The technical as a kingdom of life

Biologists categorize life into kingdoms. Animal, vegetable, fungal - and so on. Memetics proposes that culture is alive too. "Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically". Where does culture fit into biology's grand classification schemes? As far as I can tell, it doesn't. I've looked at numerous resources about classifying living things into large-scale categories or "kingdoms" - and none makes any mention of culture.

A pioneer of promoting classification of culture as its own kingdom has been Kevin Kelly. In "The Technium" and "What Technology Wants" Kevin argues that "technical stuff" merits classification as a new kingdom of life. Here is Kevin in 2007:

One way to think of the technium is as the 7th kingdom of life. There are roughly six kingdoms of life according to Lynn Margulis and others. As an extropic system that originated from animals, one of the six kingdoms, we can think of the technium as a 7th.

Technology seems a bit narrower than culture, but it covers many cultural phenotypes, so sure: the technical should be up there with the animal and the vegetable as a large scale kingoms of life. Go Kevin!

While Kevin has basically the right idea, I am more worried about the rest of the world's biologists. How come they are promoting such messed up classification schemes? How can they think culture is not alive? Rocks are not alive, but culture is clearly alive. It reproduces. It exhibits adaptation. Anyone who thinks that culture is not alive has a pretty messed up conception of what life is. Biology is the study of life - by definition. How can that not include culture?

I don't know exactly what has happened, here, but it is obviously pretty messed up. Biologists should be embarassed and ashamed of their crappy classifcation schemes. What were they thinking? How come they have made such an enormous screw up? I don't have all the answers, but I suspect that "the social sciences" might have something to do with it. Apparently, anything to do with humans comes under the remit of the social sciences - and they have got stuck in a murky backwater for decades, with many of the practitioners not accepting the scientific method, not accepting evolution, not accepting cultural evolution, or promoting various other sorts of archaic nonsense. Even so, it takes two to tango. If the social sciences want to monopolize the science of human behavior, other biologists don't have to let them. Biologists should stand up and fight for culture to also be within their remit.

Look at a car - for example. Is it an animal? No. Is it vegetable? No. Is it mineral? No. It is something else. That many biologists can't sensibly classify such a common object into their kingdoms of life reflects badly on them. They have screwed up. It is time for them to make amends.