On September 13, 2025, six of us began with a debate about who was right, Darwin or Lamarck. One proponent of Lamarck pointed out that the discovery of a yeast’s heat shock protein can misfold another protein into a prion that confers an advantage to the yeast’s daughter cells. However, he missed the part where the discoverer of the misfolding proteins into prions process noted that this is an exception to Darwinian evolution, and she still holds that evolution is the Darwinian process of natural selection of genetically controlled traits. Our units of inheritance are genes, not prions, which are not acquired from our parents.
Nevertheless, could Lamarckian evolution be operating in the case of memes? After all, a message passed on to each player in the telephone game is a garbled version of the original message. Polymerases that replicate DNA can correct errors as the strands are duplicated. Perhaps memes also have ways to reduce distortion during their transmission. Phonemes in words can be arranged in a catchy pattern that permitted some in our group to remember the poems they memorized in 7th grade, kept mnemonically in their brains. Another mechanism is conformity, where some spectators at a baseball game during the 7th-inning stretch will correct others not singing the right words to the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
H.P. Grice holds that language is a result of an agreement to cooperate. This is a shift from linguistic analysis of words to where speakers and listeners cooperate to create meaning. Where Grice focuses on the speaker's intentions, Ruth Millikan emphasizes the historical, evolutionary function of language. Millikan, rejecting Grice's focus on intentions as the primary explanatory factor of language, proposed that meaning is not about what a speaker intends but about the "proper function" of a linguistic sign, which is determined by its history of use.
Millikan would consider the specific set of vocalizations of the vervet monkey, used as alarm calls, an innate feature of a protolanguage, but not intentional in the human sense. They are an affordance because it's a feature that directly offers an opportunity for action to the listener. An affordance is an opportunity for an action that an object offers to a user based on its physical properties, like a car’s features, such as door handles that affords grasping and pulling, steering wheel has a circular shape that affords gripping and turning, pedals afford pressing with your feet to accelerate or brake, and a windshield that affords a view of vision.
For Daniel Dennett, language is the environment in which memes develop, flourish, and evolve. and spread. Dennett extends Richard Dawkins's concept of memes as cultural replicators that evolve through a process analogous to natural selection. Just as genes are replicated, memes (ideas, tunes, catchphrases) are copied from mind to mind. This process was largely blind and unguided. A good story might be passed down because it is easy to remember, a catchy tune because it sticks in the mind, or a useful tool-making technique because it works without anyone consciously designing it to be a good replicator. The success of the meme is determined by its ability to survive and spread in the cultural environment, not necessarily by a conscious choice.
From bacteria to Bach is the long journey from the beginning of life to the evolution of minds. While Darwinian evolution has the design space that develops competence without comprehension from genes to memes, language creates a design space where competence enables comprehension. For Dennett, language creates the design space for memes. It is the primary environment that enables the complex, cumulative, and increasingly sophisticated evolution of memes, where linguistic competence enables comprehension. To master the art of composing, a composer needs to be fluent in the terms of music as if music were a language having its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. For Dennett, Johann Sebastian Bach was the most intelligent designer of music of the Baroque period, who mastered the formalities of music and was intentional in his manipulation of the chords to create the rich-sounding music that made him one of the greatest composers in Western musical history. As new memes are created, a culture evolves. Does language also create the design space from which consciousness arises? Is consciousness a hard problem to solve?
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 October 4, 2025, from 2 PM to 4 PM.
