Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries
may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor
to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual
power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Both have been used so
loosely they can refer to everything from word–of–mouth marketing
efforts to remix videos to popular content in ways that don’t help us understand the nature of these different
activities and the potential relationships between them. Both terms seek to explain the process of cultural
transmission but do so in such a way they strip aside the social and cultural contexts in which ideas
circulate, and the human choices which determine which ideas get replicated.
The terms 'viral' and 'memes' refer to a range of things. The term 'culture' does so too. This
criticism of the terms 'viral' and 'memes' applies equally to the widely-accepted and useful term 'culture'.
For me that illustrates the vacuousness of this critique. Saying something is 'cultural' doesn't help
distinguish between the different aspects of culture. That's not the point of the terminology. Instead
it highlights how it is copied and passed on - for example by imitation or teaching.
I fail to see how the terms “viral” and “memes” strip aside the social and cultural contexts in which ideas
circulate. Those are environmental factors that act as selective forces. This is surely cultural evolution 101.
Perhaps Henry has been confused by the specialized nature of memetics. Just as genetics is quite focused on
how genes mutate and recombine, so memetics is focused on how memes mutate and recombine. However, these disciplines
do not stand alone - there are other folk looking more at things like development, the nature of selective
forces and interactions with the surrounding ecology.
However, I'm speculating here. Henry doesn't explain where he gets his conception from. To me this criticism seems
to be unsubstantiated.
Henry also writes:
Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea,
which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed,
or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we
move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most
easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on
the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and
media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even
as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media
industry.
Talk of memes does not "place an emphasis on the replication of the original idea" at the expense of
transformation. In biology, there are copying, recombination and mutation. Saying that
biological models emphasize copying at the expense of recombination and mutation seems as though
it would be silly to me. Evolution depends critically on both copying and mutation.
Recombination is very important too. A copying-only version of evolutionary theory would be
impotent indeed - but there's no such thing - except as a straw man in the minds of critics.
I do like the "If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead" slogan, though. To many memeticists, myself included,
culture is alive, "not just metaphorically but technically".
This is apparently a book about evo-devo and complexity theory.
I would give "evo-devo" 1/10 for its revolutionary qualities. Complexity theory gets a 6/10 from me on this scale - with the proviso that the revolution dates back to the 1980s. I was taught it at university, and it's been orthodoxy for decades now.
The blurb for this book claims that: "Evolution is simply change over time". That is one definition - but it isn't a definition that makes it a scientific theory. The point of Darwinism was that it made predictions and was refutable. The idea that "evolution is simply change over time" makes "evolution" into an unscientific concept.
I skimmed the book. The contents are of poor quality. It offers a revisionist history of Darwinism. This is a conspiracy theorists book about evolutionary theory. That's unfortunate. I like the "evoluton revoluton" meme. I don't like seeing it being given a bad name in this way.
Oh well, at least Alan Bennet's book is better than Spetner and Shapiro's The Evolution Revolution. That one's a creationist tract!
For Jonathan Marks's previous efforts in the area see here.
I agree with Marks about at least one thing - there's too much "bean bag genetics" in cultural evolution - and not enough understanding of the role of symbiosis - mirroring the situation of organic evolutionary theory between 1930 and 1980. Marks attributes this trait to memetics - which ironically seems to be the most symbiosis-aware strain of cultural evolution to me.
The rest of the article is painful reading for cultural evolution enthusiasts. Not because it makes good points, but because arrogance and confusion don't mix well.
The rest of Evolutionary Anthropology is also a pretty strange place. As with many of those concerned with human evolution, it seems to be preoccupied with the distant past. There's an awful lot of modern data on human cultural evolution that not enough people seem to be looking at.
As it stands, memetics is an approach to culture that is problematic in two respects. First, it is atomistic, and second, it is mentalist.
I Pörn (2002) says:
When atomism is transferred to the social sciences, individualism results. In cultural studies atomism appears as the presupposition of “memes”—that is, a cultural object or belief that can be replicated, passed on, and evolve, and which seems to have a life of its own.
The name atom comes from the Greek (atomos, "indivisible"). It means "uncuttable", something that cannot be further divided.
Words are memes. Words can be subdivided into syllables or letters. It is pretty obvious that some memes are divisible in this way. Similarly genes may be divided into nucleotides. Neither genes or memes are "atomistic".
Of course, no meme enthusiasts ever characterised memes as "atomistic" in the first place.
Instead, "atomism" is a term that has been applied to memetics by critics. This approach is known as a straw-man attack. Such attacks involve projecting undesirable traits onto the object of criticism and then making out that they actually belong to it. Straw man attacks are a well known form of fallacious arugmentation.
Memes are reductionistic, not atomistic - and reductionism is wonderful - one of the foundation stones of the scientific method.
Ingold has some specific criticisims - among them:
Secondly, there is the question of what actually evolves. For ‘evolutionary biology’ it is normally taken to be the so-called genotype. Does there, then, exist some cultural analogue of the genotype? Opinion on the matter is divided even among ‘evolutionary biologists’ themselves, as Robert Aunger testifies in his comment
Yes: the cultural genotype is the memotype. It is rather less clearly delimited than in the organic realm, since cultural creatures are sometimes less clearly delimited than organic ones are. However organic organisms do not always have clear boundaries either - for example, consider ants or the Portuguese Man o'War.
the very assumption that information is pre-encoded, in genes or culture, prior to its phenotypic expression in the forms and behaviour of the individuals who carry it, implies that there exists some ‘reading’ of the genetic or cultural ‘code’ that is independent of the social and environmental contexts in which those individuals grow up and live their lives.
Not really. English is a memetic code that maps from memes to meme products. However: is English "independent of the social and environmental contexts in which those individuals grow up and live their lives"? Not really - there are also French and Spanish speakers and English is constantly being modified by those who speak it. This just seems to be a misunderstanding.
Are we to understand that cultural information is transmitted, from head to head, independently and in advance of its expression?
That depends a bit on what you mean. A recipe can be transmitted from head to head without ever going through its main meme expression process - namely baking a cake. However, there's a sense in which behavioral imitation involves at least some meme expression processes - involving creating behavior and then observing it and reconstructing corresponding motor actions. However, it is rare for culture to be copied independently of its expression.
How can a theory of cultural evolution, modelled on the principles of ‘evolutionary biology’, be other than completely circular? Following in the footsteps of other neo-Darwinian culture theorists, Mesoudi et al. define culture as transmitted information (ideas, knowledge, beliefs, values, skills, attitudes) that affects the behaviour of individuals. They then go on to announce that there is ‘ample evidence that culture plays a powerful role in determining human behaviour and cognition’ (331). Culture is anything that determines what humans think and do, ergo what humans think and do is determined by culture!
That argument just doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Culture is NOT defined as being "anything that determines what humans think and do" by Mesoudi et al. - they also permit non-social learning and genetics to influence human behaviour. Tim continues with:
Nor is this circularity limited to neo-Darwinian reasoning about culture. The same goes for its thinking about genes. To establish the genotype of an organism, ‘evolutionary biology’ works backwards from its outward, phenotypic form and behaviour by factoring out variation due to environmental experience so as to arrive at a context-independent description, only to declare that its form and behaviour are expressions, within a particular environmental context, of an evolved genotype. The concept of ‘trait’, whether applied to genetic or cultural characters, at once embodies and conceals this circularity.
WTF? I don't think Tim Ingold knows what he is talking about! This is what an anthropologist criticising evolutionary biology looks like? I think Tim should stick to subjects he knows something about.
Medoudi et al. offer their responses to all this here. They describe Ingold's article as containing "unhelpful misrepresentation and scaremongering".
This podcast is pretty boring. Memes start in part 2. Ingold has the idea that evolutionary biology needs to be combined with developmental systems theory - and various other things - in order to create a viable theory.
The main problem with that is that we already have a perfectly good, highly viable theory that is spending far too much time sitting around not being applied.
The current situation is that immense retardation in the social sciences is occurring - through the lack of a Darwinian theory of cultural change.
Scientists should probably roll out the current best shot at a Darwinian theory of culture across the social sciences fairly soon. I mean, 150 years of pre-Darwinian thinking in the social sciences is enough - right? The social sciences should at least get onto the Darwinian bandwagon. Some of the more esoteric aspects of evolutionary theory can be postponed - if it actually helps with that basic mission.
Tim Ingold doesn't seem to me to be part of the solution. Maybe he has a revolutionary unified theory of biology up his sleeve, but from what I can see, it doesn't look like it, and nobody should delay rolling out Darwinian culture theories on his behalf. This makes Tim part of the problem.
The other thing to say is that, in my experience, most people who claim that developmental systems theory is important to integrate into evolutionary biology often have a poor understanding of how useful evolutionary biology can be with no modeling of developmental processes at all. Evolutionary biology kind of has a "slot" into which theories of development can be fitted. A lack of knowledge of development thus has very little impact on progress in evolutionary theory. Population genetics is the same. We can do meme frequency analysis just fine without understanding development at all.
The fallacy of Dennett's argument also undermines his other imperialist hope--that the universal acid of natural selection might reduce human cultural change to the Darwinian algorithm as well. Dennett, following Dawkins once again, tries to identify human thoughts and actions as "memes," thus viewing them as units that are subject to a form of selection analagous to natural selection of genes. Cultural change, working by memetic selection, then becomes as algorithmic as biological change operating by natural selection on genes--thus uniting the evolution of organisms and thoughts under a single ultra-Darwinian rubric:
According to Darwin's dangerous idea...not only all your children and your children's children, but all your brainchildren and your brainchildren's brainchildren must grow from the common stock of Design elements, genes and memes.... Life and all its glories are thus united under a single perspective.
But, as Dennett himself correctly and repeatedly emphasizes, the generality of an algorithm depends upon "substrate neutrality." That is, the various materials (substrates) subject to the mechanism (natural selection in this case) must all permit the mechanism to work in the same effective manner. If one kind of substrate tweaks the mechanism to operate differently (or, even worse, not to work at all), then the algorithm fails. To choose a somewhat silly example that actually played an important role in recent American foreign policy, the cold war "domino theory" held that communism must be stopped everywhere because if one country turned red, then others would do so as well, for countries are like dominos standing on their ends and placed one behind the other--so that the toppling of one must propagate down the entire line to topple all. Now if you devised a general formula (an algorithm) to describe the necessary propagation of such toppling, and wanted to cite the algorithm as a general rule for all systems made of a series of separate objects, then the generality of your algorithm would depend upon substrate neutrality--that is, upon the algorithm's common working, regardless of substrate (similarly for dominos and nations in this case). The domino theory failed because differences in substrate affect the outcome, and such differences can even derail the operation of the algorithm. Dominoes must topple, but the second nation in a line might brace itself, stay upright upon impact, and therefore fail to propagate the collapse.
Natural selection does not enjoy this necessary substrate neutrality. As the great evolutionist R.A. Fisher showed many years ago in the founding document of modern Darwinism (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, l930), natural selection requires Mendelian inheritance to be effective. Genetic evolution works upon such a substrate and can therefore be Darwinian. Cultural (or memetic) change manifestly operates on the radically different substrate of Lamarckian inheritance, or the passage of acquired characters to subsequent generations. Whatever we invent in our lifetimes, we can pass on to our children by our writing and teaching. Evolutionists have long understood that Darwinism cannot operate effectively in systems of Lamarckian inheritance--for Lamarckian change has such a clear direction, and permits evolution to proceed so rapidly, that the much slower process of natural selection shrinks to insignificance before the Lamarckian juggernaut.
From "Bully for Brontosauraus":
I am convinced that comparisons between biological evolution and human cultural or technological change have done vastly more harm than good — and examples abound of this most common of all intellectual traps. Biological evolution is a bad analogue for cultural change because the two are different for three major reasons that could hardly be more fundamental.
First, cultural evolution can be faster by orders of magnitude than biological change at its maximal Darwinian rate — and questions of timing are of the essence in evolutionary arguments.
Second, cultural evolution is direct and Lamarckian in form: [t]he achievements of one generation are passed directly to descendants, thus producing the great potential speed of cultural change. Biological evolution is indirect and Darwinian, as favorable traits do not descend to the next generation unless, by good fortune, they arise as products of genetic change.
Third, the basic topologies of biological and cultural change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change.
From "Life's Grandeur" page 219:
In this sense, I deeply regret that common usage refers to the history of our artifacts and social organizations as “cultural evolution.” Using the same term - evolution - for both natural and cultural history obfuscates far more than it enlightens. ... Why not speak of something more neutral and descriptive — ‘cultural change,’ for example?”
...
But cultural change, on a radical other hand, is potentially Lamarckian in basic mechanism. Any cultural knowledge acquired in one generation can be directly passed to the next by what we call, in a most noble word, education.
...
This uniquely and distinctively Lamarckian style of human cultural inheritance gives our technological history a directional and cumulative character that no natural Darwinian evolution can possess.
...
human cultural change is an entirely distinct process operating under radically different principles that do allow for the strong possibility of a driven trend to what we may legitimately call “progress”
...
The common designation of “evolution” then leads to one of the most frequent and portentous errors in our analysis of human life and history – the overly reductionist assumption that the Darwinian natural paradigm will fully encompass our social and technological history as well.
...
Biological evolution is powered by natural selection, cultural evolution by a different set of principles that I understand but dimly.
Gould said in a 1996 radio interview with Susan Blackmore:
The criticism of memes starts at 53:50. The whole thing is really too ridiculous to comment on. I'll just quote:
Dennett complains that Aping Mankind caricatures a controversial idea he develops: cultural memes. The Darwinesque concept originates in Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are analogous to genes, Dennett has said, "replicating units of culture" that spread from mind to mind like a virus. Religion, chess, songs, clothing, tolerance for free speech—all have been described as memes. Tallis considers it absurd to talk of a noun-phrase like "tolerance for free speech" as a discrete entity. But Dennett argues that Tallis's objections are based on "a simplistic idea of what one might mean by a unit." Memes aren't units? Well, in that spirit, says Dennett, organisms aren't units of biology, nor are species—they're too complex, with too much variation. "He's got to allow theory to talk about entities which are not simple building blocks," Dennett says.
The video has a Q&A here. Memes are discussed 19 minutes in.
William Wimsatt is a researcher in cultural evolution. Here he is in action:
Wimsatt is a meme critic. He prefers what he calls "Meme Like Things" (MLTs).
His case is all to do with development - and he presents what we might call an "evo devo" critique. Of course development complicates organic evolution just as much as it complicates cultural evolution.
The science of genetics typically treats development as a black box. The rationale is that development is very complicated and we have little chance of understanding very much of it - and yet there is much that can usefully be understood while completely ignoring it. As a result of this simplification, genetics has made enormous progress in understanding the transmission of heritable traits. Memetics does the exact same thing, for the exact same reason and gets the exact same benefits. So: population memetics and population genetics normally treat development as a black-box and just continue without attempting to flesh it out. This is really just how science works.
Wimsatt is yet another critic that doesn't seem to appreciaate the depth of the parallels between cultural and biological evolution. For example, about 30 minutes into the talk, he writes:
The fact that earlier MLT's (meme-like-things) affect the acquition and interpretation of later MLT's means that thet separability of heredity, development and selection in the architecture of standard pop. gen models is impossible. So the models are far more complex.
In biology, one breeding population does for all traits--you inherit the whole thing at once. For culture, we occupy a succession of partially overlapping reference groups throughout the life cycle, so the institutions and organisations that mediate this trajectory make culturally-induced population structure crucial.
Both of these points are incorrect - and they are wrong due to misconceptions about the organic realm - not the cultural realm.
Earlier infections do affect later ones. Cowpox infections affect smallpox ones. AIDS infections affect pneumonia, tuberculosis and many other infections. Hepatitis D requires a previous Hepatitis B infection - and so on.
In the organic realm, you simply don't "inherit the whole thing at once". Inheritance comes along in dribs and drabs, one food symbiont, gut symbiont, pet or persistent viral infection at a time. The idea that you receive your entire organic inheritance at birth is nonsense - rather it is acquired gradually over the lifecycle as you pick up pathogens and symbionts. In other words: the organic realm is just like the cultural realm in these respects.
References:
Wimsatt, William C (1981) Units of Selection and the Structure of the Multi-Level Genome.In P. D. Asquith and R. N. Giere (eds), Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2, Bloomsburg, PA: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 122–83. [criticism]
Wimsatt, William C (1981) Developmental Reductionistic Research Strategies and Their Biases in the Units of Selection Controversy.In T. Nickles (ed.), Scientific Discovery.Vol. II, Case Studies, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 60, Boston: Reidel, pp. 213–59. [criticism]
Wimsatt, William C (1986) Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction.In P. Betchel (ed.), Integrating Scientific Disciplines, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 185–208.[criticism]
Wimsatt, William C. (2010) Memetics does not provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution: A developmental perspective. In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology, Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72. [criticism]
This post is about the work of Henry Jenkins. Henry is interested in marketing and advertising. Here are some of his blog posts on this topic:
If you search for "evoluton revoluton" and one of the things that comes up these days is Alan Bennett's book, titled:
Confused critic of cultural evolution Jonathan Marks penned 
In 
Tim Ingold is a meme critic. In fact he seems to be a critic of most kinds of Darwinian cultural evolution.
Stephen J. Gould really didn't like the concept of Darwinian cultural evolution.
Posts
