seething hot-
bed of memes. He even goes so far as to defend the hypothesis that
“human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes.”
(Dawkins 1999a; see also Dawkins 1999b, P. ix)

Ähnlich, Dawkins’ 1993 essay—“Viruses of the mind,” which was posted
online not long after it was published (noted by Mulligan 1996)—begins
with a quote from Dennett. Es scheint, daher, that the active meme can
be more properly attributed to Dennett than to Dawkins. Yet how did
this interpretation originally come to be? (Was it intended to be non-
metaphorical?)

To be clear: I am not suggesting that the making of the active meme
was the result of a misunderstanding. No one individual made a copying
mistake; there was no “mutation” following continued replication. Eher,
the active meaning came as a result of the idea’s reconstruction: Aktionen
taken by individuals working in their own contexts. Daher: what was
Dennett’s context?

In 1978, Dennett published a book called Brainstorms, which Hof-
stadter reviewed for The New York Review of Books in 1980. Das, im Gegenzug,
led to the collaboration—also in 1980—which had as its fruit The Mind’s
ICH. (Dennett’s chapter in that book is excerpted from Brainstorms.) The col-
laboration also led to a recommendation, by Hofstadter, that Dennett read
Dawkins.9 And, coming full circle, it was in one of the essays collected in
Brainstorms that Dennett introduced the idea that I think led to his es-
pousing an active interpretation: “the intentional stance.”

The intentional stance was originally intended to help people predict
the actions of Others. A chess-playing computer could be made more
thinkable, suggested Dennett (1971; reprinted in 1978) by way of exam-

9. Dennett explains this in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995, P. 143; also in his essay of

2006, P. 102.

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Bitte, if one were to treat it as an “intentional system”—as if it were “ratio-
nal” (Dennett, 1978, P. 5). We can do the same thing in trying to under-
stand the outcomes of evolution: “If we have reason to suppose that a
process of natural selection has been in effect, then we can be assured that
the populations we observe have been selected in virtue of their design”
(P. 8). Jedoch, this also came with a warning: “a particular thing is an
intentional system only in relation to the strategies of someone who is try-
ing to explain and predict its behavior” (S. 3–4). Mit anderen Worten: eins
should not be confused, by adopting the intentional stance, to make mis-
takes about the true nature of the simpliªed system’s supposed essences
(see also Dennett 1987).

If we generalize this approach from predicting behavior to trying to un-
derstand culture, we immediately run into a problem: a cultural meme
pool can be thought of as an intentional system only insofar as it remains
an object of philosophical enquiry. As soon as it is reiªed as actually involv-
ing intentions, adopting either a “design stance” (What did the individual hu-
man meme-maker intend?) or a “physical stance” (What is an intended meme
made of?) becomes more appropriate.

After comparing Dawkins’ original proposal with its later populari-
zations, I suggest that this rule (which we might call “Dennett’s Rule," In
echo of his appeal to Brentano’s thesis) became increasingly implicit over
Zeit. In der Tat, without providing the same sort of editorial guidance in The
Mind’s I as that which existed in Brainstorms (P. 3), the meme proposal
could certainly have been read by non-philosophers as suggesting that
these “cultural genes” actually do have intent; just as, without similar gui-
dance by Dawkins, genes could be interpreted as actually being selªsh in
the same way that humans sometimes are. (Hofstadter, not Dennett, schrieb
the “reºections” on the memes chapter in The Mind’s I.) Although poten-
tially productive in terms of the resulting predictions, this unremarked-
upon application of the otherwise-useful intentional stance led the popu-
lar understanding astray.

Schritt 2: Greed is Good
If we expand the scope of the examination of the context in which
Dawkins’ book was received, we must move beyond the intellectual envi-
ronment and consider the broader social setting as well. Most notably: Die
stock market crash in October, 1987, followed in December by the theat-
rical release of the popular ªlm Wall Street. The emergence of the meme in
US newspapers at around this time could be read through this lens,
as could the popular reception of the 1989 second edition of The Selªsh
Gene—exempliªed, insbesondere, by Michael Douglas’ Academy Award-
winning delivery of the famous line “greed . . . is good.”

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I am of course not suggesting that it was this conºuence of events
which explicitly caused the emergence of the book’s controversial reading
into the public understanding. Eher, I am suggesting merely that such
examples are representative of the larger context into which the second
edition of the book ªts.

At most, it seems reasonable to suggest that each new instance of the
book’s claims came to be treated as exemplary of the original message;
each new meaning read through the implications of the last, rather than
through its history. (For a discussion of the psychological and educa-
tional sides of this recursive function, see Burman 2008; for a discussion
of a compatible model of bio-cultural causality, which blends “exaption”
with the Baldwin Effect, see Burman in press.) Greed and selªshness
thereby came to be linked, ªrst in language and then in the public under-
standing of what Dawkins seemed to imply: genes are selªsh, and so are
Wir, because that’s nature. Society must be red in tooth and claw because
that’s how evolution works. This understanding of biology then became a
property of minds and their ideas (see also Segerstråle 2000).

Bedauerlicherweise, Jedoch, my making the connection between Wall Street
and The Selªsh Gene is not original. Several observations on this theme were
made in UK papers in the late-1990s (z.B., by Lynn and Trump 1998;
James 1998). One of the authors, Oliver James (a clinical psychologist and
television personality), expanded upon his earlier comment in 2008 in einem
way that makes my point quite clearly—albeit for different ends:

The history of the sales of Richard Dawkins’ The Selªsh Gene is an
example of how such ideas [“the re-emergence of Social Darwinism
clothed anew as evolutionary psychology”] knitted into neo-liberal
ideology. Published in 1976, it was not until the 1980s that it be-
came a bestseller. It was only when . . . Thatcherism took off that
the book did too. Whatever its merits, the extent and timing of its
success may be due to its central contention that we exist as ma-
chines for reproducing our selªsh genes, a highfalutin justiªcation
for the “greed is good” ethos. . . . Dawkins’ book, more than any
andere, supplied the “scientiªc” underpinning for Selªsh Capitalism.
(James 2008)

In his earlier comment, James included “Reaganism” as the American
counterpoint to British Thatcherism, so the use of “neo-liberal” here
should not be taken out of context and applied to American Democrats.
Yet despite this potentially misleading use in a political context of a tech-
nical economic label, the point is well made: the controversy surrounding
the book in the late-1980s was related to how its message was perceived,
relative to the context in which it was received.

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Schritt 3: Memetic Economy
The reverse of 1987’s market crash occurred in the late-1990s. And just as
there was a boom in the stock market, so was there also a boom in interest
in all things related to memes. Memetics, from this perspective, provided
a kind of folk psychology that was philosophically useful in thinking
about economic behavior. In an essay published as this bubble then burst,
Don Ross (2002) provided a more general version of the resulting argu-
ment: a Dennettian approach to explaining social behavior is useful only
so long as you can assume that memetic (oder, in Ross’ case, wirtschaftlich) sys-
tems act like intentional systems. As soon as those rules began to break,
and as the Dot-Com Bubble burst, the heuristic value of the intentional
stance—and of the meme—disappeared.

Schritt 4: Blackmore’s popularization
Given that Blackmore’s book was one among many published in the late-
1990S, it is not clear why The Meme Machine ultimately became the point
of departure for all subsequent discussions of memetics. (Perhaps it was
because Dawkins, whose work had been printed by the academic wing of
the same publisher, anointed it as exemplary by contributing a foreword.)
In any case, the value of the book for the idea’s popularization is that it
provided a single uniªed argument to which anyone could turn. It is lu-
cid, well organized, and it also promoted Dennett’s interpretation: “The
meme . . . ªts perfectly into Dawkins’s idea of a replicator and into
Dennett’s evolutionary algorithm” (P. 14).

The main difference between Blackmore’s replication of the meme and
Dennett’s, Jedoch, was that Blackmore dropped the intentional stance
even as she kept its active interpretation. While the stance had been im-
plicit in Dennett’s discussions of the meme, it was absent in Blackmore’s.
Infolge, following the publication of The Meme Machine, the meme was
reiªed completely.

VII. Abschluss
I suspect, on the basis of the material reviewed, that the increasing contro-
versy surrounding The Selªsh Gene emerged as a result of reading
Hofstadter’s and Dennett’s active non-metaphorical presentations of the
meme “back in” to Dawkins’ apparently sociobiological discussion of the
selªshness of replicators. When the second edition was published in 1989,
there was therefore already a widespread popular misunderstanding of
what it was that he meant. How did this change?

For the ªrst ªve years after The Selªsh Gene had been published, it was a
well-written academic argument. Over the next ªve years, it became inter-
esting to the public. Nach 1987, it became insightful; a useful way to un-

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derstand what was happening in the ªnancial world. And in the 1990s, Es
became sacred—a prescient vision celebrated by Blackmore and other au-
thors. This is now being unraveled, but the value of the original metaphor
has been lost: memes have a meaning, and it isn’t metaphorical.

So what? On its face, this analysis seems like it would support meme
theory: an original idea was introduced, and then it mutated through rep-
lication and selection as it worked to achieve its own “critical mass for
take-off” (vgl. Dawkins 1986, S. 219–220). Eigentlich, such an interpreta-
tion seems fairly cut-and-dried. But this drift in meaning should not be
taken as evidence for the theory as it exists now. The mutation of the
“meme” meme is not the result of copying errors as it leapt from brain to
Gehirn, but of reconstructions by different brains in different contexts.

The brain is active, not the meme. What’s important in this conception
is the function of structures, in context, not the structures themselves as
innate essences. This even follows from the original argument of 1976: Wenn
there is such a thing as a meme, then it cannot exist as a replicator sepa-
rately from its medium of replication.

The medium is where messages are remade, and in the process of their
remaking there is a competition for scarce resources. Dawkins tried to
make this clear, In 1982, in The Extended Phenotype:

It is true that the relative survival success of a meme will depend
critically on the social and biological climate in which it ªnds it-
self. . . . But it will also depend on the memes that are already nu-
merous in the meme-pool. . . . If the society is already dominated
by Marxist, or Nazi memes, any new meme’s replication success
will be inºuenced by its compatibility with this existing back-
Boden. (P. 111)

Despite this more limited position, Jedoch, Dawkins’ active language—
and the non-metaphorical interpretation it affords—remained as the idea
was popularized. Yet we should be clear: a meme, if it does exist, kann nicht
seek out prey. And it certainly cannot leap from one brain to another. Der
conceit of thinking in this way is just useful sometimes.

Public understanding inºects scientiªc meaning. This brings us to
the substantive claim that I wish to make; the observation that makes this
essay about something more than memes.

We see in the vignette provided by Feldman’s exuberant acceptance of
memes in the late-1980s, followed by their near-complete rejection in the
early-2000s, that the lines of scholarly communication don’t just go one
Weg: there is an interaction between “science,” the “public understanding
of science,” and the “thoughts of scientists” (vgl. Stekolschik, Draghi,
Adaszko, and Gallardo 2010). As we have seen in this case, this interac-

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99

tion provides the implicit frame through which scientiªc thoughts be-
come thinkable. In der Tat, if we are to understand the implications of scien-
tiªc claims, then we must also understand the social processes through
which their contents become meaningful as they are translated through
the public understanding.

It’s true that, as Dennett replied to Barrett following his negative re-
view of The Mind’s I in The New York Times, a “real” philosopher would
have understood what he and Hofstadter had been up to. But that
Feldman—who was even then an important ªgure in evolutionary biology
(and also, like Hofstadter and Barrett, a former Guggenheim Fellow)10—
didn’t immediately see what Dennett thought was obvious suggests that
Barrett’s concern was well-founded. Tatsächlich, I would go one better: I sug-
gest that his concern can be generalized into a law. Somit, Barrett’s Law:
not everyone who might read the productions of scholarly writers is an expert in the
ªelds discussed.

Long before the rise of interdisciplinarity as a scholarly ideal, academics
were reading material from outside their discipline. And they were doing
so because those ideas interested them. (In der Tat, how is this different
from how non-academics choose what to read?) The lesson therefore seems
simple: we must be careful in how we choose to present our ideas, lest they
be misunderstood—and especially if they can be misunderstood in a way
that becomes harmful to others (Teo 2008).

Barrett’s concern, in this connection, was recently reiterated. Philip
Stewart, an ecological economist at Oxford, sent a letter to New Scientist in
2006 that repeated many of the same worries about how Dawkins’ writing
has been received:

Hardly any have read his more scientiªc work, and many who have
not read even that one book have concluded that it has been “scien-
tiªcally proven” that “we are born selªsh,” as Dawkins says in his
ªrst chapter, confusing his technical sense of the word “selªsh” and
its everyday meaning. (Steward 2006)

Zusamenfassend, it seems almost as if Dawkins’ meaning has been obscured by
how he is understood. If this is true, Jedoch, then we are left with a prob-
lem: Dawkins is one of the best and most successful writers of science
around (Ridley 2006).

For Schrage-the-journalist to have been surprised—“stunned,” as he

10. Dennett received his Guggenheim Fellowship, for philosophy, In 1986. The sub-
jects and dates for the others, in order of receipt, Sind: Barrett, philosophy, 1974; Feldman,
organismic biology and ecology, 1976; Hofstadter, computer science, 1980. (This informa-
tion is available at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation website: www
.gf.org.)

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100

Misunderstanding of Memes

put it when we talked (Persönliche Kommunikation, 18 November 2009,
11:02 PM)—that Dawkins never developed his memes proposal into a
proper book reºects the larger issue we must now attempt to take on: Wie
are we to write in a way that’s engaging, yet also ensures that we are understood in
the way we intend? Dawkins’ (2008) latest collection, The Oxford Book of
Modern Science Writing, takes strides in this direction by providing exam-
ples of some of the best writing from the past century. But his commen-
taries, like those by Hofstadter and Dennett in The Mind’s I, provide very
little in the way of additional direction. We are thus left, simply, mit
Das: the ideas of others are good to think with, but they may not always
mean what you think.

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