Richard Dawkins | Memes | Oxford Union

[Music] [Applause] when I said that uh the reason why we explain evolution in terms of changes in gene frequencies I said the reason for that was that only genes make exact copies of themselves through generations and therefore only genes have a really significant difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones now in order to dramatize that point in the last chapter of the first edition of The Selfish Gene I wanted to make the point that actually anything which has that property that genes have of making exact copies of themselves anything that has that property would do and I pointed out that uh if on some other planet if on Mars there is life then I put my shirt on uh the prediction that it will be found to be darwinian life and that there will be something equivalent to genes there'll be something equivalent to DNA which is very very exactly copied not not absolutely exactly but usually exactly copied there'll be something equivalent to DNA and it may well not be DNA may be nothing like DNA but of course we we haven't been to to to distant planets to find other forms of life and so I instead said maybe there's another kind of replicator on this planet that potentially could be doing the same job as DNA and that's where the meme came from the meme is the unit of cultural inheritance it's anything that behaves like a gene in human culture uh the equivalent of uh the act of reproduction at the genetic level would be the act of copying an idea from one brain to another and I used examples like whistling a tune uh and the and somebody else catches the tune almost like catching a virus and they whistle the tune and they walk off into the street whistling the same tune and somebody else catches it uh and whistles the same tune and so potentially you can have the same tune spreading throughout throughout the town or if not a tune it could be a style of dress um it could be an accent it could be a a favorite word uh it could be um a a a style of pottery or wood carving or anything like that W which is copied from one person to another you could imagine a style of carpentry a style of wood carving that is copied from a master to an apprentice and then The Apprentice becomes a master of the Next Generation and passes on his skill to an apprentice of the Next Generation anything like that provided that something is accurately copied down generations and where I use the word generation in a metaphorical way you you now understand generation could mean I whistle a tune and then you pick it up and whistle the same tun that's one generation so I'm using generation in that in that metaphorical sense wherever you have memes that are copied from one brain to another you potentially have the possibility of a kind of natural selection now it's a big step from that to say they're actually is natural selection presumably if we go with the analogy of the tunes some some tunes are more likely to be whistled and copied than others because they're just better Tunes they're more catchy we we actually use the word catchy um so there is a kind of natural selection that we all sort of know about um various objections have been raised to the theory of memes and by the way I should add that I I only ever proposed it in order to downplay the gene as the only unit of natural s section I wanted to say look you've just read this book The Selfish Gene which is all about genes as the level at which natural selection acts it doesn't have to be that way the level of natural selection is certainly not the individual organism nor is it the group but it could be some other kind of molecule on another planet or it could be the meme on this planet um I I wasn't intending it to be a contribution to the theory of human culture others have tried to make it so which is all which is fine I'm delighted that they have I mean Dan dennit and Susan Blackmore for example um objections have been raised to it like the mutation rates too high uh the thing about genes is that they are exceedingly accurately copied memes are not um if if I let let's let's imagine the game of that Americans call telephone and we here call Chinese Whispers where you have a line of people and I whisper a rhyme into the ear of the first person who Whispers the rhyme into the ear of the next person who Whispers it into the next one and so on and the the funny part of the game is that usually the rhyme becomes completely garbled by the time it reaches it reaches the other end but if the rhyme was sufficiently short and easy to remember if it were just something very short uh like too many cooks spil the broth that would probably get to the end of 20 people without without mutating um so we all know that it's perfectly possible for unmutated memes to survive but we all know it because we all speak English we all learn an English vocabulary and we can all repeat what other people have said in our native language and it doesn't matter that some of us say in an English accent and some in a Scottish accent and some in an American accent some in a female voice some in a male voice these are all um trivial mutations and they're trivial in exactly the sense in precisely the sense that they don't get copied from one end from one generation of the game of Chinese Whispers to the other I mean let's persist with this exact example I whisper into the ear of the first person a rhyme the this first person Whispers the same rhyme into the air of the next person but she does it in a female voice but it doesn't matter the message survives uh the next person does it in an Irish accent it doesn't matter the message survives the exact words survive and there's a perfectly good operational test of this you take 20 people and play Chinese Whispers and you then make a take a take a tape recording of each person's whispering and you've got 20 tapes now 20 tape recordings and you then find an independent Observer and you say here are these 20 tape recordings put them in order just listen to them and see if you can work out which was the first generation which the second generation which the third and so on they won't be able to do do it unless there's a definite mutation of a word changes then they'll do it but if it's just a change of accent a change of pitch of voice there will be nothing there'll be no consistent change as you go down the generations Generation 3 and generation 17 will be indistinguishable as far as the actual words are are concerned now that would probably be true it's a very simple rhyme in a language that all the people in the line understand but if they're English speakers and the rhyme is a rhyme in in in Bulgarian then what will pass down the line will mutate very rapidly because all that the people can possibly do is repeat it phonetically and it'll come out completely garbled by the time it gets to the other end that's a bad mean but the mere fact that it's I I I don't think anybody will dispute that it's obvious that uh provided that the the rhyme is short and in in language that everybody in the in the line understands in in most cases or in many cases at least it's sufficient to say in many cases it will survive intact and the important point is that you will not be able to tell the order in which those messages were uh were enunciated [Music]

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Keywords: Union, Society, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, genes, generations, success, The Selfish Gene (Book), Richard Dawkins (Author), Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason And Science (Organization), dawkins, ethologist, oxford, new college, gene-centered, evolution, atheist, Darwinism (Ideology), moral values, morals, biology, teaching, america, threat, memes

Id: 4BVpEoQ4T2M

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2014