Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species--such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation--are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making.
It goes on to say:
This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.
This sounds promising. Laland has previously written other books on the same topic. The book Sense and Nonsense was a well-written overview of the subject area. The first edition had a whole chapter omn memetics. Kevin's recent book apparently mentions memes only in a brief footnote explaining how irrelevant they are. Laland also once co-authored the paper Mathematical Models for Memetics which proposed that the various schools of cultural evolution would benefit from putting their heads together and encouraged meme enthusiasts to get their math on.
[Laland's] contribution is to realize that the spark that got the whole thing started were innovations in food-processing techniques that let us get more energy from our diet. More efficient eating allowed for brain growth, an extension of lifespan, and population growth.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler and this is a video review of Sense and Nonsense by Laland and Brown.
Sense and Nonsense is a great book. It covers a range of evolutionary approaches to human behaviour. The key concepts of each approach are treated in turn in separate chapters and then the authors describe case studies and then offer a critical evaluation for each one.
The approaches considered are: sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics and gene-culture coevolution.
There's also an introductory chapter, a chapter covering the history of the field prior to 1975 and a final chapter that wraps up.
I read the last three chapters first. These are the ones on memetics, gene-culture coevolution and the last chapter on "comparing and integrating approaches". I did this because Memetics and gene-culture coevolution are really the only remaining attempts at a proper study of human evolution, and that matches my own particular interests.
The authors are mostly in the "gene-culture coevolution" camp. They seem to be mostly looking at the other approaches to see where they went wrong. Their descriptions of the other approaches are pretty fair, but they do go out of their way sometimes to make then look stupid.
Despite this, their coverage of memetics is mostly accurate, sympathetic and good. However, the authors do say:
Perhaps because of the need to demonstrate that culture is a genuine evolutionary process in its own right and cannot be reduced to a mere product of biological evolution, so far meme enthusiasts have concentrated almost exclusively on the characteristics that make memes infectious. However, the success of a virus depends not only on its infectiousness but also on the susceptibility of its hosts and on whether the social environment promotes contact between hosts. The same three factors may also determine the success of memes (Laland and Odling-Smee, 2000). Were memeticists to accept that evolved genetic predispositions may influence meme adoption, leaving human beings particularly susceptible to acquiring memes that increase their reproductive success, they would converge on the ideological position of advocates of gene–culture coevolution.
This seems strange to me. I checked with Blackmore's meme book - published three years before "Sense and Nonsense" - and she has a section about how meme transmission depends on both properties of the memes and properties of their hosts on page 15.
Aaron Lynch's 1996 book talks about "cognitive immune reactions" against memes, the idea of a "memetic immune mechanism".
The idea that memetics doesn't have this covered seems to me to be patronising nonsense.
The authors claim that memetics:
denies any substantive filtering role for evolved psychological mechanisms.
I am very sceptical. I've never come across any author who has said anything remotely like that. I suspect this is down to some kind of misunderstanding.
The next chapter is about gene-culture coevolution. I found some oddities there as well. The book says:
Social transmission can occur vertically (that is, from parents to offspring), obliquely (from the parental to the offspring generation; for instance, learning from teachers or religious elders) or horizontally (that is within-generation transmission, such as learning from friends or siblings). Of course, genetic inheritance is exclusively vertical and hence, as social transmission frequently occurs through some combination of these modes of information transmission, cultural evolution and gene–culture coevolution may commonly exhibit quite different properties from biological evolution.
However, this is completely untrue. Organic entities can be transmitted down the generations horizontally and obliquely too. This happens with parasites and mutualists. This is in fact a deep similarity between organic and cultural evolution - rather than grounds for treating them differently.
I felt the authors were rather soft on Boyd and Richerson's Cultural Group Selection concept. They say:
Boyd and Richerson propose an alternative form of group selection that just might work.
...and then use the concept to support the thesis that:
Their analysis demonstrates that, when cultural transmission is included into evolutionary models, the nature of the evolutionary process may be quite dramaticallly different.
However, this is not a very reasonable conclusion. Parasites also act so as to rapidly produce and maintain differences between groups of humans. Parasites have very similar dynamics to culture in this respect. Like culture, they involve horizontal spread between hosts, short lifecycles and rapid evolution. As with culture, migrants tend to adopt the parasites of their new population. We have empirical data on the relative influence of parasites and culture when it comes to death as a result of humans invading other groups of humans - since there have been many invasions in recorded history - for example in America, Australia and Africa. Organic parasites (such as smallpox) did a large proportion of the work in producing fitness differences between groups of humans in many of the cases studied - accounting for more than half the deaths in some cases. Culture does some of this work too - but the organic and cultural realms are not so different here.
There are some differences between organic and cultural evolutionary change - but Cultural Group Selection seems to be a poor example of such a difference - since parasites and mutualists in the organic world behave so similarly.
Next, th chapter on evolutionary psychology. This chapter is excellent. I especially appreciated the idea that the popularity of evolutionary psychology is partly due to its manifest lack of racism. However, the authors don't mention the biggest criticism of evolutionary psychology until the very end of their chapter. That criticism is that - as currently practiced - evolutionary psychology only deals with human universals and says little about cultural evolution. I feel that this point needs to be emphasised at least a little. While evolutionary psychology only deals with human universals it will remain a folorn and useless endeavour. Culture is just too important a force to ignore. Ignoring it has produced a substantial mountain of evolutionary psychology-based junk science. To become relevant, evolutionary psychology must reform itself - or attempt to fuse with memetics and/or gene-culture coevolution.
The chapter on human behavioural ecology is again of fine quality. However, human behavioural ecology isn't really a seriopus attempt to model human evolution. It is a small piece of the puzzle.
The chapter on sociobiology was excellent as well. Controversy makes for readability, and this chapter was quite a page-turner. Sociobiology was a nice idea but it became rather tarred by association with Wilson's presentation of it - which had both theoretical and political shortcomings. Wilson went on to try and fuse sociobiology with his own version of gene-culture coevolution - an attempt which met with only rather limited success. These days sociobiology seems to have mostly become a dirty word - which is a bit of a shame.
Lastly the history chapter. This covers Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Francis Galton, Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris - and many others. I thought this was the worst chapter in the book - and recommend readers read it last - so they are not put off. One of the chapter's themes is that people believed in progressive evolution - which led to all manner of social evils - whereas now we know that evolution has no direction. However, progressive evolution is a perfectly reasonable concept, and it is clearly evident in the world. The authors apparently criticise it without even trying very hard to understand it. Social evolution is a politically-charged subject. I appreciate that it is hard to cover the subject objectively - but I felt that the authors failed to keep their own political perspective out of the picture.
The book has dated rather little in the 10 years since 2002 - though I believe the work has been republished recently. Gene-culture coevolution is now on a much firmer footing. The author's call for more experimental work has been met in the mean time with a substantial volume of work demonstrating cultural evolution under laboratory conditions, and probing the properties of cultural transmission processes.
The authors manage to make themselves look pretty smart in the book, by poking holes in practically all the existing theories. That is not unreasonable - the authors are obviously pretty smart people - but I found it a little grating. From time to time, I noticed that the criticised theories were getting bent out of shape a little - in ways which helped to give the authors some corrective work to do.
The book is very broad and ambitious in scope. Alas, that means it inevitably lacks depth. I would have much preferred a book about the topic covered in the last three chapters. Having said that, several of the other chapters were mostly high-quality entertaining content containing material which I was less familiar with - so I learned more from them.
Anyway, overall a great book, I expect that most readers will learn a considerable amount of interesting things about how evolution applies and has been applied to humans from it.
The blurb reads: "An interdisciplinary conference focusing on new ideas and discoveries in research on the evolution of human cognition The conference focuses on genetic, developmental, and socio-cultural processes that have played a particularly significant role in the evolution of human cognition, and on uniquely human cognitive achievements in domains such as causal understanding, language, social learning, theory of mind and meta-cognition.".
There's quite a bit about social transmission and evolution.
Many modern academic students of cultural evolution seem to share a common problem with understanding how cultural evolution operates. Though some pay lip service to the idea, they don't seem to fully appreciate that culture's relationship with human hosts is a symbiosis.
Some quotes (some of which I have discussed before) illustrate the syndrome:
Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Sense and Nonsense (2004, p.253):
Social transmission can occur vertically (that is, from parents to offspring), obliquely (from the parental to the offspring generation; for instance, learning from teachers or religious elders) or horizontally (that is, within-generation transmission such as learning from friends or siblings). Of course, genetic inheritance is exclusively vertical and hence, as social transmission frequently occurs through some combination of these modes of information transmission, cultural evolution may commonly exhibit commonly exhibit quite different properties from biological evolution.
Among humans, genes can only pass unidirectionally from one generation to the next (vertically), normally through intimate contact. But ideas (or “memes”) now regularly pass between individuals distant from each other in space and time, within generations, and even backwards through generations. Through mass media or the Internet, a single individual can influence millions of others within a very short period of time.
William Durham (1991, p.193) says:
genes usually cannot be transmitted independently of the reproduction of their carriers. This constraint obviously does not apply to memes.
We do know that culture is most ungene-like in many respects. Culture has the principle of inheritance of acquired variation (what one person invents another can imitate). We are not necessarily blind victims of chance imitation, but can pick and choose among any cultural variants that come to our attention and creatively put our own twist on them. we don’t have to imitate our parents or any other specific individuals but can always be open to a better idea, or own invention or someone else’s.
Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution (2011) has a similar passage:
One of the more obvious differences between cultural and biological evolution involves the potential transmission pathways each involves. Genetic inheritance is often thought of as being exclusively vertical and biparental, with genetic information transmitted in equal amounts from two parents to a single offspring. In culture, on the other hand, one can learn beliefs, ideas, skills, and so forth, not just from one's biological parents (termed "vertical cultural transmission"), but also from other members of the parental generation ("oblique cultural transmission") and from members of one's own generation ("horizontal cultural transmission").
...though Mesoudi continues by acknowledging:
In fact many of these pathways of cultural transmission have parallels in biological evolution.
...although he fails to mention any of the key phenomena of mutualism, partasitism or symbiosis.
Most of the material above is completely wrong. Symbionts (parasites and mutualists) commonly pass "horizontally" between humans. Parasite genes are shared horizontally by kisses, sex, holding hands and sneezing. Mutualist symbionts and their genes are shared between humans at gardening shops, farms, seed shops and fruit shops. Oblique transmission and transmission "backwards" - down the host generations - work in a similar manner. It should be a matter of acute embarrassment among theorists of social evolution to have missed this.
Such symbiont exchange is by no means confined to humans or other creatures with culture - it occurs ubiquitously in the animal kingdom.
In my experience, many of the misunderstandings of memetics actually turn out to be misunderstandings of how biological evolution works. This example is a case in point.
These academic students of cultural evolution usually go on to say that - because of these differences, we need new models to deal with the situation - and then they go on to develop elaborate extended genotype models to deal with the situation. No! That is not how science is done. The existing models of organic symbiosis handle all these cases just fine. We do not need a raft of new models just to deal with the case of organisms whose genes happen not to be made out of DNA.
Mesoudi's defense of this practice reads:
Nevertheless, most quantitative models of genetic inheritance are indeed based on the assumption of vertical inheritance, making it necessary to construct models tailored specifically to the cultural case.
Not everyone in academia gets this wrong. David Hull, for example was pointing out this mistake back in 1988:
In this connection, commentators often state that biological evolution is always vertical whereas conceptual evolution is likely to be "horizontal". By this they mean that the transmission of characteristics in biological evolution is always from parent to offspring (ie, inheritance). Characteristics always follow genes. In point of fact, biological evolution is not always vertical, even when characteristics follow genes. For example, it is horizontal when bacteria, paramecia, etc. exchange genetic material. Horizontal transmission can even be cross-lineage, as when viruses pick up genes from an organism belonging to one species and transmit them to an organism belonging to a different species.
There are a few cases of recognition of symbiosis:
Most mathematical models of cultural evolution derive from epidemiology. The terminology of "horizontal transmission", "vertical transmission" and "oblique transmission" comes from epidemiology. Epidemiology itself is mostly - though not exclusively - concerned with symbiosis.
Boyd and Richerson (1985) have three sentences on symbiosis. They say:
Horizontal transmission is analogous in some ways to the transmission of a pathogen
...and...
The item of culture being spread horizontally acts like a microbe that reproduces and spreads rapidly because it is "infective" and has a short generation length compared to the biological generation length of the host. Fads and fashions and technical innovations are familiar examples.
Boyd and Richerson (2005, p.165) has a paragraph on symbiosis:
The nonparentally transmitted parts of culture are analogous to microbes. Our immune system evolved to kill microbial pathogens but it also allows us to acquire helpful symbionts. As we know all too well, microbial pathogens are common, despite the sophistication of the immune system. One reason is that we are not the only players in this game. Natural selection helps parasites trick our immune system. Since microbial populations have short generation times and large populations, parasite adaptation can be very rapid. The psychology of social learning is like an immune system in that it is adapted to absorb beneficial ideas but resist maladaptive ones. And, like the immune system it is not always able to keep up with rapidly evolving cultural “pathogens.”
This section is pure memetics. They also implicitly endorse symbiosis in their section on "selfish memes" (p.153-154).
An empirical study of the spread of heroin addiction describes the close resemblance of its dynamics to the spread of disease that requires intimate contact (Hughes and Crawford 19721. Addiction is spread along chains of close friendship. Addicts remain infectious only in the early stapes of addiction, while the p1easurabte aspect of the drug still outweighs the manifest disability of advanced addiction. Only a limited population of susceptible individuals is at risk of acquiring the addiction even if exposed. Many simple epidemiological principles probably apply to pathological cultural traits - e.g., parents notice that the incidence of minor microbial infections and various obnoxious habits in children increase together when they first go to school. Crowded classrooms of young susceptibles are the ideal environment for the spread of pathogens of both types by horizontal transmission among the children!
...and there is a fairly specific endorsement of the idea from Peter Richerson here:
I think it is near to undeniable that cultural variants are sometimes selected to become selfish pathogens along the lines that Dawkins suggested. Since some cultural variants can spread rapidly among people, as in the case of fads, they rather resemble the life cycle of a viral or bacterial pathogen.
The term "adaptive lag" describes cases where the rate at which an organism adapts to its environment is slower than the rate of environmental change, leading to a mismatch between the organism's adaptations and its environment.
Adaptive lag is an important concept in memetics, since the lifecycles of cultural creatures is very rapid - and so cultural adaptations happen much more rapidly than genetic change in the human gene pool does. That means the human genome lags behind the cultural memome, as though being dragged along behind it on a very long, elastic leash.
Humans Frequently Buffer Adaptive Lag Through Cultural Niche Construction
When Humans Are Unable to Buffer Adaptive Lag Fully Through Further Cultural Niche Construction, Natural Selection on Genes Ensues
There's a sense in which Laland and Brown are correct: we can see that humans are pretty well adapted to the modern environmnet - because there are seven billion of them.
However, adaptive lag is still an important concept. Drop an adult hunter-gatherer in NYC and you will see the effects of adaptive lag in action. Perhaps we should say "adaptive lag in DNA-genes" - to emphasise the intended perspective.
Also, look at the humans in Japan. Japan is thriving culturally - but it is the memes that are thriving the most. DNA genes are not doing so well by comparison. Again, the DNA-genes exhibit an "adaptive lag".
OK, so: Dennett, Blackmore, Dawkins, Hofstadter evidently understand memetics pretty well - but most of these folk don't hold academic posts any more. So, who in academia does have some understanding of memetics?
Here's my tentative list:
Daniel Dennett - External Professor at Santa Fe Institute and University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Center for Cognitive Studies. Dan is a longstanding meme enthusiast.
Kevin Laland - Principal Investigator in The Laland lab in Scotland. In 2000, Laland wrote: "We reject the argument that meaningful differences exist between memetics and the population genetics methods. We also believe that cultural evolution and gene-culture co-evolutionary theory will be much enriched by embracing memetics." Right - indeed. Laland had a section in his 2002 book all about memetics.
Dr Jeremy Kendal - The Principal Investigator in the Director in the Centre for the Coevolution of Biology and Culture at Durham university. Jeremy co-authored the above paper with Kevin Laland.
Keith E. Stanovich - The Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. Memes feature heavily in his work, and he has produced a long defence of memetics entitled: Rationality, Evolution, and the Meme Concept.
Peter Richerson - Richerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Department of Environmental Science and Policy. University of California Davis. He is one of the academic researchers who has come the closest to memetics - though he seems to be responsible for spreading much of the misinformation about it - and still seems to react allergicly to the "m"-word. However, in 2010, he wrote: "I reiterate that entertaining this idea is just to walk down Darwin’s straight and narrow path. It all boils down to heritable variation for fitness. Richard Dawkins followed this path in the Selfish Gene where he introduced the concept of memes. One of the problems with the meme concept as it evolved is that users of the term focused far too heavily on the selfish potential of memes. But I think it is near to undeniable that cultural variants are sometimes selected to become selfish pathogens along the lines that Dawkins suggested. Since some cultural variants can spread rapidly among people, as in the case of fads, they rather resemble the life cycle of a viral or bacterial pathogen.". I think it should be admitted that he now has a basic understaning of the subject.
Robert Aunger - Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Public Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and has written much on memes, including a book on the topic.
Laland's recent book on cultural evolution is out. It is titled: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind.
The "
Many modern academic students of cultural evolution seem to share a common problem with understanding how cultural evolution operates. Though some pay lip service to the idea, they don't seem to fully appreciate that culture's relationship with human hosts is a symbiosis.
The term "adaptive lag" describes cases where the rate at which an organism adapts to its environment is slower than the rate of environmental change, leading to a mismatch between the organism's adaptations and its environment.
OK, so: Dennett, Blackmore, Dawkins, Hofstadter evidently understand memetics pretty well - but most of these folk don't hold academic posts any more. So, who in academia does have some understanding of memetics?
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