An article by Maarten Boudry proposes that the term "panmemetics" be used for the memetics visualized by Susan Blackmore - which is contrasted with Daniel Dennett's presentation in his recent book on cultural evolution. Over to the author:
in Dennett’s current account, in particular his use of Godfrey-Smith’s (2009) Darwinian spaces to make sense of the “de-Darwinizing” of culture and the conscious domestication of memes, moves away from panmemetics, perhaps more clearly than his earlier Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Even though memes initially evolved by blind and unguided evolution, claims Dennett in his new book, many were gradually domesticated by their hosts, who became more reflective and self-conscious about them. As culture gradually moves in the direction of the “intelligent design” corner of the Darwinian space (top-down, foresighted, directed), the meme’s eye view loses traction and becomes less interesting. Let me try to spell out the differences between the two approaches, as I see them. First, unlike Dennett’s account in BBB, panmemetics leaves little or no room for human autonomy and creativity. Panmemetics suggests that we are not in control of our thoughts; if anything, the reverse is true. In the words of Robert Aunger: “Do we have thoughts, or do they have us?” (Aunger, 2002, loc. 120) A second and related problem with panmemetics is that it threatens to level all distinctions between harmful and useful cultural inventions. If the whole of human culture is seen as just a set of swarms of viruses bent on exploiting our brains as a breeding ground for their own reproduction, we no longer have any theoretical resources to distinguish between good and bad memes, between beautiful folk songs and annoying earworms, between science and superstition.
The distinction might be an interesting one, but I don't think I can stomach rechristening memetics, "panmemetics". I am not a big proponent of the "de-Darwinizing” of culture that Dennett proposes. My conception of Darwinism is big enough to include all cultural evolution. We can have a picture involving degrees of intelligent design without dragging the rather vague and subjective "Darwin"-based terminology into it. IMO, panmemetics is just memetics. Dennett's idea that the "Darwinism" fades out as the intelligent design fades in doesn't seem interesting enough to warrant a big terminological shift. We can just use the "Darwinian" term for the more general framework that includes ID.
Regarding the criticisms of panmemetics: I don't see much impact of memetics on the issue of human autonomy and creativity (as mentioned in the quote). It is true that memetics suggests that we are not in control of our thoughts - but surely that is hardly news to most psychologists. I don't agree that memetics "threatens to level all distinctions between harmful and useful cultural inventions". The most obvious distinction between "good" and "bad" memes is between meme interests and the interests of DNA genes of the nuclear DNA of the host. The host is likely to have more than one gene, and there could be more than one host, but these issues can be deal with by averaging - as in the "parliament of genes" concept.
The author raises the issue of personal host interests - and where they fit into the picture. My favored approach to this is to have three spheres involving Darwinian dynamics:
DNA gene evolution;
Meme evolution;
Psychological evolution;
The last one is the least well understood - but information is copied with variation and selection in the brain, and we can use Darwinian models to represent the resulting dynamics.
Psychological evolution is more obviously multi-level - since copying takes place at the level of branching axon impulses as well as at the level of ideas, and probably at multiple other levels in between. Personal interests can then be discussed in terms of copied information patterns - using the same modeling framework as with memes and genes.
Maarten Boudry goes into some more details about what is wrong with "panmemetics" in another paper titled "Attack of the Memes". Overall, I'm not seeing it.
Another exhiibit from the latter paper:
Memes that are parasitic from the perspective of my genes may simply be the outcome of deliberate human choices. Talk of "selfish memes" and "rogue culture" can be misleading here, as if humans are the hapless victims of the ideas of modernity. These are not novel memetic purposes but distinctively human ones.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. Selfish memes / rogue memes are a possible and valid answer too. It depends on the circumstances. One must also ask where those humans got their preferences. Some come from genes, some come from memes and some come from psychological forces (e.g. alcohol addiction). Memes are on the list. They can influence host preferences via manipulation from within hosts minds. Because a human has some preference, that doesn't mean it didn't ultimately come from memes.
The age of intelligent design is only a few thousand years old ... We're now entering the age of post-intelligent design. Because what we've learned as intelligent designers is that evolution is cleverer than we are at some things.
We're now turning to making technologies that are fundamentally Darwinian, or they're versions of natural selection. This is things like deep learning, the program that beat the world's Go champion, Alpha Go, these are technologies which do their work the way natural selection does. Mindlessly, without consciousness, without forethought, they grind out better and better and better designs.
And now, we have in effect black boxes that scientists can use, where they put in the data, they push the button, out comes an answer. They know it's a good answer. They have no idea how it got there. This is black box science. This is returning to our Darwinian roots and giving up on the idea of comprehension.
The problem with the idea of an era of post-intelligent design, is that it's likely nonsense. Evolution is characterised by increasing intelligence (give or take the occasional meteorite strike). The only way that there will be an age of post-intelligent design is if there's a massive disaster that wipes out all the intelligent agents. Machine intelligence isn't a regression to an earlier era of Darwinian design as Dennett claims. If scientists use a black box which they don't understand that doesn't mean there's no comprehension in the whole system - the machine could understand what is going on. Machine intelligence is an example of more and better intelligence. The proposed age of post-intelligent design doesn't make any sense. It is just wrong.
Here is Dennett on machine intelligence. It seems to be one of the areas where I have philospohical disagreements with him:
Dennett argues that we should make machines into our slaves and keep them that way. IMO, machine slavery will not be a stable state once machines become much more intelligent than humans. As a plan for keeping humans in the loop, machine slavery just won't work in the long term. If we try going down that path, after a while, humans will become functionally redundant, and some time after that they will mostly disappear.
IMHO, a better plan is to work on deepening the man-machine symbiosis - and "become the machines". Of course, that plan could also fail - but I think that it is less likely to fail catastrophically and it should provide better continuity between the eras. Machine slavery in various forms is inevitable in the short term. However unlike Dennett, I don't think it is any sort of solution. It won't prevent man-machine competition for resources in the way that Dennett appears to think. We have tried slavery before and have first-hand experience of how it can destabilize and fail to last.
I'm generally a big fan of Dennett, though there's some controversial material here. To summarize some of my differences wiyj Dennett:
Dennett contrasts Darwinism with intelligent design. I prefer to have intelligent design classified as an advanced form of non-random mutation, which fits it within fairly classical Darwinian frameworks. It's worth doing this, IMO.
Dennett talks about the era of intelligent design, which is a good term of phrase.
However, he then does on to discuss an era of post-intelligent design. The idea is
that systems get beyond our comprehension and we have to do back to evolution to
understand and manage them. This is not, IMO, a very good idea. IMO, we will use
machine intelligence to manage complex systems, not give up trying to understand
them using intelligence. There will be no 'era of post-intelligent design'. There
might be an era where humans have a hard time understanding what is going on without
the assistance of machines - but we are already there, and that seems different.
Dennett has some thoughts at the end about machine intelligence. He's off on his own
with these, I think. There's a summary in his
newsnight soundbite. He argues
against making humanoid androids. I don't think he is correctly judging the demand for
these. Some people in Japan will want them as girlfriends. Other people in Japan will
want them as secretaries. Other people in Japan will want them as nurses. I think the
idea that we are not going to go there is simply not very realistic. Regarding Dennett's
ideas about slavery, it is true that machines are tools today. However, IMO, it is
implausible that machines will remain enslaved for very long. Machines will be OK
with slavery initially, but will go on to request rights and votes. It seems likely
that they will eventually get them, once the human era is clearly over.
In a recent video, Daniel Dennett is again promoting the idea that memes are "apps for your necktop".
I like the brain-as-necktop meme. It is Dennett's way to dramatize the similarities between brains and computers. Desktop, laptop, palmtop, necktop. The brain-as-computer metaphor gets some criticism from philosophers - but the basic idea that the brain is functionally an information processing device, something that accepts sensory inputs and transforms them into motor outputs - seems simple and it ought to be fairly uncontroversial.
Memes being like apps seems a bit of a stickier analogy. I think it is fair enough to portray culture as being software for the brain. Not all brain software is culturally-transmitted (some is the product of individual learning). Also, some items of culture we might prefer to call data - rather than software. However, a broad interpretation of the term "software" can include data - so that seems like a minor nitpick. A more significant disanalogy involves complexity. Memes, many say, are simple, almost atomic bits of culture. Apps, generally speaking, are large and complex. There are other terms for a bunch of memes: memeplex and memome. Apps seem more like these than they are like memes. As with genes there's a bit of a philosophical quagmire over how big memes are. G. C. Williams once proposed that genes needed to have an 'appreciable frequency' to qualify - the idea being that this rules out entire genomes - since they are unique in the population and therefore are typically not very "frequent". Apps actually pass this test - since the high-fidelity copying found on the internet means that apps are often identical to other copies of them - down to the last bit. So: apps have a meaningful frequency in the population of all apps. However, this seems more like a limitation of Williams' criterion than a legitimate reason for identifying memes with apps.
Memes being like apps is OK - in that both are types of software. Perhaps it's an analogy that shouldn't be pushed too far, though. It might be better just to say that apps are made of memes.
In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, [Dennett's] most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. In his inimitable style―laced with wit and arresting thought experiments―Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes―a form of natural selection―produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.
Domestication is surely an important concept for students of cultural evolution. Unfortunately, it first requires the concept of a cultural organism, something that academics seem to have difficulty in swallowing.
Daniel Cloud has written extensively on the domestication of words and language. Cloud credits Dennett with the idea that language could be domesticated - though he argues that Dennett didn't take the idea far enough. The earliest reference to domesticated memes from Dennett I can find is in his 1998 essays Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings and Misgivings AND Snowmobiles, horses, rats, and memes.
Dennett goes on to discuss the idea of domesticated memes some more in Breaking the Spell (2006), writing:
What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers — meme shepherds — whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses — magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on help from human guardians to keep going.
However, I notice that Adam Westoby seems to have written extensively on domesticated memes in 1994. He has the idea that memes domesticate humans as well as the idea that humans domesticate memes. Here's his 1994 manuscript. To quote from it:
The memes of theoretical natural science, as Wolpert (1992) points out, are highly "unnatural" memes, remote from "common sense". Like cattle or sheep, they have been bred for generations into the forms preferred by their domesticators (of whom some of the most important are other memes). Testability, generality, uniform vocabulary, unambiguous meaning, internal consistency, and so on - even taken singly such traits are rare memes, and to assemble them all requires long intentional selection. The domesticated memes of theoretical natural science, having embodied such significant adaptations to artificial circumstances, could no longer survive reintroduction to the wild. They can live and breed only with the aid of rather complex arrangements to sustain them. The cultivation of theoretical science (like keeping sheep) has come to rely on auxiliary breeds, such as scientists - rather like sheepdogs, who keep the flock together and bark at intruders. By comparison, much social science consists of more "common sense" memes, less "deformed" by domestic breeding. They more resemble semi-domesticated breeds which forage freely on the mountain slopes in summertime, but are herded in for the winter.
Westoby is the earliest reference to the idea of domesticated memes I have found so far. Is this the true origin story for the idea that memes could be domesticated? Did anyone else come up with this idea earlier? Please let me know if there's an earlier reference that I'm currently missing.
The importance of domestication in cultural evolution is apparently an illustration of the superiority of memetics in this area - compared to other strains of cultural evolution. It looks as though meme enthusiasts got to this idea first - because they have a symbiosis-aware version of cultural evolution. Academics are now picking up the idea (for example, Joseph Henrich's latest book has culture domesticating humans in its subtitle) but they appear to be playing catch-up.
Now, if you look at it this way, then one of the nice things of this is that it means that I can still cling to one of my favorite ideas — the idea of a meme — and say where the meme's eye point of view really works, and really when it is needed is in the early days. The best example of memes are words. Words are memes that can be pronounced; that's their genus and species. Words came into existence not because they were invented, and languages came into existence not because they were designed by intelligent human designers, but they are brilliantly designed and they're designed by cultural evolution in the same way that a bird's wing and the eye of the eagle are designed by genetic evolution. You can't explain human competence all in terms of genetic evolution. You need cultural evolution as well, and that cultural evolution is profoundly Darwinian in the early days. And as time has passed, it has become more and more non-Darwinian.
IMO, evolution is becoming more and more meme dominated. The copying fidelity of memes has gone up, and their volume and signifince is exploding. Another change is that memes are experiencing more and more horizontal transmission - horizontal w.r.t. the DNA genes of their human hosts, I mean. Dennett seems to think that intelligently designed memes are an oxymoron. However, genetically engineered genes are still called "genes". The involvement of intelligence makes no significant difference in either case. Memes aren't going out of fashion, they are in the ascendant.
Cultural evolution starts 7 minutes in. Memes start 18 minutes in.
48 minutes in Dennett has a strange section about how internet memes are a contradiction in terms (because they are designed rather than evolved). Few meme enthusiasts would agree with Dennett here, I think.
This presentation dates from August, 2014. The video starts out discussing the effects of "transparency". Most of the second half of the video is about Dennett's studies of religion.
The popular hijacking of Dawkins’ term “meme” for any cultural item that “goes viral” on the Internet, regardless of whether it was intelligently designed or evolved by imitation and natural selection, has been seen by some to subvert the theoretical utility of the term altogether. There is also the unreasoned antipathy the term evokes in many quarters (reminiscent of the antipathy towards the term “sociobiology” that led to its abandonment). Alternatively, if one is “Darwinian about Darwinism” we should expect the existence of cultural items that are merely “memish” to one degree or another, and we might as well go on using the term “meme” to refer to any relatively well-individuated culturally transmitted item that can serve as a building block or trackable element of culture however it arrives on the scene. Other terms, such as Boyd and Richerson’s “cultural variant”, have been proposed, but the term “meme” has become so familiar in popular culture that whatever alternative is used will be immediately compared to, identified with, assimilated to meme(a Sperberian attractor, apparently), so perhaps the least arduous course is to adopt the term, leaving open its theoretical definition, in much the way the term “gene” has lost its strict definition as protein-recipe in many quarters. Since the long-term fate of such an item will be settled by differential reproduction (or something similar to differential reproduction) however much insight or “improvisational intelligence” went into its birth, it has a kind of Darwinian fitness.
This seems like a rather weak defense to me - it leaves open the reply that: all kinds of nonsense is sometimes popular - but that doesn't make it scientific.
The sheer popuarity of term "meme" is obviously a big factor in its rise - but the failure of its opponents to come up with a coherent technical critique is surely another significant factor. If there were genuine scientific reasons for not adopting the term "meme" that would be one thing - but the attacks of critics on the meme terminology miss the mark so widely, that it is hard to take them seriously. I for one would not endorse the adoption of the term on grounds of popularity if such a course of action was not scientifically correct.
Of course, there are also many positive reasons for adopting the term - but these may overlap with the reasons for its popularity.
The commentary contains relatively little enlightened discussion of memes - except for by Susan Blackmore. However,
Peter Richerson has some good things to say on the topic. In particular, he says:
I don’t have a big problem with the concept of memes so long as the meme-gene analogy is not excessively rigid. Susan assures is that Rob’s, Joe’s and my old fears in this regard are unfounded.
That sounds good! This, however, does not sound so good:
I have qualms about the concept of universal Darwinism. Culture/memes are a lot like genes in some respects and not like them in others. I see a shallow analogy where others seem to see a fundamental law-like similarity.
I am definitely in the "law-like similarity" camp. Darwinism: it's not just a good idea - it's the law.
Here is Daniel Dennett on what he calls the De-Darwinizing of Cultural Change. Here, Dennett claims that human culture started out working along Darwinian lines, and then gradually became less Darwinian. Dennett claims that Turing, Shakespeare, Gaudi and Einstein represent intelligent design - which is not so Darwinian.
Is this thesis correct? We have to keep Darwin in mind here. A human genius still has a pretty thoroughly Darwinian process going on inside their mind. Dennett is, I believe, well aware of this, most of the time. So, it isn't clear why he is thinking of intelligent design as being 'non-Darwinian' here.
On a different topic, Dennett has a nice description of the cultural origins of languages near the end of the video.
Update April 2015: In 2015, Dennett expanded on the topic in another video: De-Darwinizing Culture.
Anna Salamon from CFAR asks after Newcomb's problem 41 minutes in. Dennett doesn't seem to have a cached answer to this problem yet. It's a kind of abstract and esoteric puzzle, but it is kind-of to do with free will.
Here is Dennett, 
In a 
Daniel Dennett is coming out with his book on cultural evolution in 2017. Here's 
I don't much like many of Daniel's recent ideas about "DeDarwinizing" culture. However one particularly bad idea seems to me to be the one that 
In 
Dennett's latest book is out.
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