Abstract

Efforts to use concepts from contemporary biology in understanding the dissemination of culture have been inspired by two main analogies. One of these supposes that there are cultural units—memes—that share important similarities with genes, and a number of authors have attempted to exploit this analogy to develop precise theories of cultural transmission. According to a second analogy, the spread of culture is like the infection of a population by a virus. Very often, the two analogies are developed in tandem: Dawkins’s introduction of the meme contains both his own assimilation of memes to genes and explicit approval of an elegant formulation of the view of memes as parasites by his then-colleague Nicholas Humphrey ; similarly, Daniel Dennett’s influential presentation of cultural transmission as the spread of memes appeals to one or other analogy indifferently as if they were equivalent. My aim in what follows is to take a hard look at the second analogy, treating it with a bit more precision than is customary. We’ll find that the formal details of transmission processes are by no means equivalent, and that even the kinematics is more complicated than seems to have been appreciated.