 I recently wrote a summary article about why humans are hairless. The content is broadly similar to my much longer 2011 article on the topic, " Memes and the evolution of human hairlessness". Please refer to that article for references.
Why do humans differ from other great apes? They have stable and open-ended cross-generational cultural inheritance - in addition to the more common DNA-based inheritance. Apes have cumulative cultural evolution too, but with a low complexity ceiling. This cultural difference leads to most of the other differences, from walking and swimming to talking, large brains and ultrasociality. How does culture affect hairlessness? In three types of ways:
- It allows humans to compensate for the disadvantages of missing a genetic adaptation with cultural adaptations. Bedding, housing, clothing, baby slings, and so on all become possible with cultural inheritance.
- Another way is by changing the intensity of selection pressures that favor hairlessness. One pathway is via ultrasociality and parasites. Larger group sizes with more social contact (which are facilitated by culture) may lead to more opportuities for parasites to spread, and may also result in more grooming opportunities. Bathing, wading and swimming may also affect hairlessness. As might the odd and no doubt culturally transmitted human habit of using pack hunting and long distance running to exhaust their prey.
- Lastly, hairlessness is a sexually dimorphic trait. It is associated with neoteny, which seems to have been favored as a mechanism for other reasons during human evolution. Neotoney facilitates our culturally-magnified large brain fitting through the human pelvis - among other things. At some stage in human evolution, youthful, hairless females had benefits in terms of sexual attractiveness. Hairy women were not so favoured. Being visibly free from ectoparasites abd other disease may have been part of it. The effects of female hairiness may have spread over to men too, since men and women share many genes. Sexual selection seems to have been be a factor in promoting human hairlessness.
Genetic drift is a well-established idea in population genetics. It generally refers to stochastic changes in gene frequency that are not caused by selection. The term comes from nautical language: if a ship is not driven by the wind it may "drift" around, pushed hither and thither by the waves. Historically, genetic drift was not considered to be a very important force until the 1960s, when it was shown to be significant experimentally, and it was discovered that many genomes were full of useless junk DNA, which was then subject to genetic drift, resulting in molecular clocks useful for dating evolutionary divergences.
Genetic drift results in "neutral networks", whih in turn allow populations to maintain diversity that can be recruited by natural selection if the environment changes. Drift results in historical contingency and path dependence.
Complicating the definition of genetic drift is the desire to distinguish it from genetic draft. The term "genetic draft" refers to gene changes caused by linkage and selection at other loci. It is related to the concept of genetic hitchhiking. Like genetic drift, genetic draft can have a stochastic component, as a gene's neighbours vary over time. Unlike genetic drift, genetic draft can act persistently in the same direction.
Memetic drift is pretty much the exact same thing with memes instead of genes. Like gene frequencies, meme frequencies drift around in the absence of directional selection, resulting in loss of memetic diversity in small meme pools. As with genetic drift, memetic drift is a useful null hypothesis when dealing with the issue of whether an observed trait is an adaptation. As with genetic drift and genetic draft, we can distinguish between memetic drift and memetic draft.
Genetic drift is much discussed but memetic drift is rarely mentioned. I remember a good discussion of it in Kevin Layland's book "Sense and Nonsense". It is sometimes used by researchers as a null hypothesis. However, it is much less frequently mentioned than genetic drift is. This is, I believe, largely caused by cultural evolution's scientific lag. The significance of genetic drift was not recognised until the 1960s. Cultural evolution lags behind its organic counterpart in many ways, and this is plausibly one of them.
If you think about optimization frameworks in economics (one of the most advanced evolutionary social sciences) then the equivalent of genetic drift is rarely mentioned. It is the same with optimization frameworks in physics. Phyics features the "maximum entropy production principle" which explains a good deal of physical evolution. It too has concepts corresponding to genetic drift. However, it rarely mentions or makes use of these concepts. Phausibly, it is because these sciences are underdeveloped relative to evolutionary biology.
I'm generally a critic of contrasting "genetic drift" with "natural selection" (for details see here). Indeed, the definition of genetic drift is relatively complex, and it is often not a very useful scientific category, due to the practical difficulty of identifying it in any particular case. Memetic drift has much the same set of problems. However, I do, of course, acknowledge the significance of evolution by accident, and the systematic loss of diversity in small populations that arises due to factors which don't involve directional selection.
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.
 You may have heard about natural selection. There's also natural sorting.
Sorting is a process which involves creating order out of disorder by rearrangement.
Sorting is ubiquitous in nature. There are pecking orders, lek rankings and dominance hierarchies. Rocks sort themselves by size on beaches and gasses sort themselves by density in the atmosphere.
In computer science, filtering and sorting get similar space on bookshelves. Knuth's epic volume 3 of The Art of Computer Programming is devoted to Sorting and Searching. This equal billing seems fairly reasonable to me.
However, sorting is rarely mentioned by physicists, biologists or evolutionary theorists. In evolutionary theory in particular, filtering seems to get all the limelight - while sorting is largely ignored.
I think the neglect of sorting is probably a case of terminology influencing thought. Selection is regarded as a central concept in evolutionary theory - while sorting doesn't enjoy the same status.
Whatever the reason for its neglect, sorting is a pretty important phenomenon. Environmental gradients are common (e.g. depth and altitude). Often organisms get sorted along the gradients - with the most competent organisms getting the best niches. For humans proximity to city centers results in an important gradient. The poorest humans get sorted to the outskirts by property prices - while a lot of courtship of the most desirable mates takes place in central locations.
Sorting and filtering are often combined in biological systems. Sorting is fairly often followed by filtering. In some cases the filtering is performed by mates - who choose the best partners they can find. In other cases, filtering is done by predators. For example, when a cheetah chases gazelles, the prey naturally sort themselves from fastest to slowest. The cheetah then filters out the slowest one.
It is worth noting that sorting has other effects on evolutionary dynamics that aren't much to do with sorting being a prelude to filtering. Consider assortative mating, for example. That's not really sorting followed by filtering - the sort itself is what affects the evolutionary dynamics.
It is possible to classify natural sorting into two main types based on the mechanism involved. Some types of sorting involve direct comparisons between neighbors. Others do not - and instead rely on different entities having different speeds or trajectories. Examples of sorts that do not involve direct comparisons between neighbors include the gazelle example above, electrophoresis and the ink diffusion spectrum phenomenon.
Sorting processes that involve neighbour copmparisons are dissipative: they create order and they need a power supply and generate heat. Sorting processes that don't compare the entities they are sorting tend to be more reversible. For example, a prism sorts light rays. However it isn't dissipative: the effect of a prism can be reversed by another prism. This observation suggests the names 'dissipative sort' and 'reversible sort' for the two categories of sorting processes.
Sorting is usually thought of as being a one dimensional phenomenon. However natural sorting also takes place in two and three dimensions. Here's a two-dimensional sort of ink pigments:
 The dimensionality involved is not a defining characteristic of sorting processes.
It is sometimes possible to describe dissipative sorting operations in terms of selection. For example, when you shake your breakfast cereal, and the largest lumps rise to the top that process could be described as a series of many individual "selections" in which layers of the cereal act as porus sieves that allow small particles to fall through and select against large particles. This sort of re-description is possible for sorts that involve neighbor comparisons. It is usually less helpful to describe sorts that do not involve neighbor comparisons in terms of selection. Even where re-description in terms of selection is possible, describing sorting as a series of filtering operations is often long-winded and obtuse. It is usually best to simply describe sorting processes using the term "sorting".
One of the notable exceptions to the neglect of sorting by evolutionary theorists is John Wilkins. He has long been reframing natural selection in terms of sorting. I didn't get the idea from him, though I had long been aware of him framing evolution in terms of sorting. For an example of John's thinking on the topic see the "Evolution and Chance" talk.origins FAQ.
 Memes like genes clearly recombine. It is a simple matter to point to what were once independent memes fused together. Portmanteaus are an obvious example. For example:
- "Sheeple" - a portmanteau of sheep and people;
- "Spork" - a portmanteau of spoon and fork;
It is fairly common to use the term "sex" as a synonym for "recombination". For example, this is what Matt Ridley seems to do - when he says that ideas have sex.
However, not everyone shares this broad conception of sex. For one thing, you can recombine your own genes with each other - for example as an error-correction strategy, but - unless the process involves outcrossing - few would classify this as being sex. Another issue is pathogens. A retrovirus that infects your cells is certainly recombining its genes with yours - yet many people would be reluctant to call refer to this form of recombination as being "sex".
This leads to the question of how best to distinguish between sex and disease. One apparent difference is that sex involves members of the same species - whereas disease involves members of different species. However the most common definition of what a species is invokes the idea of sexual reproduction. To simultaneously define "species" in terms of "sex" and "sex" in terms of "species" would be circular.
Other differences might be invoked: parasites have shorter generation times, smaller bodies and smaller genomes than their hosts. However, most of these differences apply to genuine males somewhere or another in biology. They seem unsuitable to act as a basis for classification.
My view is that the best way to distinguish sex from disease is to see whether the recipient benefits from its injection of genes. If it willingly accepts the genetic donation, that's sex. If it rejects them - or tries to - that's disease. This raises some corner cases - such as cases of rape. These cases suggest a slightly different criterion - it's sex if there are adaptations favouring the incorporation of the injected genes - and it's disease if adaptations resist them.
I wrote up this idea in 2007 - in an essay titled: "Sex is not a disease" - and I think the idea has stood up well to the test of time.
Having said what we mean by sex, it is now possible to address the issue of sex in cultural evolution. The portmanteaus we originally gave as examples of recombination don't look much like sex or disease - they are one-off events. However, there are some cases of cultural evolution that seem more sexual:
- Fashion products - Fashion generates enormous cultural diversity. If you just think about shoes, the number of varieties on sale at any time is enormous - and cultural sexual recombiantion seems like a tempting explanation. Here, recombination is ritualised into annual fashion shows - where the designers go to copy each other's products.
- Printer-cartridge diversity - in my 2011 memetics book I gave printer-cartridge diversity as an example of parasite driven recombination. The parasites in this case are the cartridge-cloning companies. Parasites drive a lot of sexual recombination in the organic realm - and it looks as though similar diversity is produced in cultural evolution in response to parasitism.
- Experimentation on consumers - some internet companies (such as Google) run regular experiments on their users. They change the colours scheme, the positioning of adverts - and so on. At any time people may be participating in many different experiments - and multiple experiments are run simultaneously - to gather data about their interactions. The dynamics here involve a kind of ritualized recombination.
- Genetic algorithms and memetic algorithms - anyone who denies the existence of cultural sex surely faces a strong challenge in explaining how these optimisation techniques work without invoking the concept of cultural sex.
Even with the relatively strict definition of "sex" given here, it seems as though cultural evolution exhibits sexual recombination. I am not really clear on what Richard Dawkins meant in 2005 - when he said (of memes):
One respect in which they are not like genes is that there is nothing obviously corresponding to chromosomes or loci or alleles or sexual recombination.
Memes do have sexual recombination. I don't think there is room for much argument about that. If your conception of sex doesn't apply to cultural evolution, you probably don't have a very useful conception of it.
Sex has been described as being "nature's masterpiece". It is true that there are quite a lot of monocultures in cultural evolution. Many products for example, occur in many identical copies. Microsoft's Windows is a monoculture. However like many monocultures it has been plagued by pathogens.
However, nonetheless, there is sex in cultural evolution. Even a fairly cursory look at the fashion world shows the impact of regular sexual recombination on product diversity.
In the organic realm, sex often leads to gamete size dimorphism. It is possible to see this in companies - with some large, fat organizations provision resources, while other small, meme-carrying mobile agents of various types flit between them. There's also an equivalent of female choice. Interviews, testing by R+D departments, and carefully scrutinized fundraising pitches all qualify here.
Sex has proved popular in the organic realm. No doubt it will become similarly popular in cultural evolution. After all, regular recombination with outcrossing is the best way that is known to explore large, complex search spaces.
 The term " horizontal gene transfer" refers to the transfer of genes between organisms a manner other than the transfer between parent and offspring that takes place during normal reproduction.
Such transfer normally involves a symbiotic relationship of some kind:
- Parasitism and mutualism;
- Direct injection of genes;
- Sexual recombination;
Sexual recombination is not normally listed as a form of horizontal gene transfer -
on the grounds that it is a case of ordinary reproduction. This seems like a misclassification
to me: sexual recombination involves one organism injecting its genes into another one that is
not its direct offspring. Like other forms of HGT, it creates a reticulated evolutionary tree.
Direct injection of genes is common among bacteria - where it is called bacterial conjugation.
In symbiology, when gene transfer is vertical (i.e. symbiont and host generations are synchronized) the interests of symbionts and hosts tend to become aligned - what is good for the host is good for the symbiont. By contrast, when gene transfer is horizontal the interests of symbionts and hosts are not aligned. This can result in stress and problems for the host. One classic (and topical) example of this is the ebola parasite. This cares little about the welfare of its host, and treats it as a reservoir of resources to be turned into more parasites as soon as possible - often killing the host in the process.
Horizontal gene transfer produces a "reticulated" (networked, web-like) phylogeny - rather than a classic tree-like shape.
Horizontal meme transfer works in a similar way to horizontal gene transfer. The symbionts involved are cultural, and their heritable material is memes. The hosts involved are often human beings - but they can also be computer systems or organizations. "Horizontal" is normally intended to be with respect to the lineages of the DNA genes of the human hosts.
Sometimes it is claimed that cultural evolution features more horizontal transfer than than is seen in the organic realm. However, actual studies of the topic tend to show that cultural evolution and DNA-based evolution are roughly similarly reticulated. Alex Mesoudi devoted a section to this topic in his 2011 book. It starts on page 90 and is titled: "But is cultural evolution treelike". He reports on work comparing the "retention index" of 21 phylogenetic trees and 21 phylomemetic trees. The cultural trees had a retention index of 0.59, whole the organic trees managed 0.61. His citation for this work is: Collard, M; Shennan, S.J.; Tehrani, J.J.; (2006) Branching versus blending in macroscale cultural evolution: A comparative study.
Another surprisingly-common claim is that cultural evolution features horizontal and oblique meme transfer - while the organic realm, gene transfer is always vertical. For examples of this claim, see here and here. This claim is patently false.
We are currently seeing a shift from vertical meme transfer (as seen in many traditional religions) to horizontal meme transfer. Human population densities are increasing, and additionally, new meme-transfer routes are appearing - in the form of wires, optical cables, and radio waves. Consequently meme interests and the interests of the host DNA genes are likely to become increasingly different - according to standard evolutionary theory.
 The last 50 years have seen a massive expansion of the domain of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Though the idea that Darwin's ideas could be usefully applied to subject areas beyond the evolution
of species over geological timescales has been around ever since Darwin's era, it wasn't until the
1970s that systematic exploration of the area began.
Karl Popper applied Darwinism to science. B.F. Skinner applied Darwinism to individual learning.
Donald Campbell applied it to social learning. In 1976, Richard Dawkins devoted a chapter
in "The Selfish Gene" to the idea that culture evolved.
Then things really began to get going. In the 1980s several serious books by scientists on the
topic of cultural evolution appeared. Gerald Edelman discovered Darwinian evolution in the
immune system - and in low-level brain structures - such as neurons and synapses.
William Calvin also did pioneering work on Darwinian evolution
in the brain.
Darwinian evolutionary theory was broadly applied to social sciences, with economics - often regarded as the most "scientific" of the social sciences - generally leading the way. Not things like evolutionary psychology - which is still mostly obsessed with DNA genes - but rather Darwinian theories based on cultural variation.
It now seems fairly clear that the basic concepts of Darwinian evolutionary theory, such as adaptation and drift, apply widely including to many physical and chemical systems outside of biology. There's some debate on whether we should call it "Darwinism" - partly because of the scale of the developments since Darwin's era. However, this is a relatively minor terminological skirmish; the point is that Darwin's basic principles apply.
Self-organizing systems were once seen as a challenge to Darwinism from physics. For example, the forms of tree branches and roots do indeed resemble the patterns made by lightning strikes and fractal drainage basins - and some speculated that the same physical principles were responsible for both. However an examination of how these systems are formed shows that the Darwinian principles of descent with modification and extinction is involved in lightning strikes and fractal drainage basins. Fractal drainage patterns adaptively fit the drainage basins that contain them - due to Darwinian adaptation. What started off as looking like an invasion of biology from physics has turned into a battle with territory being lost and gained on both sides.
Darwinian evolutionary theory also applies to observation selection effects - which are an important area of science. This is another case of Darwin invading territory which was once thought to belong to physics.
We also understand why Darwinian evolutionary theory is so broadly applicable. Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on the production of new forms from old ones via copying and the elimination of unfit ones. It depends on mutations being small. A theory with no restraints on the type of mutation is consistent with any sort of observation, and so is useless. We can see that copying is ubiquitous in nature. The observed fact that physics is simple and local works to keep mutation small. There's also a law of conservation of information. Information never comes out of nowhere - it always comes from somewhere else. Under these circumstances, an evolutionary theory along the general lines that Darwin described is practically bound to apply. Design can't come out of nowhere - because the universe is closed. Instead it evolves gradually.
Once the idea that the domain of Darwinian evolutionary theory was expanding dramatically took root in the minds of scientists, some questions developed:
- How can we best characterise the general theory that applies to all these domains?
- What are the limits of evolutionary theory? i.e. when does it turn into dynamical systems theory?
To some extent, these questions are still being worked on by scientists. However the expansion of Darwinian evolutionary theory is a big deal. Expansion of the domain of the theory has brought growth, new developments and refinements. We can see the evolutionary theory more clearly through having more varied data from a range of different processes - based on different kinds of heritable material. It is probably the biggest revolution that Darwinian evolutionary theory has seen to date.
A recent paper in Nature describes this revolution. It's written by a bunch of developmental biologists - who use their own terminology and have their own perspective on the issue. It also features some rather embarrassing straw man attacks on what they call "Standard Evolutionary Theory". However it is possible to make out that some of their points are a watered-down version of the one I am describing here. My coverage of that paper is here.
References
Eusociality
Eusociality is a type of social organisation used by ants and bees - in which many individuals form a highly cooperative group and reproductive capabilities are suppressed in most individuals. Multicellular organisms originally formed out of eusocial groups of cells that clumped together for the advantages that group living brought to them.
Eusociality is common. If you count multicellularity as an advanced form of eusociality, then it is found everywhere. Even if you only consider cases where the individuals still have some kind of semi-independent existence, the prevalence of ants and bees in the biosphere means that eusociality is still a very important phenomenon.
Though meme-infested humans do exhibit ultrasociality, we are not yet near to eusociality - since we don't exhibit reproductive suppression. While it's possible to imagine a future populated by sterile clones of celebrities - and other in-demand individuals - we aren't there yet.
Eusociality is one of nature's ways of building cooperative systems. If offspring can reproduce independently, but travel slowly they often compete with their parents and their siblings as they are forced to compete with them for resources. A eusocial colony is a simple way of building cooperative systems on a large scale.
The widespread occurance of eusociality in the organic realm, raises the issue of what its status is in the cultural realm. It turns out that eusociality is common there too. There are many cases where reproductive 'queens' and sterile 'workers' can be identified in cultural evolution. Books are manufactured in factories - where most of the copies are made - and most of the copies will be destroyed before they manage to reproduce. However the existence of the copies acts to channel resources back towards the reproductive individual - enabling them to gain power and produce more copies - for example by book sales funding marketing and advertising.
Cultural eusociality
Eusociality is an extreme case altruism based on kin selection - in which workers give up their own opportunities to reproduce to help their queen to reproduce. It is also widely seen in the realm of human culture. There are many cases where the equivalent of cultural "queens" send out cultural "workers" out into the world to channel resources back towards the queens. This pattern is seen with consumer electronics, recipes, factories, server-side software, digital rights management, computer games - and many other phenomena. Cultural kin selection is involved in the explanation for these kind of phenomena.
To give a specific example, the use of patriotism to cause soldiers to sacrifice themselves in battle is an example of sterile workers sacrificing themselves for other reproductive individuals. However, dying in battle is highly likely to be bad for your own genes - so why do soldiers do it? What the deaths of soldiers are adaptive for is the patriotism memeplex. That exists in the form of other copies which directly benefit as a result of the sacrifices of the soldiers. The instance of the patriotism memeplex in the soldiers dies along with its human host - but copies of that memeplex in the generals and politicians survive - and so nationalism spreads. The soldiers are infected by memeoids – their brains are infested with necrotrophic memes which were memetically engineered by the state.
Offspring sterility
In the case of books, their non-digitized form makes copying them challenging. In many other cases, specific sterility features can also be identified. Patents, trademarks, digital rights management - all are oriented towards preventing unauthorised copying of sterile workers - with the aim of increasing the resources that are channeled back towards the original source.
It is usually easy to copy cultural information - so, in cases where reproductive memes are surrounded by sterile workers require special explanation. Several factors can result in offspring sterility - including: - Obfuscation - this protects consumer electronics and microprocessors.
- Cryptography - This involves using technical defenses to make copying difficult - resulting in Digital Rights Management;
- Legal threats - Some types of copying are prohibited by copyright, patent and trademark law;
- Watermarks - This helps to protect some videos, images and money;
- Registration - Some software ensures that it is not copied by "phoning home" - contacting its manufacturer over the internet;
- Dongles - Dependencies on something that is not easy to copy.
Offspring sterility is one of the hallmarks of cultural eusiciality that distinguishes it from simple situations where there is an individual meme which lots of identical copies happen to have been made.
Cultural cloning
Money illustrates that cultural kin can be identical clones.
Money is an example of cultural eusociality which involves identical clones. Notes and coins are not normally copied from. When they are, the copiers are hunted down and imprisoned. Technical measures are used to prevent copying - such as watermarks, metal strips and very detailed patterns which are hard to scan. Notes and coins are usually produced from reproductive individuals inside the treasury. The money in circulation plays the role of workers, the machines in the treasury that produce them are the queens, and the the blueprints for those machines are their heritable material. Money illustrates that the kin involved can be identical clones - as they are in conventional multicellular organisms. Identical clones usually offer the best possible chance of kin selection resulting in mutual cooperation.
Parental manipulation
The mechanism responsible for eusociality is typically the same in the organic and cultural realms. Kin selection acts in both realms - the sterile workers and their queens are closely related. In both cases parental manipulation is often involved. The queens make the workers sterile by building them without reproductive parts, so that they can better help their maker without getting distracted.
Eusociality - or extended phenotype?
When considering cultural eusociality, one issue is whether the sterile forms are better viewed as individuals in their own right - or the extended phenotype of the reproductives. For example, a cake factory makes "sterile" cakes - which are rarely copied from directly. It might be unorthodox to describe those as "sterile workers" - since they don't really contain the same "heritable material" as is found in the cake factory. The process of baking makes "reverse-engineering" the cake challenging - and the cake might better be regarded as the extended phenotype of the cake factory. I call this the "hair and nails` issue because, while human somatic cells are a lot like sterile workers, hair and fingernail tissues are not.
Prevalence
Cultural eusociality is ubiquitous. The printing press produced some of the first mass-produced identical copies of memes. These days, digital copying has reduced the cost of copying further - and some web pages and videos have been reproduced billions of times. In many cases, these highly-copied digital systems exhibit offspring sterility, one of the hallmarks of eusociality. This is often implemented via "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) systems.
This article is based on an excerpt from my forthcoming "Memes" book.
A major breakthrough in evolutionary biology in the 1960s took the form of the development of a theory that could account for much cooperative behaviour in nature. That theory takes on new significance and importance when applied to cultural variation. In particular, nepotism, kinship, relatedness and kin selection all have direct parallels in cultural evolution.
Kin selection
Genetically related individuals frequently cooperate and behave altruistically towards one another. This phenomenon is modeled by a branch of evolutionary theory known as "kin selection". This models cases where organisms engage in behaviour that favours relatives over non-relatives. Kin selection explains parental care, nepotism, eusociality among the social insects, problematical adopted children - and many other phenomena. The original explanation of kin selection invoked shared genes. J. B. S. Haldane was one of the first evolutionary biologists to understand the idea in the 1950s. It was subsequently studied and modeled by William Hamilton in the 1960s. Hamilton said:
The existence of altruism in nature can be explained by thinking about the replication of genes. We need to descend to the level of the gene, rather than the individual, in order to see that the gene exists surrounded by copies of identical genes that exist in all its relatives - in particular in its close relatives, its siblings, who have a half chance of carrying a copy of that particular gene, its offspring, which also have a half chance, parents: a half-chance, cousins: one eighth, etc. Seeing this swarm of genes that exists around a particular one, we can then ask what is the behavior caused by this gene that is most likely to cause the propagation of this set of copies in the relatives around it.
A broadly similar argument applies to memes. This raises interesting possibilities for what we will be calling " cultural kin selection".
Cultural kin selection
 Just as genetic kin can be expected to cooperate, so it seems reasonable to expect memetic kin to cooperate - on much the same grounds.
Our understanding of altruism needs to be augmented by considering the reproduction of memes. We need to descend to the level of the meme, in order to see that an individual meme is surrounded by copies of itself in the form of the meme's parents, offspring, siblings and cousins - its memetic kin. Seeing this swarm of memes that exists around a particular one, we can then ask which of the behaviors that could be promoted by this meme would be most likely to cause the propagation of the swarm of copies of itself that surround it.
That kin selection can be usefully applied in the cultural realm is an old idea. Boyd and Richerson discussed the idea in 1980. Paul Allison and Francis Heylighen noted it in 1992. Anthropologists had previously distinguished between "biological kinship" and "social kinship" (Hawkes, 1983) or between "natural kin" and "nurtural kin" (Watson, 1983) - but they mostly lacked a coherent theory about the evolutionary basis of these categories. Cultural kin selection helps to explain why these traditional anthropological categories are as useful as they are.
Suicide terrorism represents a good example of cultural kin selection. All the memes in the suicide bombers are extinguished, but copies of their memeplexes in other individuals are promoted by the publicity generated by their actions. Suicide terrorists believe that they are part of a brotherhood and that their actions help their relatives. This is not far from the truth - though the "brotherhood" is a cultural - not an organic one - and the bombing typically promotes associated memes - not organic genes. Cultural kin selection is involved many types of human social behaviour - including political, military, religious and professional groupings.
Parental resource allocation
Parental investments in offspring are one of the the most prominent manifestations of kin selection in the organic realm. These so not require particularly advanced cognition or much in the way of recognition of kin. Parents usually provide their offspring with more than just a genetic inheritance. They often provide them with material resources, to help their offspring get off to a good start in life. Parental investment typically involves one or more of these two types of contribution:
- Resource boluses - allocated at birth;
- Resource trickles - supplied over an extended period of time;
Parents sometimes provide a resource bolus - to help give their offspring a good start in life. For example, this can take the form of albumen in a large egg, or stored fats in a large nut or seed.
Another strategy is to provide a resource trickle over a more extended period of time. This requires an extended association between the parent and their offspring after it is born. Such extended relationships do exist - but they are not that common: many organisms simply abandon their offspring. Trickle feeding is the approach taken by strawberry plants, for example. They reproduce sexually using seeds - but also employ vegetative reproduction - using "runners". In this latter case, the baby strawberry plants are attached to their parents by fibrous stalks that provide them with nutrients while they are getting established. Among mammals, 'brooding' is common and maternal affection for offspring is fairly widespread. Humans also use trickle-feeding techniques with their own offspring. Maintaining a connection between parent and offspring in this way allows parents to dynamically allocate resources between their offspring - depending on their perceived viability.
Cultural parental resource allocation
Resource boluses and resource trickles are both found in cultural evolution. Resource trickles seem to be more common than in the organic realm. The world of finance provides many examples. One example is sales people: it is common to put new recruits on a salary after teaching them how to do their job. This allows them to support themselves while they are learning their new trade - but before they are able to earn a healthy commission. Another example is franchises. When a new franchise starts up, it is sometimes supported economically for a while by existing ones - while the new establishment finds its feet. Offices, factories, farming and mining operations often behave in a similar way.
Maintaining a connection over which funds can be transferred is simple and cheap in the modern world, and a resource trickle provides more dynamic control over the flow of resources. Cultural parents don't normally perish during childbirth - and so parents are often around to supply a resource trickle.
Religious memeplexes are among those that make extensive use of extended parental investments. Religions are often old and highly evolved elements of culture, with considerable adaptation to the human psyche. It is common for them to feature extended indoctrination periods. Sometimes the indoctrination takes place by trusted family members during childhood years - when the human mind is at its most impressionable. There's an extended association between the religious memes in the adult teachers, and their cultural offspring inside the children.
Teaching
A common example of cultural parental investment involves teaching. Teachers sometimes have extended relationships with their students. While they are together, memes are planted in the minds of the student - and the teacher cares for and nurtures them. Teachers don't just deliberately expose people to their memes, they check to make sure they are installed properly, and provide additional exposure if they are not. The memes are repeated and reinforced until they are well established in their new host. If one teaching method fails, another teaching method can be tried. Teachers often act as though they care for the future welfare of the memes they implant in students. They also act as though want the students to keep coming back - so that more memes can be installed. The meme's eye view pictures the memes inside the teacher influencing their behaviour - so that they ensure that the memetic offspring are well established in the minds of the students. If the student is inspired to subsequently go on to teach others, that is better still.
Teachers often teach others to teach. That's a case of memes not just caring about their immediate offspring - but trying to ensure that they become long-term ancestors. Obviously, being linked with memes associated with teaching others is a way for memes to improve their own fitness. Teaching memes are thus in demand - many other memes act as though they want to be associated with them.
Cultural kin recognition
 Outside relationships that involve teaching, cultural kin selection acting on memes inside different humans demands that memes somehow "recognize" each other while they are inside other human bodies. For mental symbionts to identify other mental symbionts while they are inside human bodies is a non-trivial feat. If you think of memes as software, that may help to understand how such a thing is possible. How this feat is actually performed is interesting. Memes typically use the same psychological apparatus designed for recognizing relatives in order to to identify copies of themselves inside others.
Memes often subvert their host's kin recognition for their own ends by making non-relatives appear to be relatives. A concrete example of subversion of host kin recognition may be found on the battlefield. Shared military uniforms indicate shared nationality memeplexes. These memeplexes are prepared to sacrifice themselves for copies of themselves in other bodies – and they manipulate their hosts to achieve that end – to fool their hosts into believing that their fellows are their genetic kin – not just their memetic kin. This is why military uniforms are often designed to cover the entire body and make soldiers appear to be identical clones of one another - to act as a superstimulus to the kin recognition apparatus in the human brain. Shakespeare expressed the feeling of brotherhood associated with warfare - writing:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
The human hosts may not literally be fooled into thinking that non-relatives are really kin. However, kin recognition is part of the human psyche - extending down into unconscious realms. While people may not be consciously fooled, part of their brain is still thinking: "kin" - and acting accordingly.
Religions subvert kinship kinship recognition systems as well. Monks are "brothers" in a "brotherhood", and the priests are called "Father". Nuns are "sisters", in a "sisterhood" and the head nun is their "Mother Superior" - or their "Reverend Mother". Then there's the holy "father" - who plays the paternal role. As with the military, the monks and nuns often wear identical uniforms - so they look like kin. Church is all about family - but it the relationships involved are not organic - they are cultural.
Kin recognition has had a rocky ride in mainstream biology in recent years. It has turned out to not be as widespread as was originally imagined. Gardner and West's 2007 article "The Decline and Fall of Genetic Kin Recognition" covers the controversy - suggesting that markers used for kin recognition would tend to rapidly reach fixation - and become useless as kin-specific markers - unless high levels of mutation or selection oppose this. They suggest that selection for marker diversity which is caused by parasites may help to explain why kin recognition is widespread among humans. The theory of gene-meme coevolution suggests another answer to this question - that humans use memes as markers that act as proxies for DNA relatedness that are both highly variable and easily identifiable. In both cases, rapidly evolving symbionts would act to promote altruism by providing a rapidly-changing source markers to act as signals associated with relatedness.
Perhaps the most important thing to say about cultural kin recognition is that it is not a prerequisite for cultural kin selection. David Hales in 1997 claimed that:
memetic kin altruism can only function if memes can induce individuals to distinguish between memetic kin and non-kin.
However, advanced cognition which is capable of recognizing other individuals is not required in order to distinguish kin from non-kin. A strawberry plant doesn't need to "recognise" its own offspring - because it is joined to them by runners. Similarly, many organisms don't disperse their offspring very far from home - in which case, being nice to your neighbours is often much the same as being nice to your relatives.
Memetic relatedness
Relatedness is not always so easy to calculate in the case of culture. Here is Peter Richerson (2010) expressing scepticism on the topic:
In the case of culture, the analog of kinship is very hard to estimate. Having two parents with equal genetic contribution makes the calculation of relatedness easy. In cultural transmission, one, two, a few, or many people in your social network are possible sources of culture. People may use different parts of their network for different cultural domains. No one has proposed a way to estimate cultural relatedness in the face of such problems.
It is not true that no one has proposed a way to estimate cultural relatedness. Paul D. Allison did it in 1992. John Evers did it in 1998. However, it is true that the concept of "memetic relatedness" between people does face some practical problems. We currently have no practical way to sequence all a person's memes - to recover all the cultural information stored in an individual brain. We can, however measure the occurrence of particular memes, via questionnaires and similar methods. In the organic realm, basic a calculation of relatedness on shared genes works quite well - because of the mechanics of meiosis. However, in the cultural realm, memes are not dished out so evenly and uniformly - and one sample of memes might give one estimate of relatedness, while another sample might produce a different estimate. That is a practical problem for estimating memetic relatedness between people - both for scientists and for memes attempting to track their own offspring. However, there are statistical techniques designed to deal with this sort of issue. If you randomly sample some memes from one person and then see if they are present in another person (and repeat the process the other way around) that will probably produce a reasonably usable figure for the memetic relatedness between them. The issue isn't a show-stopping problem.
However, while calculating memetic relatedness between people is not easy, it is often not necessary. Consider for a moment the similar case of kin selection among organic parasites. Some braconid parasitoids attack caterpillas. They crawl into the caterpillar's brain, form cysts, and manipulate its behaviour. These parasites die - but the behavior they induce helps their kin to reproduce. This is an example of kin selection. However, there's no calculation of the additional level of relatedness between the hosts that arises as a result of them sharing parasite genes. Such a calculation would be irrelevant and unnecessary. Kin selection acting on memes is similar. Many of the important relationships are between sets of memes or memeplexes. Calculating relatedness between memes is pretty trivial. Often such relatednesses are either one or zero - i.e. either the memes are either identical copies, or they are not. This idea can be expanded to memeplexes without much difficulty. That is enough to support the theory of kin selection in the cultural domain. Averaging relatedness over all the memes in a single host is often not necessary in order to model the dynamics involved.
Hamilton's rule
The "holy grail" for students of cultural kin selection seems to have been to derive an equivalent of Hamilton's rule. There have been a number of attempts to do this. An early attempt was made in a paper by John Evers (1998) called "A justification of societal altruism according to the memetic application of Hamilton's Rule". This paper derived a variant of Hamilton's rule applied to memes - adapted to deal with horizontal transmission. It was based on the idea of using a figure for the "fraction of shared memes" in place of Hamilton's relatedness. However, John doesn't really go into the difficulties associated with this idea. Also, adjusting Hamilton's rule to deal with horizontal transmission doesn't seem to be particularly urgent to me.
More recently, David Queller (2011) wrote a paper titled "Expanded social fitness and Hamilton's rule for kin, kith, and kind" - which attempted to roll kin selection, "kith" selection and "green beard" effects into an extended version of Hamilton's rule. David Queller's work is not based on memetics. It attempts to cover all kinds of social effect - not just cultural ones. While this work is interesting and general, its generality works against it in some respects. It doesn't allow predictions to be based on shared memes - and that is one of the main virtues of cultural kin selection. David Queller's use of the term "kith selection" clashes with Gordon Rakita's prior use of the term in a potentially confusing manner. I'm inclined to label "kith selection" as unnecessarily-obscure jargon.
Of course, applying an unmodified version of Hamilton's rule directly to pair-wise interactions between cultural creatures is still perfectly possible. In the organic realm, kin selection theory makes use of the idea of "genetic relatedness" - and idea that gives a rough estimate of the proportion of rare genes that are likely to be shared between two individuals. Part of the attraction of Hamilton's rule is that it allows a cheap calculation of this "relatedness" - based on easily accessible information about geneaology. In practice a lot of relatedness figures between cultural creatures are either 0 or 1. The lack of memetic meiosis complicates this approach. Also, in cultural kin selection, there are additional difficulties after relatedness has been calculated. Genes typically affect behaviour in the organic realm fairly directly. However, for the "puppet masters" of memetics, memes must manipulate their hosts in a highly indirect manner. Memes face difficulties associated with accessing host sense data and with controlling host motor outputs. These are broadly similar to the difficulties parasites face in manipulating their hosts. As with parasites, the resulting host behaviour is the result of a battle with host's DNA genes and all the other memes that the host carries. Most memes don't get things their own way. This indirect control over behaviour acts as a further confounding factor which makes it harder for approaches based directly on using Hamilton's rule to produce useful answers.
I think it is best to avoid obsessing over memetic versions of Hamilton's rule. The original Hamilton's rule works in the cultural domain in an unmodified form. The only problem is that the complex and indirect nature of meme expression can mean that it is harder and more complex to apply. Of course, it is still possible to adopt the meme's eye view - and ask how a meme could act so as to affect the propagation of the surrounding swarm of copies of itself. That is still an extremely useful approach - even if you don't directly use Hamilton's rule.
Related content
- Tyler, Tim (2012) Cultural Kin Selection - a teaser.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural eusociality.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Technological kin selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) The significance of cultural kin selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection vs cultural group selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection and the meme revolution.
- Tyler, Tim (2013) A brief history of cultural kin selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2013) Cultural kin selection bibliography.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural group selection bibliography.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Homophily.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection meets anthropology.
- Tyler, Tim (2013) Tag-Based Cooperation.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Criticisms of cultural kin selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection within hosts.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection vs memetic engineering.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural kin selection may have driven imitation capability.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Links between organic kinship and cultural kinship.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Misrepresentation of kin selection by group selection advocates.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural evolution + group selection = a disaster in the making.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural local competition.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural superorganisms.
- Tyler, Tim (2015) David Sloane Wilson on cultural kin selection.
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Cultural spite.
This article is based on an excerpt from my forthcoming "Memes" book.
 r/K selection is the conventional classification scheme for the well-known phenomenon in which some organisms produce large numbers of offspring, while others devote their resources to producing a smaller number.
While r-selection produces organisms that produces many offspring, K-selection produces
organisms that produce only a few. There's also the possibility of facultative variation along this spectrum - producing many offspring in one environment and few offspring in other environments. This type of facultative variation is seen in humans. Humans in war-stricken countries produce many offspring, while humans in affluent, meme-rich countries - such as Japan - produce only a few.
The whole of r/K selection theory can be applied on the level of genes, organisms or groups. It is also equally applicable to genetic and cultural variation - as has long been observed by students of memetics.
Memes are often compared to viruses. Small size and r-selection are closely associated. On these grounds, you might expect to see that most memes were r-selected - emphasizing the production of large numbers of offspring over most other factors. There is a considerable quantity of truth to this picture - but not all memes are r-selected. Large complex collections of genes that exhibit parental care are those that are most likely to be K-selected. The same is true of large complex collections of memes. For example, some types of religion take many years to be transmitted from one generation to the next. Many religions are evangelical - but not all are. Judaism, for example mostly keeps itself to itself - and you rarely see adherents knocking on doors or passing out leaflets. Instead it spreads via birth and marriage. Regal memes - those associated with being king and queen - are another example of failure of horizontal transmission.
Most of the examples of K-selected memes given above involve memes that are transmitted in a pattern related to the genes of their hosts. However, not all K-selected memes need to be transmitted in this way. For example, a trade secret of a company might spend most of its time in a safe - and reproduce only when the company opens another factory. In such a case, genes and memes might well have quite separate transmission pathways.
Since most r-selected memes are transmitted "horizontally" between human hosts within a single human generation they typically do not follow the transmission pathways of the host's DNA genes. This results in much greater scope for meme-gene conflicts over resources to arise. Such r-selected memes can behave like pathogens. In extreme cases, necrotrophic memes are seen. The hosts of these memes are just resources to be burned through - from the perspective of the memes.
In the future, humans seem likely to become increasingly subjected to r-selected memes - as more humans get online and transmission of memes between humans becomes ever easier - due to improved networking technologies. That may well mean more cases of meme-gene conflict.
This coming situation is part of the reason why human scientists need to get to grips with memetics now. It is uniquely equipped to model this type of dynamical system.
References
 In a grand historical view of copying on the planet, we have something like this:
Genes -> Ideas -> Memes
- Organic copying resulted from the origin of life;
- Psychological copying which evolved within minds;
- Cultural copying which evolved between minds.
Each stage led to its own explosion of living systems. Nucleic acid copying led to the Oxygen holocaust. Psychological copying led to the Cambrian explosion. Cultural copying led to the modern technology explosion.
There's some controversy over whether the last stage should be split into two - with human copying and machine copying being distinguished from one another - with a meme-driven human explosion preceding the ongoing technology explosion. Probably the main proponent of this split is Susan Blackmore.
Another controversy surrounds the origin of life. Probably there were copying systems before DNA. Also there were probably copying systems before the origin of life. A. G. Cairns-Smith argued forcefully in Genetic Takeover that there was no such thing as pre-biotic evolution. It now looks as though he was wrong - and that pre-biotic copying and selection are commonplace. Their role in the origin of life seems probable - though somewhat uncertain.
 Positional inheritance and velocity inheritance offer high fidelity transmission of information when physical objects split - allowing for adaptations to arise in physical systems. Copying with variation and selection in physics is a relatively simple and obvious application of Darwinism.
Darwinian physics is currently mostly an unknown topic in the mainstream. There's some Quantum Darwinism out there - but it is hard for most people to assess the worth of this material. Darwinian models apply well to fairly simple Newtonian systems. These models are more comprehensible and should be easier for most people to understand and accept.
Darwinian physics lacks some of the complications that cause social scientists to get into muddles about memes. For instance, simple physical systems have pretty undirected variation - allowing the standard neo-Darwinian assumption that mutations are random with respect to fitness to be applied - without much loss of modeling realism. The simple physical systems used as examples in Darwinian physics are easier to understand than the complex structures involved in human cultural evolution.
Darwinian physics has been worked on. Bickhard and Campbell's 2003 paper covers the topic - listing crystal growth, convection cells and catalysis as targets of explanation. D. B. Kelley's book on Universal Darwinism also covers it. However, for whatever reason, the subject area has not yet become mainstream knowledge.
Physicists are reasonable people. It seems reasonable to expect that they will regard the project of Darwinizing physics with less hostility than social scientists regard the project of Darwinizing culture.
Another reason to put energy into Darwinian physics is that physics has historically been a "high-status" science. If physicists come to accept that Universal Darwinism applies to basic inorganic physical systems, that will be a big and important feather in the cap of Darwinism.
One of the things I think that physicists will expect to see is the relationship between Universal Darwinism and
the maximum entropy principle. Another is the relationship between Darwinism and the anthropic principle.
Social science is still the area of greatest social and political importance for evolutionary theory. It's the area where there's the greatest need for correct, Darwinian science. It's the area where backwards, pre-Darwinian science is doing the most damage. It's an area where religious attempts to distort science get a lot of funding. However, Darwinian physics can contribute to this project indirectly - by helping to apply increased pressure to the social scientists on multiple fronts.
References
- Tyler, Tim (2014) Darwinian physics (the video!)
- Tyler, Tim (2013) Positional inheritance
- Tyler, Tim (2013) Velocity inheritance
- Tyler, Tim (2013) Observation of the observable
- Tyler, Tim (2012) Universal Darwinism
- Kelley, D. B. (2012) The Origin of Everything
- Campbell, John (2015) Darwin Does Physics
- Campbell, John (2014) Darwin does physics
- Campbell, John (2012) Universal Darwinism (Welcome)
- Dawkins, Richard (2009) Applying Darwinian Evolution to Physics
 I previously nominated
positional
inheritance as the most common kind of inheritance.
The second-most common kind is probably velocity inheritance. The term
"Velocity inheritance" refers to the way in which entities that split tend to inherit their parent's velocity. The offspring pieces tend to inherit the velocity of their parents.
Turbulence illustrates velocity inheritance fairly clearly. Or think of the way the targets break up in clay pigeon shooting.
Velocity inheritance is quite a lot like positional inheritance - but there are some differences:
Positional inheritance is always high-fidelity. However, the fidelity of velocity inheritance breaks down considerably when the particles involved become very small. In particular if the offspring particles are neutrinos or photons, velocity inheritance is not very high fidelity. You can also see poor velocity inheritance if you smash small objects into much larger ones at enormous speeds.
Some may find that velocity inheritance is easier to understand than positional inheritance. Velocity is more obviously a property of objects that is copied when they divide. Others find it more confusing - and get caught up in (irrelevant) concerns about relativity and frames of reference.
Other "simple" properties are inherited too when entities split - mass, angular momentum, charge, etc. The inheritance is not not always which such high fidelity as is seen in position or velocity inheritance.
 Notoriously, evolutionary theory applies to populations. For evolution to operate, you need to have a population of variants for natural selection to choose between.
That evolutionary theory doesn't apply to individuals is enshrined in definitions of evolution, and is in textbooks (for example, Mark Ridley's "Evolution" textbook).
Here's Douglas Futuyma (1998):
The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve.
Here's Larry Moran (2012):
Note that biological evolution refers to populations and not to individuals. In other words, populations evolve but individuals do not. This is a very important point. It distinguishes biological evolution from other forms of evolution in science (e.g., stellar evolution).
Here's Graham Bell (1997):
Individuals do not evolve; they develop, reproduce, and die. The characteristics of organisms, however, may change through time.
However, in universal Darwinism, individuals do evolve. Their brains evolve via learning. Their bodies evolve during development. Most Darwinian individuals are, in fact, populations on closer examination. Animals are populations of cells. Cells are populations of bacteria. Bacteria are populations of molecules. Molecules are populations of atoms - and so on. Many of those populations clearly evolve over time - event by completely standard evolutionary theory.
What are the neo-Darwinians thinking about? It isn't clear - but I think they are maybe trying to divide the evolutionary process up - so it only applies to one population (or level) at a time.
This seems silly. You can't have a system evolving from one perspective and not evolving from another one. Herbert Spencer's concept of a single unified evolutionary process is far superior. Here's Herbert Spencer (1862):
there are not several kinds of Evolution having certain traits in common, but one Evolution going on everywhere after the same manner.
Long ago, the idea that individuals were themselves composed of populations was not understood. It took a while to understand that these populations evolved by Darwinian mechanisms in a non-trivial way over individual lifespans. However, now this is understood. The idea that individuals do not evolve is outdated dogma. Dogma often takes a while to die - and this is a case in point.
 I've previously written about memetic hitchhiking. This is one of the main ways in which memes catch rides with other memes - via memetic linkage.
However, there's also another type of hitchhiking involved with cultural evolution: phenotypic hitchhiking. This is like the hitchhiking done by parasites and commensuals in the organic realm - where snails hitchhike on birds' feet and lice hitchhike in mammalian hair. Unlike memetic hitchhiking and genetic hitchhiking, this type of hitchhiking doesn't really depend on linkage. It takes place between symbiotic partners, rather than within a single organism.
Symbiotic hitchhiking can be categorized as follows:
- Organic hitchhikes on organic - e.g. a snail on a duck's foot;
- Organic hitchhikes on cultural - e.g. a mouse on a boat;
- Cultural hitchhikes on organic - e.g. memes in a human mind;
- Cultural hitchhikes on cultural - e.g. sticker on an advertising hoarding.
The idea appears in Bettinger, Boyd and Richerson (1994). They say:
Hitch-hiking, however, does not necessarily require any linkage in the physical sense, only an initial statistical association. Because of this, genes can easily hitch-hike with cultural innovations or vise versa.
A paper by Whitehead, Richerson and Boyd (2002) also discusses "cultural hitchhiking".
The 2011 academic paper "Religion, fertility and genes: a dual inheritance model" discusses a case of genes for religiousity hitchhiking of cultural religious practices.
While academia seems to have grasped "phenotypic hitchhiking" involving cultural variation early on, it doesn't seem to have cottoned on to memetic hitchhiking very well at all. Yet this is surely the most common and important form of hitchhiking in cultural evolution.
Referring to genes hitchhiking on cultural variation as "cultural hitchhiking" seems like bad terminology - since there are also other kinds of cultural hitchhiking that are take place. Genes hitchhiking on memes is just one type of hitchhiking involving culture.
References
 Dysmemics is the study of bad memes. It's named after dysgenics and eumemics.
With both dysmemics and eumemics, there's some scope for how the term is interpreted. Most of this revolves around the issue of what agent the memes involved are good or bad for. The value of memes is often considered with respect to their human hosts. However, one might also consider their value to memeplexes they are part of - or to society as a whole. I favour a broad definition of these terms that leaves open the issue of who or what the memes involved are good or bad for.
Though dysmemics and eumemics have almost opposite meanings, one of the main reasons for studying bad memes is to figure out ways of eliminating them. So, in practice, dysmemics and eumemics are rather like close cousins.
In science, the role of skeptics and reviewers is to identify and expose bad memes. In the arts, this work is done by reviewers and critics. Identifying and exposing bad memes is important work. However those who do it are notoriously unpopular. Society should try and ensure that skeptics and critics are well supported and positively motivated.
Much as eugenics is the art and science improving human genes in the gene pool, eumemics is art and science of improving the memes in the meme pool.
As with eugenics there are "positive" and "negative" forms of eumemics. Positive eumemics aim at promoting and spreading "good" memes. Negative eumemics aims at sabotaging, crippling and eliminating "bad" memes.
Eugenics has proved to be a controversial doctrine - one linked in many people's minds with the ethnic cleansing and Adolf Hitler. However, so far, eumemics has not had the same level of controversy associated with it - to most people it just seems obvious that we should seek to improve the meme pool.
There's a fair amount of conflict in the biosphere - and some of it is between memes and memeplexes. Memeplexes sometimes share an ecological niche with direct competitors - and the result is fairly often a battle to the death. VHS vs Beetamax and Blue Ray vs HD DVD are well-known examples from the tech realm - which is often characterized by winner-takes-all battles.
Probably the most common established terms for this sort of thing are Culture war and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_conflict. However, these terms seem to have acquired some pretty specific connotations. For example, culture war is typically used to refer to conflicts between entire cultures - rather than conflicts within whole cultures. I think this leaves a substantial niche which the concept of meme warfare could usefully fill.
Meme wars happen in the realm of marketing and advertising. They happen in politics. They happen in science. Famously, they happen in religion.
Meme warfare is often characterized by nasty tactics. F.U.D., negative advertising, astroturfing, culture jamming and agitprop. Thus the saying: all's fair in meme warfare.
Not all kinds of conflicts qualify as "war". If the parties have conflicts of interests - but come to an agreement, that's not normally classified as "war". It's the same with cultural conflicts. Sometimes memes compete for resources - but are never in danger of wiping each other out. Unless it's a serious conflict - in which one bunch of memes is fairly explicitly acting so as to exterminate and eliminate its competitors, that's not really "warfare".
Writers and artists often produce memes that compete - but it's only rarely meme warfare. Their memes can often peacefully coexist.
The history of meme warfare is interesting. One of the effects of the virtualization of conflict is that a lot of conflict has moved into the ideosphere. However, while memes have gained in power and numbers over time, they have increasingly found ways to cooperate, form large groups - and avoid conflict.
 Basics
Meme therapy aims to improve health and well-being with interventions that use or target memes. It's named after gene therapy. "Gene therapy" has historically been a rather narrow term. However, meme therapy is probably best interpreted rather broadly - referring to a wide range of therapies based on memes.
Some common forms of meme therapy resemble vaccinations. For instance, hearing a story about someone who got burned in a pyramid scheme can help protect people about pyramid schemes they might encounter in the future. As with organic immunity, vaccines - in the form of weakened versions of dangerous real-world memes - can subsequently provide protection against the real thing. Another approach is to combat bad memes with good memes. There are also forms of memetic preventative medicine - such as skepticism.
History
Meme therapy was an important part of memetics from its inception. The book Virus of the Mind had a strong self-help element. More recently there's the book Disinfect Your Mind: Defend Yourself with Memetics Against Mass Media, Politicians, Corporate Management, Your Aunt's Advice, and Other Mind Viruses. The theme of these books has generally been that your brain is under siege by a crowd of memes that seek to manipulate you - for the benefit of advertisers, politicians, religious leaders - and indeed the memes themselves. Only by mastering the self-help side of memetics can you hope to properly defend yourself.
Susan Blackmore is among those who have written about the self-help aspects of memetics - for example in her article, "Meditation as meme weeding". Sue talks about weeding out the bad memes, so that good ones might flourish. This gardening metaphor seems quite appropriate.
Mental illness
More recently, there have been more medical-based approaches. Hoyle Leigh has become one of the pioneers of meme therapy. He has written a fine book on the topic titled " Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness: Toward an Integrative Model". This notes that the symptoms of obsessions, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression and some kinds of stress appear to include over-growths of memes inside the minds of the patients - with particular memes often dominating their attention. It then goes on to propose treatment regimes - including meme therapy. Such meme therapy is part of Darwinian psychiatry.
Techniques
Common meme therapy techniques include:
- Meditation;
- Skepticism;
- Affirmation;
- Mantras;
- Music;
Classification
Meme therapies can be classified in several ways:
- Broad-spectrum vs narrow spectrum;
- Self-administered vs other-administered;
- Anti-biotic vs pro-biotic;
- Preventative vs restorative;
For example, meditation is an example of broad-spectrum anti-biotic meme therapy. It targets a range of memes, but the therapy doesn't really involve much in the way of memes. Affirmations are a form of pro-biotic meme therapy - they try to replace bad memes with good ones.
It's also possible to classify meme therapies based on the type of problem they treat. Treatable categories of disorder include excesses of negative memes, insufficient positive memes, and various kinds of auto-immune memetic disorders.
Ubiquity
Self-administered meme therapy is ubiquitous. People spend a lot of time listening to music and watching movies. These are basic forms of meme therapy.
 I have a page where some of my memetics-related content is indexed.
However, there's a lot of content from me on this blog (and elsewhere) that hasn't been indexed there yet.
This post is a step towards indexing some of this content - under the general theme of basic concepts.
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