In our view, the utility of the notion of memetics lies in its articulation with natural selection—the idea that behavior (whether physical or mental) can be, at some level, biologically (genetically) determined.   Our studies of the evolution of language have served to strengthen our conviction that innate behaviors do exist for Homo sapiens.  This idea has been slow to be acknowledged primarily because the human capacity for culture provides a potentially infinite variety of forms for any given behavior type.  This gives the appearance that all of our cultural creations are completely arbitrary ones, derived simply out of the imagination of the individuals who originally ‘coin’ them.

 Allow us to begin, then, with the idea that ‘memes’ should be reserved for cognitive, mainly sense-perception ‘grounds’ of behavior which are species specific, and which in the case of Homo sapiens constitute a hierarchy of basic tendencies underlying cultural behavior.  In this sense, a meme is an inherited complex of cognitive capacities which stands as an analog in cultural evolution to the ‘genotype’ of the purely somatic system.  A wider range of behaviors or variations of perception-to action complexes build upon the most basic patterns.  Though some of these behavior variations become significant to selection of memes or meme alternatives in the context of cultural evolution, most ‘surface’ patterns remain superfluous to survival, and thus cease to serve as vehicles for selection of genetic patterns.

 As J. M. Balkin noted in Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, memes can build upon one another within the cultural medium, proliferating completely outside the confines of single individuals and their reproductive success.  But, as such, memes are not limited in their replicability by any biological reproductive reality; purely cultural memes are no longer applicable to the laws of natural selection.  This is not to say an analogous process cannot be pursued, such as the ‘principle of techno-environmental determinism’ of Marvin Harris, or some other metaphor of selected cultural patterning.  In our view, however, the extended analogy of cultural selection is of only limited utility and offers little insight beyond the results of decades of work in other fields:  linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, semiotics, psychology, etc.  But the ‘infinite’ variety of memes does manifest some ‘deep’ patterning, basic ideas which recur with such frequency that they indicate universality.  We think Chomsky was correct to posit a deep biological algorithm within language, and to seek its definition.

 To find utility in memetic inquiry, then, one needs to focus on those elements of human society which are ubiquitous while seeking to determine the prime element of mental activity that ties together all the diversity of forms.  We believe these prime elements will be derived from our species’ particular perceptual world, the biological reality which ‘inspires’ or ‘shapes’ the cognitive reality.   Just as the architecture of bones, nerves, and muscles of the human leg dictates or shapes ‘chair’ designs, the architecture of our brains shapes our cultural designs.  If we consider the prime thoughts which are determined by our physical reality as ‘memes’, then such thoughts would serve as ‘basal memes’, if you will ,—the structures from which all other variation stems.  From such structures, we might begin to elucidate the boundary between brain and mind, biology and culture.

 Given the example of the ‘life after death’ meme, we can begin to make some conjectures about the underlying basal meme.  First, one must ignore the thousands of conclusions we come to regarding the question of life after death, and focus instead on the fact that for humans ‘life after death’ is a question at all.  The apparent loss of animation when a body dies is an issue which demands thought.  Understanding why this observable unit of our everyday world becomes an issue with humans, while it is apparently not so with most other animals, can begin to speak to what it really means to be human.

 Further conjecture is warranted here.  Humans are animals who take note of the nature of a living animal when it is alive and also after its death.  As an aside, we can also note that there are almost no cultural traditions referring to life after death for plants.  Their relative lack of outward manifestations of ‘living’—manifestations which are open to our perceptual realm—provides for our noting little contrast between life and death states.  Hence, even among today’s supposedly scientifically sophisticated populations, we have significant numbers of people who are agitated by the need to kill animals for food—derived, we believe, from modern culture’s industrial ‘distancing’ of the actual killing from consumers—but who have no qualms about ripping those poor carrots out of the ground, stripping away their skin, and hacking them to bits.

 So humans notice change, either in space or, more importantly, in time:  "There’s Ernie lying there; he didn’t look like that a moment ago.  What happened?"  We remember him in his live state, and we recognize the change.  For cats, the carcass is regarded as either no longer interesting as a play thing, or as ‘food’.  For humans, because we remember another being, we have a sense of loss. We make inferences about cause and effect, and so we ‘construct’ death.    For us, this is basic problem solving stuff, but the notion of time-based contrast does not exist with many other animals. We think diachronically.  We think sequentially.  This is a real element that sets us apart from most other animals, and again the difference for us becomes one of degree as well as of kind.  Thus, though we know that Chimpanzees and Gorillas notice death, their repertoire for ‘constructing’ it culturally is quite limited.

 ‘Belief in an afterlife’ suggests a meme constructed on self-other awareness   which simultaneously establishes for humans a temporal awareness and the algorithm of syntax.  Temporal awareness rises from the firm sensuous assurance that (1) the experienced past ‘really happened’, (2) the present is directly connected to the past as ‘in some sense the same thing’, and (3) the future will unfold as a further consequence of the self.  The syntax algorithm rises, we believe, from the habitual juxtaposition of ‘naming’ processes and ‘predication’ processes.   In the former, we connect an arbitrary sign with some bounded, sensed, presence, logically conceived as a whole—anything, we might say, to which we might apply the term ‘thing’.  With predication, on the other hand, we literally name a diachronic contiguity—anything we might refer to as a ‘process’.  In neither of these naming conventions do we require complete knowledge.  The sign is applied to partial information, or traces, which are also processed into the present-past-future continuum.  The distinctions which differentiate the basic human meme constituents proposed here—the immutable patterns underlying human culture—thus fit such binary connections as, for example:

thing ----- process I / present ----- becoming me/past ----- extant  you/future ----- not extant

 The idea of meme we are pursuing would mean, taken from a sense perception point of view in ‘anthroposemiosis’, that our physiology is constructed to allow ‘displacement’ via the self.  In the simplest terms, it is hard for us to conceive of ‘death’.  Though we may conceive of an annihilated self, one completely non-extant and non-existent, our biological tendency is to see the final transformation of our personal present as a forthcoming entrance into a different kind of ‘becoming’, one as hidden from us in process as the complete self/you is hidden from us as some future aspect of our being.  Indeed, we have constant confirmation of our past being, and constant confirmation that our expectations of future being are not perfect.  Thus, death as ‘complete annihilation’ appears only in a family of meaningful options:  life in other worlds, life in other forms, life in other bodies, etc.  The various surface beliefs concerning life after death simply indicate the power of the perceptual meme that defines self, other, and future self as ‘other’.

 A similar founding meme would differentiate male and female through the evolved complexes of psycho-sexual drives and perceptions.  The modes of gender consciousness grounded in male-female, male-male, and female-female attraction or revulsion have many surface cultural variations.   At depth, we suggest, are sexually keyed perceptions and autonomic reactions.  Thus, gender behavior complexes adjust memetically within each culture along roughly similar lines, mainly by emphasizing gender contrasts while not specifically defining the contrastive elements themselves.  Under such conditions some cultures are more phallocentric and others are more egalitarian.  Truly matricentric cultures are rare (though not impossible) because of power issues based in strength, risk taking, aggressiveness, etc.

 Another extension of these two basic memetic systems in culture, both related to the idea of ‘life after death’, is kinship.  The individual differentiates male and female, generations, filiation, and alliance according to naturally selected perceptual patterns through which we build basic systems (such as Crow-type matrilineal systems, Omaha-type patrilineal systems, Australian alliance systems, etc.).  Using the self-awareness and gender memes identified above, one can generate all of the six or seven basic kinship patterns known through ethnology, account for the selection of different basic systems according to surrounding ecological conditions, and account for the adaptive contributions of myriad variations within each of the basic patterns, though these variations will usually seem less directly attuned to survival.  In this view, kinship is literally a ‘biologically driven’ labeling of relationship possibilities which results in a few oppositionally functional systems while disallowing systems that present gender or self-awareness contradictions.  The key point here is that only a few basic patterns can be built, and these constitute the so-called ‘basic kinship types’.   And in most kinship systems, the reality of ‘death’ is linked to the common-sense equation of alternating generations.   That is, the kinship terms themselves push us toward continuing social relationships with dead ancestors, a fundamental denial of complete annihilation.

 Kinship systems, then, constitute higher level memes which can become theoretical connections of the biological to the cultural in the web of natural selection.  Once again, we return to elements we have noted in our work on the evolution of language.  The basic forms lead to myriad variations.  We don’t simply name and label with our symbolic systems, we make comments on what we name—we make inferences and suppositions.  Symbolic constructions are tied together in grammars to express larger thoughts, and languages are formed.

 We believe the idea of basal memes can begin to provide means for an understanding of ourselves by working in two scientific directions simultaneously.  Not only can we take our universal cultural traits and work back to the perceptual realities from which they derive, we can also take our understandings of human perception and connect them with attendant cultural constructs.  For a last example, consider our capabilities and limits in recognizing the light spectrum, hue and tone, which presupposes our vocabularies regarding color.

 In every situation we have noted, the evolution of universal aspects of culture can be tied to the natural selection of basic biological realities.  Our questions can be concentrated on the utility of recognizing particular frequencies of light, the placement of ‘the self’ in a perceptual construction of self versus other, the placement of ‘things’ in contexts of ‘process’, etc., all basal memes (or ‘deep structures’, if you wish).  Through such ideas we can begin to determine what specific capabilities the development of larger brains accomplished for human evolution.