That’s a damn convincing rationale, actually. At first I was like “yeah this might be a correct conception of replicators, but isn’t it missing out on the most interesting aspect of cultural conventions by leaving out their function?” But if you think about the genetic parallel then it’s obvious that the function, however meaningful and important it is to us, is only secondary. Still, it just moves the burden from the replicator to the replication process, and the emergent communicative function is after all what most linguists are primarily interested in. Which shows up how complicated linguistics really is: it’s like genetics, where they’re trying to figure out how the replicated ‘message’ is translated into something purposeful and functional in a highly complex and interactive fashion, with the added difficulty that the code in which the message is written is under constant negotiation and its functional interpretation is at the hands of different humans’ conceptual systems. Oh joy.

(In relation to my critique of phylogenetic methods as applied to linguistics I also like this conception of replicators very much because it highly resembles the principles on which the comparative method posits historical relationships between languages, i.e. primarily building on regularities between forms and freely accommodating semantic changes as long as they appear plausible.)

Is that the original layout of the poster btw? If yes, it’s really nice