by Joan Liu

Created on: May 21, 2010

In The God Delusion, Dawkins mentions memes briefly as a means to explain the origins of religion. The word “meme” was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 publication The Selfish Gene. He defines them as “units of cultural transmission analogous to the gene” (Blackmore 2). He further explains that natural selection proceeds in the interest of the genes and not the organism. It is not organisms that compete to survive, but rather the genes compete to be duplicated. The most successful replicators are those that band to create devices or vehicles that carry out their replication – in this case, our bodies. Dawkins ends his discussion with a question, “are there other replicators on the planet?” referring to memes. Dawkins fails to expand sufficiently on this subject which leaves the basis for memetic theory.  Since then, the field of memetic theory has expanded significantly, which affected Dawkins’ later treatment of memes in The God Delusion.

Memetic theory is based off of Darwinian evolutionary principles. As genes were to our physical bodies, memes were the Darwinist replicators that explained the complexity of our minds, and thus our society.  For evolution to occur, three factors must be present – heredity, variation, and selection (Blackmore 3). Memes are inherited through the copying of behaviors, and subtle variations are inevitable due the “reverse engineering” nature of meme replication. Selection occurs due to societal and personal pressures. It is important to note that evolution is a objective process with no special eye for its end products. As Dennett writes, “the evolutionary algorithm is a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind” (50).  Dennett then takes this one step further and claims not only evolution does not have a specific goal, it does not have a specific medium either.  It is only due to our familiarity with genes that we associate evolution with genes. According to Susan Blackmore, “it doesn’t matter which replicator… if memes are replicators then evolution will occur.” It is Blackmore herself who introduced the concept of Memeplexes, or groups of memes that are mutually beneficial to each others’ survival. Dawkins, in The God Delusion, then attributes the development and proliferation of religion to active memeplexes. At a later conference on “Do Memes Account for Culture”,

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