And this, she thinks, can help to explain one of the paradoxes of the new Darwinism, one which we talked about in the previous program. Well, as Blackmore puts it, our brains are just hosts for memes, and the memes don t care. On this theory, it also comes back to the advantage of the memes. What the genes couldn t have realised was that having allowed this imitation to arise, there suddenly becomes a new replicator, which once it gets going, can turn on its creator, if you like, and start competing. And then from that point on, you have two replicators competing with each other, and then the genes are no longer in control.
Scientists do very well by using analogies.
Take a successful theory in one domain, and build your new theory that s analogous with it. Genetic evolution is a very bad model for cultural evolution because ideas are exactly not transmitted unchanged from one generation to another. They re just not gene-like objects. Griffiths thinks that memes are a beat-up. Above all, he says, meme theory is profoundly un-Darwinian, because it can' explain why some memes flourish, and others go extinct.