Darwin's Bridge

A new book on social applications of Darwinism is out:

Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences, edited by Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, Edward O. Wilson

Joseph Carroll has previously written Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

The publisher's blurb says:

• Collects the most advanced work in the consilience movement
• Demonstrates how far science has gone toward unifying knowledge about the human species, and what still needs to be done
• Each chapter takes a different disciplinary approach to the question of "human nature"
• Features expert perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, the humanities, social sciences, and more

The book seems quite focussed on Wilson's concept of consilience. There doesn't seem to be much about cultural evolution, though a few of the contributors are knowledgeable about it. Wilson doesn't seem to have got to grips with cultural evolution yet - still favoring the 'it all boils down to DNA genes' version he was promoting in the 1980s. This seems like a head-in-the-sand approach to me, ruling out the possibility of a memetic takeover on a-priori grounds. The main mention of memes is some meme FUD from Massimo Pigliucci. Initial impressions lead to low expectations for this volume here, though perhaps some of the contributions will be of interest.

Cultural evolution's scientific lag: is the modern synthesis to blame?

The study of cultural evolution has lagged far behind the study of organic evolution - much to the distress of its enthusiasts. One question is why there is such a lag. One answer is that the delay was caused, in part, by the modern evolutionay synthesis, which failed to include cultural evolution and is incompatible with it.

The story is that, for one reason or another, the architects of the modern synthesis had little or no understanding of cultural evolution. They failed to incorporate it into their synthesis. Then their synthesis became stagnant dogma, stifling innovation in the field.

I think that this story has considerable truth content, though obviously it isn't the whole story. A possible piece of evidence against the claim that the architects of the modern synthesis had little or no understanding of cultural evolution could potentially be found in the following books:

• Mankind Evolving by Theodosius Dobzhansky (1962)
• Human Culture and Evolution by Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernest Boesiger (1983)

I haven't properly reviewed this evidence yet. Both books came out significantly after the modern synthesis crystallized, though.

Another problem with the thesis is that it doesn't offer an explanation for why the the architects of the modern synthesis lacked meme literacy in the first place. Maybe the explanation for that is sufficient to account for the lag, without the modern synthesis being to blame. I can't rule that out - but the modern synthesis was influential; it probably didn't help.

Looking at the memetics timeline the first half of the 20th century was an uneventful time for cultural evolution. In fact there are no entries at all from 1915 to 1945 - which is more-or-less when the modern synthesis came together. The founders of the modern synthesis were writing during a bleak time for cultural evolution. Perhaps the world wars were a factor here.

Sharing prohibition

I've long opposed the laws that criminalize information crimes. I make an effort to put my content into the public domain wherever I can - and have been writing open source software for decades.

The weakening of the copyright laws has long seemed inevitable to me. Today we are in a kind of twilight zone - where the copyright laws are violated on a massive scale, but very few people are prosecuted. The MPAA and RIAA phased out their litigation against file sharers long ago.

The war on sharing is reminiscent of the prohibition era and the war on drugs. It ought to be an embarrassment for humans that they kept the laws against sharing on the books for so long. Sharing comes naturally to humans, they like doing it. Overall, prohibiting sharing is personally and economically destructive.

In a democracy, sharing prohibition is not normally a vote winner - since consumers who are hurt by monopolies massively outnumber producers who are awarded the monopolies. However, voting is only one side of politics, the other side is lobbying. Special interest groups argue in favor of their monopolies and the infrastructure that perpetuates them. Since producers care a lot about this issue while consumers care less, the lobbying is mostly on the pro-monopoly side. It happens on a large scale and is well funded. The resulting sharing prohibition artificially creates monopolies and promotes wealth inequality - which likely has damaging effects overall.

From the perspective of memetics, sharing prohibition limits reproduction and recombination. To the memes, it is like a directive to not have babies - except under particular circumstances. For DNA genes, the state has mostly got out of the business of interfering with reproduction. China's one child policy (now two child policy) is the most prominent exception. However, meme reproduction is still legally regulated in many countries. It is a hangover from the pre-internet days. Today, it is an appalling impediment to all kinds of activities in computer science and elsewhere. We should declare that freedom to share is a basic human right and be done with the backwards prohibition era.

Memetics and racism

To date, evolutionary psychology has mostly avoided the wrath of those sensitive to race issues by avoiding differences between human populations, and focussing on human universals. Despite this, it has been criticized by a wide range of the easily offended, for addressing issues to do with sex and age in humans. Evolutionary psychology has ignored, denigrated and generally failed to understand cultural evolution. Ignoring cultural differences is a pretty significant simplification. Memetics is all about more realistic models that account of cultural variation. One of the findings is that there's not really any such thing as the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness). Instead, humans are quite plastic and use culture to adapt to a wide range of environments. Human nature is similarly polymorphic; what is 'natural' for humans is a function of their surrounding environment and cultural context. This tends to work against the averaging out of cultural variation that is often done by students of evolutionary psychology.

One political problem with models that account for cultural variation is that differences between human populations based on DNA differences can no longer be ignored. To quantify cultural differences between two populations, DNA differences need to be controlled for. Cultural transmission involves ethnic transmission biases - where people prefer to deal and interact with those with similar ethnic backgrounds. Cultural kin selection underlies homophily, which is the basis of much xenophobia.

I figure the result of the memetic focus on human differences will be a certain degree of entanglement between meme enthusiasts and those appointed to squish racism - who generally favor human equality. So far, I can't say I have noticed much going on in this area. Memetics and racism have, so far, mostly avoided intermingling. However, it is pretty easy to see this issue coming, IMO. There will probably be factions who promote politically correct versions of memetics and other factions who are not shy about using memetics to address race-related issues.

The influence of the politically correct factions is not negligible. James Watson and Frank Ellis illustrate the issue. It seems plausible that more heads will roll in the future.

I don't have much policy advice about what can be done to help avoid problems in this area. However, I do think science ought to be in a position to help inform policy advice relating to how to build societies with less race-based conflict - something widely recognized by all parties involved to be a desirable outcome. To do this we need to study topics such as the cultural evolution of ethnic tolerance. One one hand, such a study will probably attract flames - but on the other hand a proper scientific study of ethnic discrimination seems as though it is a necessary part of avoiding future race-related conflict.

Denis Noble critiques gene as unit of heredity

Most of those who complain about gene centrism in evolutionary biology don't understand the position of the gene promoters. However, I have recently found a few who do at least address the position I hold: that genes are units of heredity and genetics is the science of heredity.

I mentioned David Dobbs's critique recently. I have also found Denis Noble has made explicit the criticism that defining a gene as a unit of heredity is unfalsifiable:

According to the original view, genes were necessarily the cause of inheritable phenotypes because that is how they were defined: as whatever in the organism is the cause of that phenotype. Johanssen even left the answer on what a gene might be vague: ‘The gene was something very uncertain, “ein Etwas” [‘anything’], with no connection to the chromosomes’ (Wanscher, 1975). Dawkins (Dawkins, 1982) also uses this ‘catch-all’ definition as ‘an inheritable unit’. It would not matter whether that was DNA or something else or any combination of factors. No experiment could disprove a ‘catch-all’ concept as anything new discovered to be included would also be welcomed as a gene. The idea becomes unfalsifiable.

This is, I think, a criticism that is very easy to refute. Science consists of, among other things, hypotheses, axioms and terminology. Hypotheses are what needs to be falsifiable. Axioms and terminology, not so much. You can criticize an axiom by saying it is false, but saying it is always true isn't much of a criticism. A similar situation applies to terminology. You can say terminology is unhelpful, unproductive, misleading and so on. However, the criticism that it is unfalsifiable cuts no ice. In science, it is hypotheses that need to be falsifiable. Unfalsifiable terminology is fine. It I say an atom is a stable mixture of protons, neutrons and electrons that can't be subdivided without changing its chemical properties, nobody can say that that's a bad definition because it is unfalsifiable. That's just a misunderstanding of how science works.

Spacetime partitioning

Many scientists are enthusiasts for dividing the world up into pieces, in order to study it. One of the simplest approaches to doing this involves spacetime partitioning. The partitions involved are usually disjoint. Partitioning schemes are often not unique. For example, on the left is one partitioning scheme, dividing the universe into organisms and environment, while on the right there's another partitioning scheme, dividing the universe into cells and environment.

With a perfect model of the dynamics of the contents of each partition and how they interact, different partitioning schemes would produce the same results. However, in practice models are imperfect and the partitioning scheme used can affect the results.

Spacetime partitioning schemes often work best when the partitions don't overlap. Of course, in reality organisms can have joint phenotypes - and can sometimes overlap. How can that be modeled? One approach is to use partially overlapping partitions. That generally leads to more complex and awkward models, but it is one approach. Another possibility is to partition genotypes, rather than phenotypes. Joint phenotypes are common, joint genotypes are much less common. In symbiotic relationships where joint genotypes occur, inheritance usually follows one of the partners, so even then, partitioning can be made to work reasonably well. The main problem with partitioning by genotype is that this fails to divide up phenotypes properly - they just get left out. It is a bit like hiding the problem. Sometimes you can model overlapping organisms using independent partitions. If your hosts and parasite phenotypes overlap, you can use one partition for the hosts and one for the parasites - where each is the environment of the other.