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The Electric Meme: A new theory of how we think by Robert Aunger, The Free Press, $27, ISBN 0743201507

AS HE observed the rich patterning of human society, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes entertained the idea that people and their artefacts constituted the flesh of a diffuse organism. Hobbes gave his culture-creature a name: Leviathan.

Today鈥檚 cultural theorists are no less fond of biological metaphor, but they are generally less ambitious than Hobbes. They don鈥檛 talk of bodies, but of diseases.

鈥淟anguage is a virus,鈥� sang the American artist and performer Laurie Anderson, quoting American literary legend William S. Burroughs. So too, according to the proto-science of memetics, are all practices, artefacts, values or ideas 鈥� for they all contain 鈥渕emes鈥�, or copyable patterns of information. These extraordinary critters replicate, compete and evolve as they leap promiscuously from substrate to substrate 鈥� that is, a book to a human brain to a song to鈥�who knows what?

Robert Aunger, who organised the first academic conference dedicated to memes, is not impressed with any of this. In The Electric Meme he tests the very idea of memetics to destruction.

The trouble with virus analogies, Aunger says, is that they allow you to be intellectually lazy. For a start, actual viruses do not leap from substrate to substrate. If you wrote down the genome of a flu virus on a piece of paper and handed the paper to your friend, you wouldn鈥檛 expect them to catch flu. In reality, 鈥渢his jet-setting lifestyle,鈥� Aunger argues, 鈥渋s not one any form of communication can sustain鈥�.

Aunger goes on to say that when thinking about replication, abstract conceptions of information simply don鈥檛 wash. So he seeks to define precisely where memes may be found 鈥� if in fact they exist at all. His conclusion, reached after some ferociously close argument, flies in the face of memetic theory.

Aunger鈥檚 memes are electric. They live and die in an individual鈥檚 brain as arrangements of electrical potentials. They are real creatures, at least as substantial as computer viruses, evolving with unreal rapidity in their neocortical substrate. They are not 鈥渋deas鈥�. The most you could say of them is that they are the building blocks of thought.

But how can you explain memes鈥� purported ability to travel from person to person? This is vital: how else can they be responsible for culture? Now comes the less happy half of Aunger鈥檚 thesis, though it is no less conscientiously argued. Memes, he says, transmit to other brains using signals. Books, poems, hairdos and all the other stuff of human culture are mere conduits for these signals.

There鈥檚 no way round it: this argument is inadequate. It is not enough that Aunger鈥檚 memes transmit copies of themselves through space by means of signals. Those signals must, in order to meet memetic dogma, leave behind them paintings, the Taj Mahal, wars, dental floss 鈥� and everything else we can remotely call cultural.

A signal is just a signal. It can鈥檛 build its own conduit. The most it can do is convey the idea of a conduit. But where do such ideas come from? Not from memes 鈥� Aunger鈥檚 already scotched the idea that memes are ideas. So we鈥檙e left with the old answer: it takes a person to have an idea.

Aunger鈥檚 book will have a major impact upon memetics. But as an explanation of culture, the model is incomplete. This is not a criticism so much as a suggestion that he might be on to something that鈥檚 the antithesis of traditional memetics, and potentially much more interesting.

Pretty much inadvertently, Aunger reveals that the apparatus of thought might inhabit the world at two concentrations: in individual brains, and in the diffuse, distributed carryings-on of society. One can鈥檛 help wondering: might culture not be a cognitive product of the distributed system? It would be a fine irony indeed if Aunger, having comprehensively trashed lazy virus metaphors, were at the same time to reawaken Hobbes鈥檚 Leviathan.