Is anyone in there?

Are you feeling yourself today? Do you in fact have a "self"? Probably not, according to many neo-Darwinists and postmodernists. So, are we just a bunch of neurones or complex beings shaped by culture and community? Which has a bigger influence on the way we behave - our genes or our culture? Postmodern philosophers and scientific thinkers have never been the best of friends. But might they have more in common than they'd like to believe? Though their theoretical starting-points are poles apart, their conclusions are strikingly similar. Both post-modernists and neo-Darwinists believe that the centre of our thinking minds, 'the self', is a fiction. So, how is our understanding of what it is to be human affected if we no longer believe that we have selves? How does one lead an ethical life if one has no self? The suggestion is that the way we behave is very much in our genes - in our evolutionary makeup. But what about the influence of culture on our behaviour? Well, culture could be the product of evolution too. It all comes down to little beasts called memes - the informational equivalent of the gene. Memes have been described as cultural viruses: abstract ideas, habits, customs, lines of poetry or music which infect our minds, and which compete with each other in much the same way as genes. The relentless competition of memes is what shapes culture: the motive force behind, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Holocaust, and South Park.