The memetic legacy of Richard Dawkins:

In my 2011 video/essay title "Dawkins Dangerous Idea", I approvingly quoted Paul McFedries as saying:

Richard Dawkins became famous in the 1970s for his concept of the selfish gene, and he has become infamous in recent years for his unyielding atheism. But I predict that Dawkins will be known, a hundred years hence, not for these contributions to science and culture but for the concept of the meme. Feel free to spread that idea around.

Now it appears that genetics blogger Razib Khan has come around to much the same idea, writing an article titled:

In 2546 Richard Dawkins Will Be Remembered For “Memes”

I still think that this is right. What is Dawkins second-biggest scientific idea? Probably the extended phenotype. That seems rather insignificant compared to memes and memetics.

Richard Dawkins on memetics and temes in 2017

Richard Dawkins gets asked if his views on memetics have changed since 1976 - and what he thinks of "temes". To start the 3 minute meme discussion, skip to 14 minutes in:

Dawkins 2015 WSJ interview on memes

Dawkins interviewed by WSJ in 2015. It is four minutes long. Memes are the topic.

Richard Dawkins explains the real meaning of the word 'meme'

The blurb reads:

Today, the word "meme" is typically used to describe a funny photo with text that gets passed around online. But Richard Dawkins coined the term years before the World Wide Web even existed.

Thanks to Kosmozoan on Reddit for bringing this one to my attention.

Dawkins reads the section on memes from his latest book

Here, Richard Dawkins reads the section about memes from his latest book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science.

The book has around three pages on memes. The content focuses on the efforts of Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett to turn memetics into a proper scientific enterprise.

Dawkins on Darwinian human affairs

Richard Dawkins may have pioneered and popularized the idea of cultural evolution but he does't always seem to have a good handle on the topic these days. For example, I was pretty disappointed with his treatment of Darwinian economics recently. In The Genius of Charles Darwin, Dawkins discusses social Darwinism, the efforts of John Rockafeller and the evolutionary business practices of Enron - and then concludes:

Darwinism in business seems to be little more than metaphor an analogy.

This material is 107 minutes in. Next, Dawkins asks:

Can Darwinism be applied to other areas of human affairs?

His answer to this question: eugenics. Dawkins goes on to explain:

I've always hated how Darwin is wheeled out to justify cut-throat business competition, racism and right-wing politics.

That's all very well - but this presentation about how Darwinism applied to human affairs is "little more than metaphor an analogy" is distorted and wrong. It's a missed opportunity to explain how Darwinism actually does apply to human affairs. If Dawkins really thinks that "Darwinism in business seems to be little more than metaphor an analogy", he's simply confused and mistaken.

Richard Dawkins on memes, Oxford, 2014

The blurb reads: An extract from Richard Dawkin's open Q&A session at the Oxford Union on 18th February 2014.

I think this talk illustrates replicator rot. IMO, this conception of a meme is a dead end and isn't suitable for use as the basis of a science of culture. However, we don't have to define memes in the exact same way as Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins on memes in 2013

Richard Dawkins: Memes

Richard Dawkins: Religion a Computer Virus

I can't embed it, but in this last video, Richard Dawkins gets into memes (and memeplexes) during the book tour associated with the first part of his autobiography: Richard Dawkins On Meme.

Video: Richard Dawkins On Meme

I can't embed this video. It's called "Richard Dawkins On Meme".

Dawkins is promoting his autobiography here - and he describes the role of memes in The Selfish Gene.

The video is dated November 2013.

Richard Dawkins - on the definition of the term "meme"

Richard Dawkins recently wrote - in an AMA on Reddit:

• Q: How do you feel now that memes, first discussed in your book The Selfish Gene, have become ubiquitous in internet culture? [...]
  • A: I'm pleased that the concept of meme has become widely understood, but the true meaning is a bit broader than the common understanding. Anything transmitted with high fidelity from brain to brain by imitation is a meme. [...]

Of course, that is true. However, to briefly recap why this sort of definition of a meme is not very useful scientifically:

Cultural elements spread from one human to the next irrespective of their copying fidelity. Essentially the same math applies to cultural elements that are copied with high fidelity and poor fidelity. Of course poor fidelity copying typically leads to a mutational meltdown - and acts against adaptive evolution. However, it does not always do so. There are ways of applying error correction to systems that exhibit poor copying fidelity. Some of these are used in real life cultural situations. Copying the most popular variant can stabilize even poor fidelity copying systems - and prevent a mutational meltdown. It is basic information theory that you can preserve signal fidelity even if you have poor quality data transmission channels.

There's little point in having a science of high fidelity copied cultural elements. It's would be a subset of the science of all copied cultural elements.

Also, there is no good reason to mention "imitation". Imitation is a type of social learning. A science of all social learning is at hand. This covers imitation, teaching, local enhancement - and other types of social learning. Being specific when you can so easily be general is not the scientific way.

In my opinion, Dawkins isn't helping memetics with this kind of material.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2009) Against Replicator Terminology.
• Tyler, Tim (2010) The role of high-fidelity transmission in memetics.
• Tyler, Tim (2011) The claim that evolution doesn't require replicators.
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Replicator rot.
• Plotkin, H. (2000) People do more than imitate.

Self-confessed memetic hijacking victims

Memetics suggests that we might observe individuals so infested with memes that the interests of their genes are overridden. I refer to this as memetic hijacking. Susan Blackmore proposed we call such creatures "meme fountains" - which sounds remarkably positive to me. I've previously use the term "meme shedding" for the way in which such creatures leave a trail of memes wherever they go.

One of the most famous examples of memetic hijacking involves chaste priests who devote their energy to prosletysing. They tend to produce copies of their memes, not copies of their genes.

Theory suggests that memes might adapt in ways that divert host reproductive success towards meme replication - as is seen in the organic realm - where some parasites sterilize their hosts - in order to make use of their reproductive resources.

Of course many necrotrophic memes also reduce the fertility of their hosts by shortening their lifespan. Suicide bombers - who are sterilized by their memes in a most dramatic fashion - are an obvious example of this.

Not many memetic hijacking victims are "self-confessed". However we do see a few. Richard Dawkins recently volunteered that:

as for me, I'd rather spread memes than genes anyway.

He had previously said:

I'm unlikely to be among those who turn out to be ancestral to all. But I'd rather spread memes than genes anyway.

Richard does have a daughter, though. Similarly, Steven Pinker famously wrote in How the Mind Works:

I am happy to be voluntarily childless, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. And if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake.

There are probably many other self-confessed memetic hijacking victims out there. I'll try to add them to this page as I track them down.

Richard Dawkins: The Making of a Scientist

Here is Richard Dawkins promoting part one of his autobiography at Google:

Ray Kurzweil is the host. Questions begin 18 minutes in.

Memes only get a brief mention at the very end of the video. They don't get very much space in the book either.

Dawkins gives his take on the evolution of cooperation near to the end in response to a question. Kin selection and reciprocity get mentioned. Group selection does not.

Another recent video has Dawkins being interviewed by Michael Shermer. Again the evolution of cooperation is a significant theme.

Richard Dawkins - Just for Hits

Dawkins gives a brief lecture on memes - that disintegrates into a psychedelic light show five minutes in.

He seems to claim that internet memes are distinguished from other memes by being memetically engineered. Of course, that isn't right - internet memes are popular internet-transmitted memes.

Memeophobe Andrew Brown takes a moment to contribute some sour grapes in Richard Dawkins and the meaningless meme.

Memeophobe Jerry Coyne weighs in as well - in Dawkins as you’ve never seen him before.

Dawkins was interviewed at the same event. There's also a "making of" video from the folks behind the visuals - and a panel discussion from the event: Just For Hits: Memes and the Internet as an incubator of creativity.

Dawkins on memes at the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase

Dawkins introducing memes in 2013 - before performing at the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase.

There's are more, longer video interviews with him from the event on the topic of memes below:

Wired has coverage in these two articles: Richard Dawkins on the internet's hijacking of the word 'meme' and Richard Dawkins appears in psychedelic show celebrating internet memes.

There's coverage of Dawkins' "Just for hits" performance is covered here.

Reply to Peter Godfrey-Smith on selfish memes

Here's Peter Godfrey-Smith criticizing selfish genes and memes:

Two kinds of agential narrative have a special psychological potency. The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a benevolent agent, often a large one, who intends that all is for the best. This category includes various Gods, the Hegelian "World Spirit" in philosophy, and stronger forms of the "Gaia" hypothesis, according to which the whole earth is a living organism. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit hidden agents, often small, pursuing agendas that cross-cut or oppose our own interests. Examples include demonic possession narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud's psychology (superego, ego, id), and selfish genes and memes. And while it is true that sometimes there are large and kind agents or small and nefarious ones at work, the psychological appeal of these ideas means that we tend to take up such stories too readily and run with them too far. The account of evolution in terms of "selfish genes" (Dawkins 1976) is a paranoid narrative of this kind. It relegates other entities in evolution, such as whole organisms, to the role of mere "vehicles."

This is a situation where a communicative device or heuristic has been allowed to take on too substantial a role; it becomes a kind of foundational description. Instead, the way to think of gene-level evolutionary processes is like this. Any collection of entities which vary, inherit characteristics in reproduction, and differ in how much they reproduce will evolve by natural selection. These include entities bigger than us, like social groups, entities smaller than us, like cells and genes, and organisms like us. As long as they satisfy the requirements of variation, heredity, and fitness differences, they will behave in a Darwinian way. The recognition that genes have the necessary features – they vary, inherit features in replication, and differing how much they are replicated – is the recognition of one of Darwinian population among others. It is not true that when we find small things doing this, inside us or underneath us, we're finding what it's all about, what it all means, the agents whose plots and programs are behind everything else we see.

I like this passage because it is eloquently put. However, I think we have to label it as misleading.

Richard Dawkins famously argued against individual and group selection because individuals and groups didn't "replicate" - and instead recombined. While there's clearly something to this, we have subsequently learned that this isn't really a convincing argument against all group selection. Wade's flour beetles convincingly showed that group selection and gene selection could peacefully coexist.

Godfrey-Smith is making much the same argument as Dawkins - but the other way around. Like Dawkins he's arguing that group selection and gene selection are incompatible. Peter likes the idea of selection at multiple levels, but thinks that this invalidates gene-level and meme-level selectionism. Dawkins apparently [1] thought that gene-level and meme-level selection invalidated group selection. The truth is more like: selection on memes and genes is one way of looking at things and selection at multiple levels is another. Individual and group-level selection don't disprove gene-level selection - they just show that it isn't the only way of looking at things. However, it was never claimed to be the only way of looking at things in the first place.

Compare memetics with atomism. Ballistics has different principles from atomic physics - and it is useful in cases where atomic physics is not. However, Ballistics doesn't disprove atomic physics. It's just working on a different scale. No violations of atomic physics are involved.

Stories of selfish genes and memes don't deserve to be described as "paranoid narratives". That really is what's going on. Sure: it's not the only way of looking at the world, but it is a valid way of looking at it. Indeed, it's the most complete and comprehensive way of looking at things - though the associated models are not always tractable. If you work at higher levels you miss out on the details.

[1] I realize that Dawkins was probably attempting to verbalise a valid point about how too much recombination often messes up the possibility of adaptations at higher levels.

Update: 2013-09-29: I notice that David Queller has an excellent Godfrey-Smith-smackdown on this topic here. Queller is right.

References

• “Selection pressures” are metaphors. So are the “laws of physics.”

Dawkins reads "Tread Softly, Because You Tread on My Memes"

Dawkins (and someone else) reads the chapter in The God Delusion titled: "Tread Softly, Because You Tread on My Memes" (audio only).

Dawkins vs Gould on cultural evolution

Someone tried citing Steven J. Gould to me in the context of cultural evolution recently. Er...

To recap, Dawkins helped to pioneer to the modern theory of cultural evolution way back in the 1970s, in an early, popular and influential contribution that pretty-much nailed the topic.

Gould was a know-nothing on the topic of cultural evolution, and produced little but a stream of ignorant blather on the topic.

Dawkins coined the term meme, Gould described it as a "meaningless metaphor".

Apologies to readers expecting a battle, but this one is no contest - it seems to me.

Beautiful Minds: Richard Dawkins

The blurb reads:

Professor Richard Dawkins reveals how he came to write his explosive first book The Selfish Gene, a work that was to divide the scientific community and make him the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation. He also explores how this set him on the path to becoming an outspoken spokesman for atheism.

It is of interest to fans - though memes appear to have been omitted.

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett on memetics in 2012

Memes are the topic for the first 30 minutes - and in the questions.

Daniel Dennett says he is planning a memetics book - a few minutes in:

Actually right now I am planning - as soon as I have finished the book I am working on - to write a book about memetics and memes, the bad arguments against them and what it really can do.

Go Daniel!

Dawkins and Blackmore discuss memetics

This event: Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore in conversation was held yesterday.

This blog post describes the discussion.

It was recorded, so let's hope for a video soon.

If I was still in Bristol I would have gone.