Rob Boyd - A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species

I read through some of the the reviews of Rob Boyd's 2017 book "A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species". To my surpise I saw that Boyd was ravaged by a meme enthusiast:

Although Boyd clearly focuses on norms, unfortunately he does not dare to 'leap' and come to the – in my view – logical conclusion: That the focal entities in cultural evolution are not individuals or even groups of individuals, but non-genetically transmitted pieces of information: ideas, norms, practices … or what others have called 'memes'.

Boyd writes: „...competition among groups can lead to the spread of some norms at the expense of others“. „Norms causing a group to survive will become more common compared to those that lead to extinction“.

That is very close to what Dan Dennett or Richard Dawkins would call a 'meme's-centered view' of cultural evolution. In biological evolution, the last sentence would be like this: „Genes causing an organism to survive and reproduce (compared to other organisms) will become more common compared to those that lead to a reduction of fitness or even death“. Therefore, imo the logical conclusion of „cultural group selection“ would be a 'meme's-centered view' of cultural evolution, but since Boyd does not like the concept of 'memes' he continues to speak of 'norms', sometimes in a rather ambiguous way.

The reviewer goes on to say:

That is one of the weaker points of Boyd's book: His poster examples from anthropological studies make perfect sense in a functionalist framework, as they are all about norms that have a strong (positive) effect on survival of HUMAN beings (useful food taboos, detoxifying material to obtain food, building shelters, etc..), but many, maybe even most of cultural variants (aka 'memes') do not have such effects. A lot of those entities culture is made of exist - and are reproduced - just because people find them interesting and memorable. That is exactly what is predicted by scholars who consider cultural variants aka 'memes' as a second replicator with its own independent 'fitness'.

I didn't read " A Different Kind of Animal" yet - but to be fair, this might be being a bit unfair to Rob. He's authored (or coauthored) many papers that use the "meme" terminology. He does understand that memes can be deleterious to their human hosts. There's a while chapter on this topic in "Not By Genes Alone". However constant use of "norm" as a substitute for "meme" does seem to be a kind of cancer in the field. Cultural evolution involves the study of memes, not just norms. Not all memes are norms.