W.G. Runciman

Any argument about religion, whether conducted in the seminar room or the saloon bar, is likely to hit the buffers not just because people hold different religious beliefs but because they disagree about what should or should not be counted as an instance of religion in the first place. Nobody will query the inclusion of what goes on at High Mass in Notre Dame or on the prayer-mats of the...

The word ‘meme’, popularised by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation’. But the idea that culture is transmitted by imitation and learning in a manner analogous but not reducible to natural selection has been around for a long time, and many other terms have been used in describing it. Darwin himself, when he came to consider ‘the causes which lead to the advance of morality’, concluded that ‘natural selection effects but little’ and looked instead to such things as ‘the approbation of our fellow-men’ and ‘example and imitation’. Much later, when the mechanism of natural selection had come to be understood in greater depth and detail than had been possible for Darwin himself, the American psychologist Donald Campbell and others began to develop the notion that cultural evolution (including the emergence of such things as theories of cultural evolution) is also driven by a competitive process of variation and selection. Campbell called his Presidential Address of 1975 to the American Psychological Association, ‘On the conflicts between biological and social evolution and between psychology and moral tradition’. But how does cultural evolution actually work?‘

When I published my last LRB Diary in June, I half-expected that it would be not only reprinted but also spoofed by one or another of the broadsheets, as indeed it was. What I didn’t expect was that the Daily Telegraph would try to use it as party-political knocking copy when any reader could tell that behind its even-handed mistrust of all politicians was a genuine pleasure at the displacement of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without Simon’s express permission what he had revealed at my dinner table about his tiny little earnings as a hugely well-paid journalist.’