Darwin Day Lecture 2006

2006 February 13, Darwin Lecture Theatre, University College London

Dr Susan Blackmore spoke on "Darwin's meme: or the origin of culture by means of natural selection"

Despite the BHA Darwin Day lecture being a day late this year (Darwin’s birthday is the 12th), the morning began well with the speaker, Dr Susan Blackmore, discussing the lecture topic with philosopher Mary Midgeley on the R4 Today programme.  The “British Humanist Society (sic) lecture” got a mention, setting off a flurry of requests for tickets which had in fact sold out weeks previously.

The lecture, on "Darwin's meme: or the origin of culture by means of natural selection", filled the delightfully appropriate Darwin Lecture Theatre at UCL. Darwin Day was introduced by BHA Vice-chair Robert Ashby as a “celebration of science” and of the open discussion that leads to truth, a characteristic shared by science and Humanism. He also introduced the Chair for the evening, BHA Vice-president Professor Richard Dawkins, who according to Google, was about half as famous as Darwin. Richard Dawkins then wished the audience a happy Darwin Day, reminded us that the bi-centenary of Darwin’s birth in 2009  would soon be here, and hoped that there would be a national holiday to celebrate the great man and the “greatest idea ever”. He then introduced Dr Susan Blackmore as a “brilliant lecturer”, a judgment she amply lived up to.

Susan Blackmore’s lecture entertainingly applied the simple but brilliant idea of evolution to an area that Darwin did not explore but which had been pioneered by Richard Dawkins – culture, with the “meme” as the means of transmission. The meme, which she defined at “that which is imitated”, has considerable explanatory power: how else, she speculated, could we explain the near universal spread (even to the mountains of Assam) of that strange hotel practice of folding the ends of toilet tolls into tidy little points?

Some memes spread because they are good, true and useful; others are less so but come attractively packaged so that despite apparent pointlessness or even dangers they too can be imitated and spread. Religion, she suggested, was one such meme: belief in God alone would probably not have succeeded – but packaged with music, attractive buildings, rewards and threats and “copy me” commands, it was bound to thrive. We are far better at imitation than even our nearest relatives in the animal world, we can copy and pass on almost anything, and in the age of the photocopier and the internet good and bad ideas can spread increasingly efficiently.

The accompanying slides ended with one of Susan Blackmore having dinner with Darwin. She wondered what he would have thought of the idea of memes and hoped that he would have approved. Most of the audience thought he would have, though not Richard Dawkins – because Darwin would have had to learn about genes first.

The evening felt more like a lively and enjoyable conversation than a lecture, and the audience appreciated the informality and the opportunities to participate. Many of the questions afterwards returned to religion and whether science and reason could ever succeed as memes (should we take up door-stepping like Jehovah’s witnesses?); others worried about the apparent determinism of the concept of memes, which seems to deprive us of choice and free will. At the end, there were thanks from Richard Dawkins who hoped that the lecture would stay with us for ever and spread like the best kind of meme, and from BHA Executive Director Hanne Stinson who thanked the Chair, the audience, and Marilyn Mason, who had initiated the event four years ago and whose retirement meant that this would be the last Darwin Day lecture she organised.

The promised bookstall never materialised, but those inspired by the lecture and those who missed it can buy Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine.