Language should always have been the king of the subjects studied by
students of memetics and cultural evolution. Speech and writing have
built-in error correction mechanisms. They are some of the things which are
most likely to be copied with high fidelity - and thus to exhibit
cumulative adaptations as they evolve. However linguists have
not been very prominent in the field of cultural evolution.
Famous students of language evolution - such as Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky -
are apparently clueless newbies when it comes to the topic.
I checked for books on the topic of the cultural evolution of language. There are:
This is a pretty small list. Also, all the books on it are very recent.
When I became interested in cultural evolution, there was practically nothing.
This post asks: what happened? Why weren't linguists early adopters of
memes and cultural evolution?
Though I think this is a good question, I don't have a terribly good answer.
What follows are my speculations:
I think that many of the cultural evolution pioneers had backgrounds in evolution
and population genetics. Most linguists would have lacked this background. They
would have found much of the primary the literature hard to follow or irrelevant.
Also, until recently, cultural evolutionists were few and far between. Only in the last few years have supporters been coming out of the woodwork in large numbers. The dates on my book list reflect this. However, I think if I made corresponding lists for the cultural evolution of science, technology and religion, the 'science' and 'religion' lists would have more items on them - though the 'technology' list might have fewer.
The eusociality
symbiont hypothesis relating to the evolution of eusociality
pictures a positive feedback loop of interactions between hosts
and symbionts, with each new symbiont pulling the colony tighter
together as the symbionts manipulate their hosts into coming into
contact with each other in order to reproduce.
The positive feedback loop involved in the hypothesis is counteracted
by negative interactions involving hosts and symbionts - in other
words by parasitism. As hosts interact more closely parasites can also
spread horizontally between them. Since horizontal transmission promotes
misalignment between host genes and parasite genes, after a certain point,
parasites start to dominate more helpful symbionts - and then the hosts
start to behave as though they want to live further apart from one another.
The significance of parasites is evident in most social insect colonies.
These are vulnerable to parasitism - due to the close proximity of the
members - and it is not uncommon to see nests obliterated by parasites.
On the other hand, because of the parasite threat, the nests themselves
are often policed by cleaning squads. Disease eradication is a big theme.
Sick individuals are exiled and everything is kept remarkably clean.
Humans are a case study for the eusociality symbiont hypothesis. Our
symbionts are typically cultural, but the basic dynamics are much the
same - the cultural symbionts manipulate the humans into coming into
contact with each other in order to reproduce. The result is human
ultrasociality.
We know that humans living in close proximity are
more vulnerable to horizontal transmission of genes. We can see this
by comparing sick city dwellers with their more healthy country cousins.
Parasite transmission favors situations where humans are crowded together.
We have institutions to deal with this - such as hospitals.
Close proximity also favors horizontal memetic transfer. Assuming that
humans want to avoid exploitation by deleterious memetic parasites, we
are going to need organizations and institutions that promote epistemic
hygine. These will involve schools, as well as other types of training
more focused on the memetic immune system.
The negative effects of memetic parasites are clearly evident today.
We have an obesity epidemic driven by fast food advertising. There
are smoking, drinking and caffination epidemics which are widespread.
Over the counter drugs are widely abused. Paranoia epidemics are
fostered by the news media with resulting scares about terrorism,
global warming, vaccination, resource depletion, and so forth.
Epistemic hygiene can reasonably be expected to become a big focus.
Not necessarily the 'thought police' pictured by George Orwell - but
other government-level infrastructure to protect populations against
the negative effects of bad
memes.
It's a fairly sympathetic critique - the author makes a serious effort to understand the topic before explaining where the perceived flaws lie. As the following quotation indicates, the author regards the blindness of variation as a key tenet of Darwinism:
the Darwinian tenet of the blindness of variation is challenged. It is argued that one should interpret biological evidence in a way that allows for a kind of directed and adapted process of variation – though this process is of course fallible and not omniscient. Paradoxically, this follows from pursueing a Darwinian approach up to its limits. Darwinism thus again demonstrates that it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
It is neo-Darwinism that got dogmatic about variation being undirected. Darwin himself was fairly agnostic about this topic - and indeed proposed a mechanism by which variation was directed by the experience of organisms.
This point revolves around a debate about what the term 'Darwinism' means. Personally, I see no compelling reason to attach Darwin's name to the more useless and out-dated theory - especially when Darwin himself had nothing to do with it.
The author also seem to think universal Darwinism is incompatible with the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms, saying:
Moreover, although it cannot be questioned that we can learn very much from Darwinism, it is claimed that Universal Darwinism as an interpretative framework can and should be replaced by an account of the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms – both in biology and in metaphysics.
...and...
I think the biological trial-and-error theory of Darwinism might also be urged to drop its universalism and acknowledge a certain evolution of evolutionary mechanisms.
The evolution of evolutionary mechanisms seems like a flat fact to me. Particularly the mechanisms that produce selection and introduce variation have complexified over time. Mutations produced inside minds can be a bit different from those produced inside cells. However, as far as evolutionary theory goes, the mechanism of production of mutations can be treated like a modular block box - with specific theories from genetics being plugged into it. A new mutational mechanism needs no changes to evolutionary theory itself - rather it's just a new mutation module. Much the same goes for selection. These days, selection can be produced by intelligent agents - for example by intelligently choosing compatible mate. Darwinism is big enough to include a variety of sources of selection. I think we can have a universal Darwinism while still leaving some space for the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms.
A critic might complain that, with these dependencies on other theories of mutation and selection, Darwinism barely qualifies as a theory in its own right. This has always been true, though. For example, to predict the fitness of a bat genome, Darwinism relies on theories of development, theories of aerodynamics and theories relating to radar. Dependencies on other theories has always been a fundamental part of Darwinism. Evolutionary theory doesn't stand alone.
These are some of the main criticisms in the book. I think that universal Darwinism survives these attacks just fine.
Some students of semiotics seem to be irritated by the success of the meme.
(e.g. Kilpinen, E. (2014)).
Semiotics seems to be much more popular than memetics, and the term 'sign'
seems to be much more popular than
the term 'meme'. However, the term 'sign' does appear to have lost some
important ground to the term 'meme'. Here's my take on how the meme
managed to get a foothold.
Semiotics claims to be older than memetics. Semiotics became popular
in the 1970s and 1980s - but claims roots going beck centuries.
However, until the 1970s there wasn't very much in the way of
semiotics publications. The founders of the various schools of cultural
evolution may have ignored semiotics, because it had yet to become
popular at that time.
By the 1970s, semiotics had basically failed to produce a school of
cultural evolution. There was no explanation of how signs evolved
based on broadly Darwinian principles.
As Terry Deacon put it:
Until now, classic semiotic theories have not had much to say about why certain signs persist and others do not, or why certain semiotic systems evolved the forms they now exhibit.
...and...
The meme concept has generated recent excitement precisely because it seems to offer hope of providing something that other theories of social and semiotic processes have not succeeded in providing. It addresses the process of semiosis, i.e., the dynamical logic of how the symbolic and concrete constituents of culture arise, assume the forms they assume, and evolve and change over time.
Retrospectively, we can see that application of evolutionary biology to human communication mostly arose outside of semiotics - mainly from those trained in evolutionary biology and population genetics.
Perhaps the bypassing of the term 'sign' by cultural
evolutionists was inevitable. The term 'sign' - in common parlance -
comes with an associated object that is signified by the sign.
Culture contains many signs - for example, letters, words and ideograms.
However there are also non-signs: for example, knots, cups and fire. These have no obvious referents - they just are. For the concept of 'sign' to be useful as a unit to cultural evolutionists all culture would need to be signs.
However, that violates the common dictionary definition of 'sign'.
The tpyical semiotics solution to this problem is to expand the definition
of 'sign' to include knots, cups and fire - and indeed, practically
anything. This is sometimes called 'pansemiotics'. If you do this, then semiotics becomes very general. Of course the problem is then that the original meaning of the term 'sign' has got lost. It is
sometimes permissible to give common language terms counter-intuitive
technical meanings. However, here, I think it just leads to pointless
confusion.
As for the claim that the concept of 'meme' misses out the concepts of
semantics and observation: this is just sour grapes on the part of
the semiotics folk. One might reply that meaning and observers
aren't part of the meme because they are context-dependent.
The domain of Darwinian evolution has expanded dramatically over the last 150 years.
Darwinian evolutionary theory is now frequently applied to cultural evolution, the
development of individuals and individual learning. More speculative extensions of
Darwinism include ones that cover quantum physics, complex adaptive systems,
cosmological natural selection and observation selection effects.
It is natural for observers of this expansion to ask: how far can the Darwinism
go? Where is the the edge of evolutionary theory? What are the limits of Darwinism?
The questions relating to "Darwinism" might be criticized as being a bit vague - but we
can replace these with similar questions about the domain of concepts such as fitness
selection and adaptation - and have some more rigorous questions that more people are
likely to be able to form a consensus about.
I think that the lesson of history is that the edge of evolution is farther out than
we think. People are inclined to say that the edge of Darwinism lies at the outer
edge of their personal understanding of it. However, we can see historically that
Darwinism has repeatedly pushed into new domains, covering new phenomena.
Another possible position is that there's no real "edge" - instead evolutionary
theory gradually breaks down as more and of its axioms are progressively broken.
I think that it is clear that there's some truth to this perspective. However,
evolutionary theory is fairly simple - and there aren't very many axioms to
break. Nonetheless, we should not necessarily expect to find a single
precipice at the edge of evolution - but rather a gradual disintegration
in the form of some steps or a slope. This complicates the issue - but
doesn't fundamentally alter the problem.
To finish this article, I have a characterization of where I think the edge
of evolution is to offer. I think evolutionary theory applies to macroscopically
irreversible systems. This gives it roughly the same domain as
maximum entropy thermodynamics - which
I claim
it is very similar to. Part of the intuition behind this involves the link between selection
(from evolutionary theory) and destruction (which leads to many macroscopic entropy increases).
This relationship is probably wrong in detail. There's nothing in evolutionary
theory that forbids its application to macroscopic reversible systems. Selection
need not necessarily be linked to destruction. However, this is the best, short
characterization of the edge of evolution that I have. Without it, I am reduced
to offering a laundry list of phenomena that I think that evolutionary theory applies to.
Alex Flint has some excellent quality meme criticism in his essay titled:
The problemwith memes.
If only all meme criticism was of this standard. Alex makes several points - here I will focus
on just one of them. He says:
If evolution amongst memes really was responsible for, say, Rick Rolling, then we should
expect to see a relatively continuous sequence of memes in historical records, analogous
to the fossil record.
Maybe. The fossil record is patchy - and not always accessible - and much the same is true of culture.
In practice, it's often possible to make valid inferences even if you have no fossils. If you see an organism, you
can validly assume it has an evolutionary history - even if you have no fossils - simply because
of common descent. We can often do much the same thing with memes.
Alex says:
The term “meme” has found widespread use in contemporary discourse, especially when discussing
the public mindset, since the constitution of that mindset is what memetic evolution is supposed
to explain. It is often used to refer to particularly catchy or trendy ideas, but I have argued
that in many such cases there is little justification for assuming that an evolutionary process
was responsible. Questioning whether the term “meme” should be applied in such cases process is
dangerously close to a vacuous quibble over semantics; however, a few cautions do bear mentioning.
First, it is a mistake to think that a deeper understanding has been reached just by calling
something a meme. In the absence of evidence for an evolutionary process, calling something a
“meme” is no different to calling it an “idea” or “phrase”. No greater understanding of its
nature or origin has been reached by invoking the term, nor does the term suggest any new
ways that it might be manipulated, magnified, or minimised.
Alex seems to think that you shouldn't call some aspect of culture a 'meme' if you can't
back up your assertion with a memetic fossil record - showing competition and selection
between memes. That goes to the definition of a meme - and I don't think the dictionary
agrees with Alex. Here's what one
dictionary says for "meme":
an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture .
an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed
from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
These definitions don't rule out memes that pop into existence by chance, or memes that
are intelligently designed. The whole idea that the term "meme" implies an origin involving
competition and selection between a series of evolutionary precursors seems to be contrary
to how the word is commonly defined.
Alex is correct to say that calling something a 'meme' doesn't imply that it
wasn't intelligently designed. However, that's simply a matter of definition.
I don't see how it is a 'problem' - and I don't see why Alex calls it a 'problem'.
Alex closes with:
In this essay I have argued that although memetic evolution is a coherent concept, applying it as an explanation for specific phenomena requires extra evidence to corroborate its causal role in producing those phenomena. In the absence of such evidence we should be careful about using the term “meme” too liberally since we may make unjustified assumptions about the nature of the ideas we are dealing with.
The "unjustified assumptions" Alex is referring to is the assumption of an evolutionary history involving variation and selection. However, this assumption seems to be coming from Alex - not from memes or memetics. It is OK to have intelligently-designed memes - indeed the internet is full of them.
In summary: we can legitimately use the term "meme" liberally - if we simply adopt the standard definition of the term. I think Alex's concerns about "unjustified assumptions" are themselves unjustified.
Parent and offsping often correlate with respect to their location.
It is possible to inherit a high-fitness location; one tree can inherit the
sunny side of the hill from another. But the significance of this inherited
variation is limited. A population can near-literally 'explore' a physical
space, if location is heritable and is linked with fitness. It may move along
gradients of environmental quality it may climb hills, or settle around water.
But to the extent that reproductive success is being determined by location per se
it is not being determined by the intrinsic features that individuals have. If
extrinsic features are most of what matters to realized fitness — if intrinsic
character is not very important - then other than this physical wandering,
not much can happen.
What can happen is that adaptations can develop. Lightning strikes can find the
shortest path to the ground, propagating cracks can locate weaknesses in materials
and drainage patterns can develop structures that efficiently drain basins.
The idea that concepts like 'fitness' and 'adaptation' apply to these kinds of
simple inorganic systems is a big deal for physics - and a big deal for Darwinism.
Of course in these kinds of system more than position is inherited. For
example, in electrical discharges, charge is also inherited. However position
is important - it is copied with high fidelity, it can often vary considerably
and many other properties can depend on it.
Godfrey-Smith attempts to draw a distinction between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic"
traits - and then claims that this affects the "Darwinian character" of processes.
However, traditional Darwinism has no use for such a distinction - all it cares about is
whether traits are inherited. If you look at axiomatic expressions of Darwinian
evolution, "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" don't get mentioned. That's because they
don't matter. They are irrelevant to most evolutionary theory. Heredity of traits
is what matters - not whether those traits are "intrinsic" or "extrinsic".
It's true that "intrinsic" traits can be more numerous than "extrinsic" ones.
However, that's no reason to single out "extrinsic" traits and exile them from
Darwinism. Darwinism makes no distinction between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" traits.
The exact same rules about copying with variation and selection apply equally to both
types of trait.
Peter says "the significance of this inherited variation is limited". It seems to me that
the significance of this inherited variation is huge. It it wasn't for positional inheritance,
we would all have been born in the vacuum of space and died instantly. It may be
only "physical wandering" that means that we were born on the surface of a planet -
rather than in interstellar space - but it makes the difference between life and
death for all of us. Location is actually a very important property
that affects fitness. We should study how it evolves using good old-fashioned
evolutionary theory - it absolutely does apply.
Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries
may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor
to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual
power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Both have been used so
loosely they can refer to everything from word–of–mouth marketing
efforts to remix videos to popular content in ways that don’t help us understand the nature of these different
activities and the potential relationships between them. Both terms seek to explain the process of cultural
transmission but do so in such a way they strip aside the social and cultural contexts in which ideas
circulate, and the human choices which determine which ideas get replicated.
The terms 'viral' and 'memes' refer to a range of things. The term 'culture' does so too. This
criticism of the terms 'viral' and 'memes' applies equally to the widely-accepted and useful term 'culture'.
For me that illustrates the vacuousness of this critique. Saying something is 'cultural' doesn't help
distinguish between the different aspects of culture. That's not the point of the terminology. Instead
it highlights how it is copied and passed on - for example by imitation or teaching.
I fail to see how the terms “viral” and “memes” strip aside the social and cultural contexts in which ideas
circulate. Those are environmental factors that act as selective forces. This is surely cultural evolution 101.
Perhaps Henry has been confused by the specialized nature of memetics. Just as genetics is quite focused on
how genes mutate and recombine, so memetics is focused on how memes mutate and recombine. However, these disciplines
do not stand alone - there are other folk looking more at things like development, the nature of selective
forces and interactions with the surrounding ecology.
However, I'm speculating here. Henry doesn't explain where he gets his conception from. To me this criticism seems
to be unsubstantiated.
Henry also writes:
Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea,
which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed,
or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we
move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most
easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on
the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and
media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even
as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media
industry.
Talk of memes does not "place an emphasis on the replication of the original idea" at the expense of
transformation. In biology, there are copying, recombination and mutation. Saying that
biological models emphasize copying at the expense of recombination and mutation seems as though
it would be silly to me. Evolution depends critically on both copying and mutation.
Recombination is very important too. A copying-only version of evolutionary theory would be
impotent indeed - but there's no such thing - except as a straw man in the minds of critics.
I do like the "If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead" slogan, though. To many memeticists, myself included,
culture is alive, "not just metaphorically but technically".
The
term "Holocene extinction event"
refers to the currently ongoing extinction of species.
It is apparently largely caused by the impact of humans on the environment. This makes it
the first extinction event caused by a proliferation of memes.
At the moment, the Holocene extinction fails to meet the criteria for a mass extinction.
In a mass extinction 75% of species go extinct in a short space of time. However,
knowledge of memetics suggests the possibility of a
memetic takeover -
in which the substrate of the heritable medium of biology changes - and the era of
the DNA molecule comes to an end. Such an event could be accompanied by a
large mass extinction. In such circumstances, many DNA-based creatures would
probably be preserved in nature reserves or historical simulations - and thus not
technically go extinct. However, it is far from clear what fraction of
the currently-known species would survive.
One problem with extinctions is that things of value get lost. Assuming that preventing
this is desirable, we can ask what steps could be taken to help prevent species loss.
I think a slower memetic takeover
would result in a reduced chance of things getting lost by accident.
Technological determinism
probably means that we can't do much to slow progress by machines down. However, what we
probably can do is speed up our own progress - and that of our companion creatures. The aim
would not be to keep up with the machines - which does not look feasible - but rather to
prolong the period of our usefulness - and prevent us from becoming an early casualty of
the current extinction.
This post is about Darwinian physics. In optimization theory, for evolutionary approaches to
work as effective search algorithm, the fitness landscape must not be too rough.
If fitness at nearby points in the fitness landscape are unrelated, an evolutionary
search will do no better than a random search.
In positional
inheritance the domain of fitness landscape maps corresponds to
a two or three dimensional physical space. Fitness usually depends
significantly on the location within that space.
It is pretty clear empirically that
fitness
at nearby locations is often correlated - i.e. fitness is heritable in cases of positional inheritance. However this leads to the question of: why is fitness heritable?
That question goes to the smoothness of nature. If you look at the world, nearby parts are often similar to each other. It isn't just neighbouring fitness that is similar - all neighbouring properties tend to be similar. Why is that the case? Here are three significant reasons:
Entropy increase causes many lumpy and rough phenomena to become more smooth and uniform.
Copying also causes like to associate with like. In a forest, the trees are similar because of genetic copying
processes.
Gravity causes air to associate with air, water to associate with water and rock to associate with rock.
It is a major force causing like to associate with like.
It's possible to argue that copying is the fundamental phenomena here -
and that gravity and entropy increases are the result of copying. Entropy
increase can also plausibly claim to be fundamental. Gravity cannot
claim to be fundamental.
I like the explanation in terms of entropy. Nature might not exactly abhor a gradient, but it isn't terribly keen on edges. There are a bunch of dissipative processes that gradually scuff, dissolve and erode them out of existence.
J.B.S. Haldane is reported to have responded to a challenge about what would
destroy his confidence in the theory of evolution with the phrase
"fossil rabbits in the Precambrian".
One might analogously ask: what would destroy our confidence in the modern theory of
cultural evolution?
I think that "Digital watches in the Prehistoric"
would have an effect broadly similar to Haldane's fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
With cultural evolution, such an observation might be a bit easier
to swallow - due to the existence of another optimizing process capable of
producing adaptations - namely human creativity. Nonetheless, individual
creativity can only go so far. If advanced technology was present and the
evidence of it was sufficiently good we might have to give up the
modern theory of cultural evolution - and adopt an approach to history based on
alien intervention - or some other source of apparent miracles. It would certainly mean a major rewrite of the history books.
Memesis refers to the origin(s) of meme(s). Its etymology derives from
the terms 'meme' and 'genesis' - it's a contraction of meme-genesis.
It can refer to the origin of a particular meme - or more generally
to the origin of evolving culture.
The origin of cultural evolution is an area which has been studied extensively in
academia. For some reason, many academics in the field seem to have specialized
in the pre-history of cultural evolution - an area where we have a paucity of
data and which it is difficult to explore experimentally. Why this happened is
another story,
but it did happen - and as a result we know more than we otherwise
would about the origin of cultural evolution. In particular the work of Boyd
and Richerson - as reported in their 2005 books - significantly illuminates
this subject area.
They speculate that the glacial climate of the current ice age provided a
challenging, spatio-temporally varying environment for our ancestors -
and a variable environment increases the benefits provided by rapid
cultural adaptations. They also suggest that the mild climate in the
modern inter-glacial period led directly to the modern flourishing
of humanity.
The doctrine of common descent suggests that all living things share
a common ancestor. If taken literally, this means that the first memes
came from evolving ideas within minds - and these ultimately arose from
DNA genes. The initial dependence of cultural evolution on DNA-based evolution
suggests that cultural evolution doesn't violate the common descent doctrine.
However the origin stories of individual memes can certainly involve external
influences that are neither genes nor memes. A classic example of this is
"the face on mars" (see right). While elements of this meme arose within
human brains and involved cultural artifacts - such as spaceships and
telescopes - it is hard to deny that an important part of the meme
originated on Mars.
Ultimately, the origins of cultural evolution should be traced back beyond
our common ancestor with chimpanzees (since these also carry a significant
cultural inheritance with them).
A partial transcript follows (starting one minute in).
It struck me as I looked back
thinking about how life has evolved
that really patterns repeat themselves
over and over and over again, and we're in the midst of
a repeating pattern right now.
The notion that
as life evolved on Earth, it began
as very simple, single-cell organisms
called prokaryottes. Prokaryotes were basically a bag of cytoplasm with some DNA
and those
single-cell organisms started to incorporate
biological technology into them.
By biological technology, I'm referring to mitochondria
that helped them process energy more efficiently, and create energy
so they could become more capable cells, golgi apparatus
nuclear membranes and so forth...
And I thought about how those
single-cell life forms
incorporated technology very much as we today as humans
are beginning to incorporate technology in us, whether it's the cellphone
or bio-medical technology in our bodies.
What life did next
was that uh... life
was it went from being
prokaryotic to eukaryotic life forms, more complex
single-cell life forms, and those eukaryotic life forms began to become
multi-cellular life forms
where a collection of 100 cells, a 1,000 cells, a million cells
would come together and form a more complex organism
where all of these individual cells were alive
but when they worked together
they did an extraordinary thing.
You and I are a collection of 10 trillion cells
that make up tissues
and organs, and ultimately a unique human being.
And I've thought about the technology that we are creating today
at an exponential rate.
Literally, the human machine interface technology will ultimately
be able to plug in through
optogenetics or human machine chip interfaces
on the Internet
of course, are giving us the ability to communicate in
a much more intimate fashion
where I think that well within the next decade, there's going to be the potential for me
to know people's feelings
and thoughts in a much more intimate fashion.
And if all of a sudden, we are becoming a species
of 7 billion interconnected individuals, what I call a meta-intelligence
we are in new organism just like yes
weren't worth seven billion individuals
we are a new organism
just like... yes, we are 7 billion individuals just like I'm a collection of 10 trillion individual cells.
But these 10 trillion cells become conscious as an individual named Peter Diamandis.
And I think that on this planet
we are alive
during a period of of
evolutionary change
where we are going from
a collection of
of billions of individuals to
a connected populous of humans
interfacing with an extraordinary amount of artificial intelligence computational
power that's around the Internet
where we together are becoming what I call this meta-intelligence.
That's an exciting time to be alive.
And I think about us as a species becoming conscious on a new level
like never before.
We are going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism
to evolution by intelligent direction.
We're on a planet where we're going to start to evolve our biology
and as you say, to become independent of this substrate
that evolves very slowly.
Humans are becoming themselves an information technology.
It's really our thoughts, our memes
our consciousness, which if we can begin to liberate from
the biological constraints that we have that will allow us to evolve far faster.
We've seen this time and time again, where
things go from one substrate to the next
and there's no reason not to believe
that we can't do that again.
It looks as though Peter and I agree about a lot. We agree that meme-based cultural symbionts share some similarities with eucaryotic endosymbionts. We agree that we are likely entering an era of self-directed evolution. We apparently agree that a memetic takeover is a likely outcome - and that there will be a change of substrate as most thinking goes digital.
There's
a fairly standard methodology for quantifying the
relative significance of genes, the environment and chance.
It involves asking what proportion of the observed variance
in a trait is explained by variation in genes and what proportion
is explained by variations in the environment.
This idea is related to the concept of "heritability" - which is
defined to be the proportion of variance in a trait which is
attributable to "genetic" variation.
Of course, there's memetic variation to consider as well - and
it would be nice to quantify how important it is.
If you have a definition of culture that's good enough you can use it
to determine to what extent environmental factors are
culturally transmitted. Then you can apply the same methodology to
see what the scale of the cultural influences are.
You would then be able to say things like: in population X 80% of the variation in trait X is due to culture and 20% of the variation in trait X is due to DNA genes.
Just as you don't have to sequence every gene to get results from
this methodology, you wouldn't have to identify every meme to be able to
say something useful about the impact of cultural heredity. You could
still make statements like: "these known memes account for 20% of the
observed variation in this trait in this specified population".
Quantification would be useful. At the moment, there seems to be some
dispute between anthropologists - who seem to think that culture is a
very important determinant of human behavior - and evolutionary psychologists -
who often seem to treat culture as simply an emergent property of DNA genes
in an environment - e.g. put humans in the arctic and out will pop igloos,
snow shoes and sleighs. A table illustrating the extent of the impact of
culture on the variance of a variety of traits would certainly be interesting.
Cyclical selection is an important concept from ecology. It involves organisms
which have lifecycles involving environments that vary cyclicly. Cyclical selection is sometimes called "alternating selection". It is sometimes described in terms of "switching environments". Cyclical selection is part of a more general phenomenon - known as "fluctuating selection". Some examples of cylical selection:
Seasonal variation - organisms may face one environment in the summer and another one in the winter.
Male gametes - these spend most of their lives inside male testicles - but must periodically
run an obstacle course inside female organisms - where they face very different
selection pressures.
Parasites - many pathogens reproduce inside host
organisms and must repeatedly find new hosts. Thriving within a host
present systematically different set of challenges to spreading between hosts -
and so the pathogens face an alternating selective pressure.
This brings us to cultural evolution. Cultural symbionts behave similarly to
organic pathogens - in that they can reproduce within a host as well as find
new hosts.
Different selection pressures apply inside minds compared to outside them.
Inside minds memes must compete for attention - so that they can
persist by being repeatedly rehearsed in short-term memory. Outside minds,
memes need to get shared on social media sites and avoid spam filters.
It's a different environment with different sources of selection.
Memes multiply within minds as well as spreading between them.
This may not be completely obvious - but the idea is supported from many directions.
Some mental illnesses are explicable in terms of overgrowths of thoughts relating
to fear, paranoia, negativity, anxiety or obsessions. Memories fairly plainly
involve copying and creativity often involves making copies with variations.
Again, copying criteria inside minds are different from copying criteria used
by computer systems in the external world.
For parasites there's the risk that adapting to the environment inside a host will
result in the loss of the ability to spread between hosts. Memes face much
the same problem - adapting to survive within a host can result in the loss of the
ability to spread between hosts. Too much intracranial selection can lead to
intercranial sterility.
Parasites may resist evolution within hosts - since this may destroy their ability to
spread between hosts. Resisting evolution within hosts has the disadvantage of reducing
their fitness there. Parasites that are not able to rapidly evolve within a host are
more likely to be obliterated at the hands of the immune system - or by other existing
residents. Memes face the same dilemma. They don't want to lose their ability to spread
between hosts - but may be under considerable pressure to evolve and adapt to their
host's internal environment.
Intracranial selection may suggest some theraputic strategies to help deal with virulent memes.
Cylical selection suggests that an extended period of selection within a host might result in
reduced virality. The parasite may appear to make peace with its host. This suggests - for
example - that the memes from old evangelicals might help to pacify young ones.
One of the findings of genetics is that many organisms have chromosomes
that consist largely of non-functional 'junk'. Not all organisms have
this junk. Some creatures - particularly some small creatures - are
clearly under selection for small genome size. However, among larger
creatures, there's a lot of variation in genome size - even among
closely related forms - in a manner that is largely inconsistent
with the 'junk' having an important function.
The are several ideas about why this junk exists.
We know that the junk consists largely of selfish DNA - e.g. LINEs
and SINEs. Perhaps this DNA is parasitic on its host and exists solely
to benefit itself.
The junk could exist as a result of a random walk in genome
size. In this case, the junk could persist simply because the
resulting selection pressure to eliminate it is relatively weak.
Evolution often proceeds by duplicating genes - or sometimes
entire chromosomes. Some parts of the duplicated structure are
then redundant, are under reduced selection pressure - and so decay.
Of course, evolution can delete things too. The prevalence of
junk could be as a result of duplication being a more useful
source of novel variation than deletion.
Eucaryotes typically have much more junk than procaryotes do.
This difference could be explained by sexual recombination - which
acts to conserve genome lengths by selecting strongly against small
changes in genome length - which is the type of mutation which is
needed to gradually eliminate junk DNA.
There are a bunch of ideas that claim that the sequence doesn't matter -
but that the junk still weakly performs some useful function. Larger genomes
take longer to divide and result in larger cells - these are traits
that could be selected positively for. The junk could act as an absorber
for randomly-inserted retroviruses - which would then not be expressed.
Or it could act as a harmless sink for chemical mutagens within the cell.
I don't know whether all these hypotheses have been distinguished
between yet. There may be truth in more than one of them.
The gene-meme analogy suggests that we may find that a lot of culture
is worthless junk too. This idea is strongly reminiscent of
Sturgeon's
law - named after Ted Sturgeon, who famously said:
Sure, 90 per cent of science fiction is crap. But then,
90 per cent of everything is crap.
Many superstitions certainly look like junk memes - in that they are
behaviours that don't have much impact fitness, and where the details
don't matter very much. Whether you touch wood or throw salt over your
shoulder makes little difference.
In genetics, the idea of 'junk' refers to sequence being irrelevant -
and not significantly impacting fitness.
I think fairly simple thought experiments show that if you randomly
change 'sequence information' in the Bible, in The Origin of Species,
in Harry Potter, in MP3s, or in videos, their fitnesses would
be negatively affected. Junk memes seem to be less common than junk
genes are.
Computer programs are another area to consider. Here, large programs often
use multiple libraries - and sometimes there's a lot of library routines
that aren't used. Random changes to these would then have little effect
on the resulting phenotype. However, these large programs are more like
symbiotic unions than individual creatures. They have many genomes -
not one main genome. This weakens the comparison with junk genes.
Maybe libraries and organizations have their share of junk - but again,
these are more like ecosystems than individual organisms - and the
comparison with junk genes again becomes more strained.
If we provisionally grant the conclusion that junk memes seem to be less
common than junk genes are, the next question that arises is: what feature
of cultural evolution leads to this difference. Some ideas about that follow:
Cultural evolution doesn't have recombination that acts to preserve genome size.
That could mean that small selection pressures to eliminate junk memes have a
chance to work - and small deletions are not strongly selected against by the
pressure to have the same genome size as everyone else in the population.
The idea that the junk defends against retroviruses (and other endogenous mutagens)
doesn't work very well in cultural evolution either. There are sometimes parasites,
and even some memes that work like retroviruses (by inserting themselves into other texts) but
this isn't so much of a problem as it is in the organic realm.
The memetic codes used in cultural evolution often lack the "start" and "stop"
codons that make junk genes possible in the first place. Where there are
such codes (e.g. inside computers) there's often more junk.
Memes are often compared to viruses. Viruses have little junk DNA. Maybe
these memes also resemble viruses in that regard.
Lastly, maybe there's just more selection pressure against junk in cultural
evolution.
Language should always have been the king of the subjects studied by
students of memetics and cultural evolution. Speech and writing have
built-in error correction mechanisms. They are some of the things which are
most likely to be copied with high fidelity - and thus to exhibit
cumulative adaptations as they evolve. However linguists have
not been very prominent in the field of cultural evolution.
Famous students of language evolution - such as Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky -
are apparently clueless newbies when it comes to the topic.
The 
Momme von Sydow has a 2012 book titled:
Some students of semiotics seem to be irritated by the success of the meme.
(e.g. 
I notice that Peter Godfrey-Smith has a section in 
This post is about the work of Henry Jenkins. Henry is interested in marketing and advertising. Here are some of his blog posts on this topic:
The
term "
This post is about Darwinian physics. In optimization theory, for evolutionary approaches to
work as effective search algorithm, the fitness landscape must not be too rough.
If fitness at nearby points in the fitness landscape are unrelated, an evolutionary
search will do no better than a random search.
Memesis refers to the origin(s) of meme(s). Its etymology derives from
the terms 'meme' and 'genesis' - it's a contraction of meme-genesis.
It can refer to the origin of a particular meme - or more generally
to the origin of evolving culture.
There's
a fairly standard methodology for quantifying the
relative significance of genes, the environment and chance.
Cyclical selection is an important concept from ecology. It involves organisms
which have lifecycles involving environments that vary cyclicly. Cyclical selection is sometimes called "alternating selection". It is sometimes described in terms of "switching environments". Cyclical selection is part of a more general phenomenon - known as "fluctuating selection". Some examples of cylical selection:
One of the findings of genetics is that many organisms have chromosomes
that consist largely of non-functional 'junk'. Not all organisms have
this junk. Some creatures - particularly some small creatures - are
clearly under selection for small genome size. However, among larger
creatures, there's a lot of variation in genome size - even among
closely related forms - in a manner that is largely inconsistent
with the 'junk' having an important function.
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