The sciences of memory and copying

A possible alternative to having a science of heredity is to have a science of memory and a science of copying (since memory and copying are the main components of heredity). In a number of respects, this would be good - since memory and copying are pretty different phenomena.

We already have a science of memory: "mnemology". This is named after Richard Semon's fine concept of the "mneme" - which was great, but ultimately lost out to the "gene". Unfortunately, mnemology does not seem to be a well-known subject area. There are also "memory studies" and "memory theory" - which don't quite seem to be the same thing. The science associated with memory seems to be a bit fragmented. Animal memory seems to have been assimilated into psychology and cognitive science - and not given a name of its own. The topic of "genetic memory" has been assimilated into genetics.

If you look for a science of copying, there doesn't seem to be much out there - except for evolutionary theory, biology, genetics and "epigenetics" [sic]. There is information theory - perhaps that is the nearest thing.

A science of copying would probably have two foundations: the concept of mutual information - from Shannon information theory - and the concept of causality. I've gone into this in more detail in my article: What are inheritance and copying?

Since one way for patterns to persist is via copying, we could have the science of memory including the science of copying. That way we could still call it the "science of heredity", "science of persistence", or "genetics". Persisting without copying is a topic unto itself - but perhaps one that is not worthy enough one to have its own separate field.

This whole situation seems rather unfortunate. The sciences of persistence and memory seem fragmented, while the science of copying barely seems to exist - outside of biology.

Perhaps my perspective on this is a bit different from other scientists. For me, storage and copying are fundamental operations. They are certainly fundamental operations inside computers. If you think about it, they are pretty fundamental operators in the rest of the world as well. To have a science of memory and a science of copying seems like a natural way to carve the world up to me. However, what we currently have seems to be a long way from this.

The case for private memes

Memes are commonly associated with social communication and learning.

However, socially-learned information coevolves with information acquired within the brain by individual learning. Socially-learned ideas compete with individually-learned ideas for attention and for the same neural real estate. All learned information evolves - not just socially-learned information. The Darwinian basis of individual learning was appreciated by Skinner. The case that learned information evolves along Darwinian lines has been made before - for example by Gary Cziko in Without Miracles.

Social learning depends on the same mechanisms as individual learning to operate. Also, many socially-learned operations incorporate individual learning into their transmission process. For example learning to ride a bicycle is probably about 10% social learning and 90% individual learning.

Cultural evolution may be modelled as a process in which individuals learn from others, combine the results with information they already have, add to it with individual learning, and then pass the results on. Individual learning is a fundamental part of this process.

Ideas inside brains are not represented to treated very differently if they are learned from another individual, or produced locally. For example, if Alice sees Bob using a slip-knot and then reverse-engineers the knot, the resulting knowledge is very similar to if Alice invents the slip-knot by herself.

I think consideration of where the optimal scientific boundaries lie strongly suggests that an evolutionary science of ideas should embrace both social and individual learning. Attempting to place a division between social and individual learning is a dubious way to divide the scientific area - since these two fields are so closely interdependent.

In the past, I've described such ideas in terms of "intercranial memes" and "protomemes".

This post will discuss more radical solutions.

Solutions

One possibility would be to create new terminology to deal with Darwinian approaches to individual learning. Skinner has already provided us with the term "extinction" - but the terminology of individual learning could be much more thoroughly Darwinised.

Another obvious possibility would be just to expand memetics to include individual learning. Memetics already has some momentum. Cloning it to handle individual learning seems inferior to just expanding memetics to cope with it. That would mean that protomemes became full memes.

This would pleasingly unite Dawkins' "memes" with Semon's "mnemes".

When giving his etymology of the term "meme", Dawkins originally offered the "consolation" that:

it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory'

However, a "memory-gene" only really makes sense if it covers individual learning too.

As I said in my post on meme etymology:

Semon's influence can live on by making memes into "memory-genes" - making use of the "consolation" that Dawkins offered us.

Meme's eye view

If genes are what cells inherit from their parents, memes should be what cultural creatures get from their parents. However, just as parasites reproduce inside their hosts, memes typically reproduce inside minds - as well as between them - and so the parent of a meme may well be another meme inside the same mind. With this perspective, it seems rather odd to only consider memes that are descended from memes in the previous generation of hosts. It should be the previous generation of memes that are under consideration.

Disadvantages

This solution proposed here does have some disadvantages:

Expanding memetics would conflicts with the 35-year old history of memes and memetics. It would probably divide the memetics community - which could do without such upheavals. It would cause considerable further confusion. Also, the attempt might fail.

Critics would probably delight in some memes retreating further into the human mind - where investigating them empirically would become more difficult. They would also probably delight in some memes getting more tangled together. Already memetics regularly faces the criticism that memes aren't as discrete as they should be if they are to be "like" genes. At the moment memes neatly divide into discrete chunks during environmental transmission - but protomemes being memes would mean that that was no longer true. These criticisms are pretty daft - but memeticists should probably hesitate before willingly providing their critics with ammunition.

The move might also divide memetics from the adademic field of cultural evolution. At the momemnt, it is quite convenient for me to be able to say that memes have scientific validity - since they are almost exactly what Boyd and Richerson defined their "cultural variants" to be in 1985. If memetics expanded, that claim would become inaccurate.

I don't plan to resolve these political disputes here at this stage.

This post exists to point at the field of learning (composed of both social-learning and individual-learning) and to say: that area is what we most urgently need an evolutionary science of - and that area should probably have the best available terminology.

For more about this issue, please see: The case for private culture.

Meme etymology

Most of the criticisms of memetics come from people who don't have a clue what they are talking about.

However, some criticisms have been voiced by those who actually do know what they are talking about.

One example is L. L. Cavalii-Sforza. He is certainly an expert - though I don't mean to imply that his criticism here is any good. Here he is with his co-authors, writing in "Genes, culture, and human evolution: a synthesis":

The term cultural “idea” as used here is similar to what many others, following Richard Dawkins, call a “meme.” We prefer to avoid that term, however, because, as Dawkins originally defined it and as many others continue to use it, a meme is a unit of imitation only, which excludes transmission through teaching.

What did Dawkins actually say? He said this:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory', or to the French word même.

What he says is: "cultural transmission" OR "imitation".

For me that sounds rather like saying the "metre" is a unit of mesuring distances or circumferences - and Cavalii-Sforza's objection is like claiming that a unit of measuring circumferences is no use for measuring human height.

Since 1976, the implications of "imitation" have dropped out of the term "meme" almost everywhere. Most dictionary definitions of the term no longer mention imitation. The main proponent of the idea is Susan Blackmore, and - as far as I can tell, she has not been very influential in this respect.

An imitation-based definition of memes would be possible, but it seems unlikely that it was ever what Dawkins intended. It doesn't make all that much sense - because then we would still need a theory of non-imitative social learning - and that theory would be very, very similar to rge theory that covers imitation. Although much the same argument suggests that we should expand the theory to include all environmental inheritance - cultural or not - that twists the traditional meaning of the word considerably, while only gaining a little.

However, the fact that the traditional "Dawkins" definition of "meme" says "imitation" rather than something like "social learning" is a llittle bit of an embarassment for memetics. It is little consolation that Boyd and Richerson (1985) made the same mistake.

I remember when I first read The Selfish Gene, when I encountered the word "meme" - I though "neat: memory-genes". When I went on to read how Dawkins thought that the term came from the Greek word for "imitation", I was horrified and disappointed - and then somewhat appeased when I read about his "consolation" - that:

it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory'

There is a problem with Dawkins' "consolation", though. It is true that there is some historical support for promoting the idea of memes being "memory-genes": Semon's original "mneme" - from 1904 was a general unit of inheritance - and Semon was a expert on human memory. He christened the mneme after the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory.

Semon's "mnemes" represented an excellent and important concept - but it was quickly eclipsed by the now-dominant term "gene", which - alas - gradually came to lack the connotations associated with 'memory' and 'learning'. Alas, "mnemes" is practically a dead term today.

The term "mnemes" covered social learning, individual learning and genetic "learning". The term "meme" - by long convention - only covers social learning. If we expand its meaning to refer to the unit of inheritance in universal Darwinism, we will be fighting against the dictionary and decades of common usage. Also, the term "gene" has a better claim on that role. At least it has firmer etymological foundations. The etymological foundations of the term "meme" have crumbled.

Rivals to gene-based terminology

In my memetics book, I propose that we use the term "gene" for the heritable elements in evolution - and ignore or discard the numerous dictionaries and textbooks that claim that genes are "molecular units of heredity" - or that they have anything to do with DNA or RNA.

There have been some other proposals for terms that convey this meaning:

• Mneme. Richard Semon (1904) wrote:

  Instead of speaking of a factor of memory, a factor of habit, or a factor of heredity and attempting to identify one with another, I have preferred to consider these as manifestations of a common principal, which I shall call the mnemic principal.

• Meme. In his book The Mocking Memes - A Basis for Automated Intelligence, Evan Louis Sheehan writes:

  I define memes to include every sort of pattern that serves as a template for its own replication.

• Replicator. David Hull (1988b) proposed replicators fill the role of the carriers of heredity in evolving systems.
  

Deploying Richard Semon's term "mneme" in the modern era seems rather impractical.

Evan Louis Sheehan's "meme" tries to hijack an existing term. "Meme" has an established meaning which does not obviously need to change. I think the attempt fails.

The proposals of David Hull and Evan Louis Sheehan also suffer from a technical problem - since they only include copyable heredity information, and not all heritable information is capable of being copied.

How do genes differ from ordinary information? In other words, what is an example of information that is not inherited? Conventionally, there is no inheritance without some living thing being involved. Also, information that is destroyed is not inherited. Other forms of information could potentially be inherited by some living thing or another.

So: "gene" still seems to be better overall. Of course, this raises the issuse of what name should we give to small chunks of nucleic acid. Im my book, I wrote:

Those are "genes" too, of course, and can normally simply be referred to as such - but if a term is really wanted to refer specifically to nucleic acid chunks while excluding other forms of inheritance - they could be called "organic genes", "cellular genes", "nuclear genes" or "DNA genes" - depending on exactly what you actually meant.

What about snappy abbreviations?

"Denes" is my pick for "DNA genes" - with "denetics" referring to their study.

"Nenes" is my pick for "nuclear genes" - with "nenetics" referring to their study.

Update 2013-05-19: Dawkins said:

Completely unknown to me when I coined "meme" in 1976, the German biologist Richard Semon wrote a book called Die Mneme (English translation The Mneme (London, Allen & Unwln, 1921)) in which he adopted the "mneme" coined in 1870 by the Austrian physiologist Ewald Hering.

Meme synonyms

The term "meme" did once have some competition.

• Edward Burnett Tylor (1871) used the terms "customs" and "survivals";
  
• Richard Semon (1921) called similar entities "mnemes";
  
• George Kingsley Zipf (1935) used the term "actemes";
  
• Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1936) used the term "unit-ideas";
  
• Julian Huxley (1955) used the term "mentifacts";
  
• Leslie White (1959) called products of symbolism "symbolates";
  
• Henry Murray (1959) called them "idenes";
  
• Donald Campbell (1960) called them "mnemones";
  
• Harold Blum (1963) endorsed "mnemes" by coining "mnemotype";
  
• Ted Cloak (1966) used "Unit of Cultural Instruction";
  
• Ralph Burhoe (1967) called them "culturetypes";
  
• Ted Cloak (1975) used the term "cultural instructions";
  
• Lumsden and Wilson (1981) called them "culturegens"
  
• Carl Swanson (1983) called them "sociogenes";
  
• Boyd and Richerson (1985) called them "cultural variants" - having previously used the terms "culture-types", "cultural representations" and "cultural traits".
• M. Stuart-Fox (1986) called them "mentemes";
  
• George Williams (1992) used "codex" as an umbrella term for memes and genes;
  
• Richard Brodie (1996) prefered to talk about "mind viruses";
  
• Joseph Giovannoli (2000) calls them "psychogenes";
  
• Seth Godin (2000) refers to "ideaviruses";
  
• William Croft (2000) used linguemes" for "linguistic replicators";
  
• Aaron Lynch (2000) used a term he invented: "thought contagions";
  
• Barry Hewlett (2002) calls them "semes";
  
• Geoffrey Hodgson (2003) proposed we use "habits" and "routines" instead;
  
• Peter Turchin (2006) called them "cultural genes";
  
• George van Driem (2007) rechristened the unit of imitation as a "mime";
  
• Craig Mackay (2011) calls them "supergenes";
  
• Bill Benzon (2014) calls them "coordinators" [ref];
  

However, none of these other terms has become anywhere near as popular as the term "meme".

At the time of writing, the term "meme" has 219,000,000 hits on Google.

The large number of close synonyms -and the large number of usages - suggest an important, natural term.

For graphs of the statistics for previous usage of the term, see here.