Lapsed memeticists

Who do you go to if you want the dirt on your new boyfriend? Why his ex, of course!

So, what do the ex-memeticists have to say for themselves?

I can think of five fairly well-known ones:

• John Wilkins - used to write papers about memes, but in Dreams of memes and replicator machines he paints memetics as a neo-Darwinian theory of cultural evolution (can you have such a thing?) and distances himself from it a little.

• Kate Distin - eschewed memes in her 2010 book Cultural Evolution, saying that she could have described the ideas in terms of memes, but had tired of arguing with those with meme misunderstandings, and wasn't interested in fighting those battles.

• Robert Aunger - started off as a proponent, claimed to be agnostic in An agnostic view of memes and eventually came out against memes - in articles like Memes and What’s the Matter with Memes?. Augner had some strange ideas about memes. His book on the topic was a long argument for the case that memes must reside in brains (internalism). As an externalist, I thought his argument was nonsense.

• Bruce Edmonds - one of the most-cited ex-memeticsts - because of his shutting down the Journal of Memetics, while knifing the field in the back with the article The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results. I've previously rubbished the bad statistics in that article. AFAICS, On Modelling in Memetics was Bruce's longest article on the topic. In 2002 he described himself as being "memetic agnostic".

• Liane Gabora - she wrote a string of early papers about memes, but in How a Generation Was Misled About Natural Selection there's a pretty spectacular rant (on page two) about Dawkins, memes, dual inheritance theory - bashing them all. She now promotes the idea that cultural evolution is non-Darwinian.

John and Kate have fairly reasonable positions. Aunger seems to be in a meme muddle. Edmonds doesn't seem to have been that keen on memes in the first place. Liane seems to be completely off the rails to me. Although she is evidently an expert, she doesn't seem noticably less muddled on the topic than other meme critics.