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).

Tim Ingold - researcher

Tim Ingold is a meme critic. In fact he seems to be a critic of most kinds of Darwinian cultural evolution.

A recent criticism is: The trouble with ‘evolutionary biology’.

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".

Tim also wrote at length about memes in his 1987 book Evolution and Social Life.

Podcasts

• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 1)
• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 2)
• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 3)
• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 4)
• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 5)
• Beyond Genes and Memes (Part 6)

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.

Links

• Home page

Symbiotic language

In a sense we have a symbiotic relationship to a nonmaterial being which we call language.

- Terrence McKenna, The Evolutionary Mind.

On that note, Mark Changizi has a new book out - called "Harnessed". It's about how language evolved to match humans.

Mark explicitly endorses memes in the book:

These poor pre-language Homo sapiens schmucks are in for a severe chimp-schooling, because what makes us modern language-wielding humans formidable compared to chimps is not what's in our genes, but what's in our memes. It is the cultural artifacts that have evolved to fit our minds and transform ancient event-recognition software into communication software that makes us kick-arse. The rise of the planet of the apes - the first such rise, when we humans rose and took over the planet - was due to culture having nature-harnessed us, and transforming us into a new kind of creature.

...and here:

This is a selection process that selects not on biology, but on human artifacts that are used by biology. The human artifacts are animal-like, in the sense that they themselves have evolved over time, under selection pressure. These artifact-creatures (in the realm of “memes”), like naturally selected biological creatures, can be highly complex, with all the hallmarks of an engineering masterpiece.

Mark has the language as being composed of "symbionts":

“Aha!” the alien prober exclaimed. The modern humans are not merely learning language and music, they’re being raised in an environment with symbionts. Language and music are technological masterpieces that evolved to live with non-linguistic hominids and transform them into something beyond their biology. What makes these modern humans no longer the non-linguistic Homo sapiens apes they biologically are is not on the inside, and not in the ancestral environment. It is due to a novel variety of evolving entity the humans have been evolving with. Language and music are evolved organism-like artifacts that are symbiotic with these human apes. And like any symbiont, these artifact symbionts have evolved to possess shapes that fit the biology, namely our brains. As a metaphor with symbionts, these aliens could then begin digesting what we modern humans are.

What are we, then, in the eyes of alien probers? We are our biology, from the genes on up. But we are more than that, indicated by the fact that the probers don’t abduct just a human, but entire human habitats. We are our biology within its appropriate habitat. But that’s true about all animals on Earth. The special thing the aliens had to grapple with when they started probing humans was that biology and habitat are not enough. They needed to abduct the cultural artifact symbionts that were co-evolving with us. That’s not something any other animal can lay claim to. The pieces of what we are can be found in our wet biology, the habitat, but also in the artifactual symbionts we have been co-evolving with.

Language-as-symbionts seems to be gradually catching on. It is a theme of Simon Kirby and George van Driem - as well as all the memeticists, of course.

This Podcast from Mark - mentions memes briefly.

I see that elsewhere Mark says:

My research suggests that language and music aren’t any more part of our biological identity than reading is. Counterintuitively, then, we aren’t “supposed” to be speaking and listening to music. They aren’t part of our “core” after all.

Er that isn't right! Check out babbling babies!

Richard Dawkins: Virus Of The Mind

This is a podcast. The memes - or rather: mind viruses - start at around 19:00 and then there's more after 28:00.

Dawkins goes into the case of the Craig Shergold chain letter postal virus in some detail.

Memetics podcasts

Here are a few podcasts about memetics:

Susan Blackmore

• Susan Blackmore, Robert Wright and Richard Dawkins: Memes podcast [0:46:00]
• Susan Blackmore: Memes & More... Much More (c-realm) [MP3]
• Susan Blackmore: Internet memes interview - at The Pod Delusion 18th March 2011. [MP3]
• Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, John Tooby and Terrence Deacon: Is Anyone in There? [MP3]
• Susan Blackmore: The future of memetics - most of this is also available on video [MP3]
• Susan Blackmore and Alister McGrath: Is God a dangerous delusion [1:59:17] [MP3]
• Susan Blackmore on Memes and Temes [??:??] [MP3]

Richard Dawkins

• Susan Blackmore, Robert Wright and Richard Dawkins: Memes podcast [0:46:00]
• Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, John Tooby and Terrence Deacon: Is Anyone in There?
• Richard Dawkins and Ben Huh: Do Youz Knowz What I Meme? [07:79]
• Richard Dawkins Lecture - Virus Of The Mind [38:55]
• Spells, Counterspells and Viruses of the Mind : Pt. 2 - followed by a reply from Steven Pinker
• Dawkins vs Pinker on religious memes

Daniel Dennett

• Daniel Dennett - From Animal to Person: The Evolution of Human Culture
• Daniel Dennett: Why are we here?

Richard Brodie

• On Genetics & Memetics
• On Gender Roles, Memes & Sexual Evolution
• The Evolution of Memes
• Memes, Attention & Consciousness

Memetics

• Adam Phillips: The Science of Memetics: Germ Theory Applied to Ideas - with Henson, Lynch, Aunger and Brodie [MP3]
• Podcast: Wired for culture - Mark Pagel [MP3]
• Richard Brodie reading the introduction to his book "Virus of the Mind"
• Jonnie Hughes: Memes and the Origin of Tepees
• Terence McKenna - Know your meme
• Terence McKenna - Culture is not your friend! - video here
• Terence McKenna - Memes, drugs and community
• What are memes - from How Stuff Works Tech
• Godless episode 17: Memetics
• Don Tinkler: Thinking about memes, minds and cultural evolution [MP3]
• Christopher Allen: Memes and memetics
• Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef: Rationally Speaking podcast: Memetics
• Introduction to memetics

Royal Society audio files

• Culture evolves - 32 audio files from the conference.
• Social learning in humans and non-human animals - 17 audio files from the conference.
• The Evolution of Society - 15 audio files from the conference.

Misc

• Rob Boyd podcast - [MP3]
• New "tipping points" podcast - [MP3]
• What is a tipping point? - [MP3]
• I’ll Have What She’s Having - book launch podcast - Alex Bentley and Mark Earls - [MP3]
• Evolving Culture: Where Do We Go From Here? by Joe Palca - featuring Rob Boyd.
• Un-Natural Selection: Human Evolution's Next Steps by Joe Palca.
• New Thinking: Advances in the Study of Human Cognitive Evolution - 11 podcasts from 2011, with videos.
• Chat: Dawkins, Memetics, Commerce and - Tom Barbalet and others.

Susan Blackmore, Robert Wright and Richard Dawkins: Memes podcast

Blurb says:

Guests:

• SUSAN BLACKMORE Author, The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999) Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of the West of England, Bristol,
  
• ROBERT WRIGHT Author, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (Vintage, l995)
  
• RICHARD DAWKINS Author, "The Selfish Gene" (Oxford University Press, 1976) Professor of the Public Understanding of Science

A meme is a idea or behavior one person can pass on to another. Some scientists claim that memes act like genes, with the fittest surviving and interacting to produce the peculiarities of human behavior. Can memetics help us understand complex aspects of human nature and culture, or is it, as some have complained, "cocktail-party science"? Join Ray Suarez and guests for a look at the controversy over memes.

Richard Dawkins and Ben Huh: Do You Knowz What I Meme?

2010 interviews with Richard Dawkins and Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger Network. Both interviews are about 3 minutes long.

Ben Huh promotes the "new" definition of "meme" popular on the internet.

Some existing discussions of this content are available here.

Another new book on memes - and tepees

This one is: On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves) by Jonnie Hughes. The title is a play on Darwin's title. It was published 10 days before my own book.

Curiously, it seems to be a travel tale - with memes mixed in. The blurb reads:

Why do some ideas spread, while others die off? Does human culture have its very own “survival of the fittest”? And if so, does that explain why our species is so different from the rest of life on Earth?

Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish entities, tricking us into helping them to reproduce. Is it the same with our ideas?

Jonnie Hughes, a science writer and documentary filmmaker, investigates the evolution of ideas in order to find out. Adopting the role of a cultural Charles Darwin, Hughes heads off, with his brother in tow, across the Midwest to observe firsthand the natural history of ideas—the patterns of their variation, inheritance, and selection in the cultural landscape. In place of Darwin’s oceanic islands, Hughes visits the “mind islands” of Native American tribes. Instead of finches, Hughes searches for signs of natural selection among the tepees.

Links

Amazon link. Google Books. Facebook page. Author's blog. New Scientist review. Author podcast.

Meme commentary

The author has said this about memes:

The "meme" is a confused and confusing term, routinely raised as an analogue of the gene without due care. I've spent the last few years stripping it back to establish whether it has any use in better understanding cultural evolution. I have to conclude that it does, but only when you correctly apply the analogy, differentiating the "genes of culture" from the "organisms of culture", the "populations of culture" and even the "species of culture". Only with this full-hearted approach can you visualise the memetic view of cultural evolution, and only then upon admiting the vaguaries of the definition of "a gene" in the first place.

Video

Update

I now have the book. Some criticisms:

The memes are rather light, not starting until page 214. The book ends on page 274.

The author embraces internalism. I find that rather disappointing.

The author asks:

Why aren't all biologists talking about memes? (page 239).

He then claims that the answer is that people can't easily find memes in brains, but that this is gradually changing - with mirror neuron discoveries. IMO, that's a crock of nonsense - that isn't the reason why.

Richerson, Boyd, Feldman, Cavalli-Sforza, Lumsden, Wilson, Laland, Mesoudi and Whiten get about half a page in the bibliography. The excuse?

I have made a conscious effort to avoid naming scientists and philosophers throught the text unless it is really important to do so. My justification is that it formalises and slows down the story. (p.279)

So: this isn't really much of a science book at all.

The summary of the efforts of these first six scientists reads:

In the 1980s a series of researchers tried to get the same smug explanatory power by lashing our cultural evolution ever so tightly to our biological evolution in complex "coevolutionary" models.

I confess that, while wincing a little, I chuckled at this characterisation. That's a pretty neat summary of what those researchers did that was wrong.

Rationally Speaking: Memetics

Critics, Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef express their difficulties in understanding memetics in a 2010 podcast here.

Massimo plays the role of expert explaining the problems with memetics. Julia plays the role of sidekick, struggling to understand Massimo's position, but having some sympathies to memetics. Those dynamics are quite fun. However, it seems to me that not too many problems are convincingly raised, and there's a lot of arguing via "I don't see how" and "it is not clear how you would do that"-style material. That doesn't work too well here: either I can see how and I do know how you would do that - or else I can explain why it it shouldn't be seen as being an important issue in the first place.

Julia Galef says at one point that she hasn't actually read anything from the Journal of Memetics. Hmm.

This is "armchair philosophy" material. They don't really mention any of the actual science involved.

Massimo says at one point that his biggest objection is that there's no ecological science of memetics which makes predictions about which memes are fitter than other ones.

This area is part of what is often called "Applied Memetics" (which also includes memetic engineering). It seems to be one of the better studied areas of the field to me - simply because social media marketing and advertising departments need to be able to predict what spreads and what doesn't in order to be able to construct successful viral marketing media.

Francis Heylighen's 1998 paper "What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution" gives an early introduction. More recently, there have been many studies of social media on the internet that look into this sort of thing. For instance see, Dan Zarella's The Science of ReTweets. Of course we don't know everything about this field, but it is a challenge in organic ecology too.

If Massimo wants to understand the relationship between gene-culture evolution and memetics, a fairly sensible (if rather snarky) take on that is Mathematical models for Memetics by Jeremy R. Kendal & Kevin N. Laland. In a nutshell, these are different groups people approaching the same material from different angles and drawing extremely similar conclusions. Memetics has much better terminology, visualisation and visibility - and gene-culture evolution has much better studies, data and credibility within academia. The historical attempts by both parties to criticise each other appear to have been fairly uniformly hopeless and stupid. Now that we have the internet, it seems obvious that these groups should work out their differences and combine their forces.

The critics of memetics don't make too many videos, it seems, but a podcast is better than nothings - and so I might try a response video or two quoting Massimo and Julia at some stage.

Update 2011-09-30 - I respond here. Also, Massimo writes his ideas on the topic up here. Massimo still seems very muddled to me. He raises much the same objections as in the podcast, and approvingly cites the academic cultural evolution literature - apparently without realizing that it is saying a lot of very similar things to memetics - and that many of his objections are equally applicable to it.

Update 2014-07-30: Julia seems to have become quite a meme enthusiast. For example, she attributes human progress to memes many times here. Go, Julia!

Culture evolves

Some links: The "Culture Evolves" web site.

Discussion Meeting issue 'Culture evolves' - papers.

Audio files from the "Culture Evolves" meeting.

Joseph Henrich - resources

Joseph Henrich is a researcher in cultural evolution.

Videos

The W.E.I.R.D.-est People in the World.

Polygamy & Democracy, Incompatible?

Are Taboos Adaptive? Evidence from the Island of Fiji

Joe Henrich - Thematic Series: The Emerging Science of Culture The Weirdest People in the World

BHTV: Jonathan Phillips and Joe Henrich

Podcasts

• On the nature of cultural transmission networks.

Links

• Joseph Henrich - Home page.
• Joseph Henrich - Home page.
• Joseph Henrich - Lab.
• Joseph Henrich - Lab publications.
• Publications - from Joseph Henrich.
• Part 1 [broken link].
• Part 2 [broken link].

Robert Boyd - resources

Robert Boyd is an experienced researcher in the field of cultural evolution.

Videos

Culture as an evolutionary phenomenon. Memes get a brief mention at 42:00.

UCLA Behavior, Evolution, & Culture.

The Cultural Niche - Social Learning and Human Adaptation

Mode and Tempo in Technological Change

CCPR Seminar: Rob Boyd (04/04/12) - Why Relatedness Is Not Enough to Predict Social Evolution.

Panel 2: Human Uniqueness, Culture and Morality (Rob starts 26 minutes in)

Podcasts

• Interview on National Public Radio's series "The Human Edge".
  
• Culture and the Evolution of Human Cooperation.
  

Links

• Robert Boyd - Publications.
• World Science Festival 2009: What It Means to be Human - part 1.
  
• World Science Festival 2009: What It Means to be Human - part 2.
  
• World Science Festival 2009: What It Means to be Human - part 3.
  
• World Science Festival 2009: What It Means to be Human - part 4.
  
• Memetics-related publications - from Robert Boyd.
  

Susan Blackmore video from 2005

Susan Blackmore video on "The Future of Memetics" - which is all about memes - from 2005:

Susan Blackmore (2005) PopTech Pop!Cast from PopTech.

There's a Q&A at the end of this talk - which is available as audio only here - but there is not much about memes in it.