On August 30, 2025, six of us delved into memes in Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back, and we found it difficult to understand. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed the emergence of a new kind of replicator swimming in the soup of human culture, and this replicator is the meme, “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” Stephen Jay Gould noted that Darwinian evolution is powered by natural selection, but cultural evolution operates by another set of principles that he does not yet understand. Is Dawkins’ analogy incomplete? Dennett holds that memes can explain cultural evolution if it is considered using Wilfrid Sellars’s ideas about the manifest and scientific images.
Sellars holds that the manifest image describes the world as we experience it through our senses, encompassing everyday objects, intentions, and thought. In contrast, the scientific image portrays the world as conceived by physical sciences, inferring subatomic particles and fundamental forces. For Dennett, memes are behaviors that can be copied but cannot be defined using the scientific image, and are better described by the manifest image. A meme could be a word or a set of lexical rules for forming irregular plurals, but it can also be other ways of communication, such as the way someone wears a baseball cap or a gesture for “just so,” signifying when something is neither good nor bad, but mediocre. For Dennett, language is the vehicle for memes. Comprehending memes requires us to understand language.
Communication is the broad process of exchanging information, while language is a specific, structured system of symbols and rules used to facilitate that exchange. Illiterate adults can converse but are unable to read the printed page. A teacher can take dictation of an Illiterate adult’s stories about friends or family, and prompts the student to read what the teacher printed, helping the student to pronounce words by using word patterns, identifying the arrangement of consonants and vowels within a word, of their story. By harnessing the power of word patterns, a student learns to read. The heart of any language is the phonemes that make up the word patterns. Some arrangements of phonemes can rhyme and become even musical, making memes even easier to remember. An earworm is a short piece of music or a song that repeats uncontrollably in your mind making it memetic.
Does the manifest image create a fictional world, and reality resides only in the scientific image? Are colors fictional in the scientific image? If someone is locked into what is tangible, then there is no color, only wavelengths that excite cells tuned to that wavelength of light, which we manifest as colors. For that matter, is money real? U.S. currency was backed by gold and silver. Our discussion became a lively debate, arguing over their interpretation of what money represents. Nevertheless, for Dennett, “Dollars are real; they just aren’t what you may think they are.” The idea of money is a kind of meme or social construct.
Since Dawkins suggested that memes are like genes, how do memes replicate? Do memes evolve in a Darwinian or a Lamarckian sense? Darwinian evolution uses heritable traits, allowing the progeny to survive better in a niche. Lamarckian evolution takes place when an acquired trait is passed on to the progeny. However, traits breed true because an organism consistently passes its specific characteristics to its offspring. Do memes also breed true? Do copies passed on to members of a culture faithfully, or do they change rapidly as it is replicated in others? Do memes change like the message in the game of telephone, where the originator whispers a message to one person who passes it on to others, one person at a time? When the last person tells his version, is it a faithful copy of the original message? On the other hand, do memes maintain some constancy during their transmission with an occasional mutation that makes them fit better?
We invite you to find out how memes affect our comprehension and become Dennett’s thinking tools for the evolution of the mind in our continuing discussion of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, B105.C477D445 2017, on September 13, 2025, from 2 PM to 4 PM.
