Yochai Benkler is interested in cooperation - particularly cooperation among humans. He is interested in net-based collaborative projects - like Wikipedia and Linux.
Videos
Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics
The Penguin and The Leviathan: The Science and Practice of Cooperation
Talks about cultural evolution 31 minutes in.
Book Talk: Yochai Benkler on How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest
Yochai Benkler: After Selfishness - Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time
Laura is currently at the SantaFe Institute. Her research investigates the evolution of human social organization, focusing on the social norms regulating kinship and marriage. This involves understanding why societies differ with respect to these norms – for example, why some prescribe monogamous marriage, while the majority allow polygyny; and how this variation came about – for example, whether the prevalence of monogamous marriage among European societies is simply an artefact of history, or whether it reflects ecological and/or social determinants.
Videos
Laura Fortunato - The Evolution of Marriage and Kinship Systems
Ara Norenzayan is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His areas of research include evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religious thought and behavior, issues of cultural variability and universality in human psychology, and relations between culture and evolution.
Videos
Darwin and your beliefs - Ara Norenzayan
Memes get explicitly mentioned at 1:12:00 in the above video. Ara says "the meme idea is underdeveloped".
Nathalie Gontier is a researcher interested in evolutionary epistemology. She has a background in both philosophy and anthropology. Her main research interests are philosophy of evolutionary biology - symbiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium and abiogenesis - evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language.
She's one of a small minority of researchers who actually understands the role of symbiosis in cultural evolution. Cultural evolution researchers are rare. Those who are up to speed with the significance of symbiosis are also uncommon. The intersection of these groups seems to be very small sometimes - but Nathalie is one of the researchers with a foot firmly in both groups.
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".
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.
Nowak achieved some not-so-desirable publicity recently with his role in the "Kin Selection debacle" in Nature.
Nowak discusses cultural evolution near the start of the first video, but - as with most writers on the subject of cooperation - Nowak seems to be more interested in game theory than symbiosis and cultural evolution.
David Krakauer is interested in intelligence, how it evolved, and where it's going next.
He has a home page at The SantaFe Institute. His home page says:
The big question that many of us are asking is what will evolutionary theory look like once it has become integrated with the sciences of adaptive information, and of course, what will these sciences then look like?
Videos
Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth Part One: The Adversarial Quartet
Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth Part Two: Invasion of the Inferential Cell
Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth Part Three: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Ted Cloak is a pioneer in the field. He published "Cultural Microevolution" in 1966, "Is a cultural ethology possible?" in 1968 and "Cultural Darwinism: Natural Selection of the Spoked Wood Wheel" in 1968.
His bio. says that he got a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in 1966. He was among the researchers cited by Dawkins (1976). He has continued pursuing the evolution of culture over the decades since then.
This quote from the 1975 version of "Is a cultural ethology possible?" illustrates what probably inspired Dawkins:
In a human carrier, then, a cultural instruction is more analogous to a viral or bacterial gene than to a gene of the carrier's own genome. It is
like an active parasite that controls some behavior of its host. It may be in complete mutual symbiosis with the human host, in which case the behavior it
produces has survival value for itself through the value it has for the survival/reproduction of the host. On the other hand, it may be like the gene of a flu or
"cold" virus; when the virus makes the host behave, e.g., sneeze, that behavior results in extraorganismic self-replication of the virus gene but not in survival or
reproduction of the host or his conspecific. From the organism's point of view, the best that can always be said for cultural instructions, as for parasites of any
sort, is that they can't destroy their hosts more quickly than they can propagate. In short, "our" cultural instructions don't work for us organisms; we work for
them. At best, we are in symbiosis with them, as we are with our genes. At worst, we are their slaves
See Ted Cloak's home page for downloadable versions of many of his papers and further resources: http://www.tedcloak.com/
Mark's latest work examines the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution by applying methods of phylogenetics, or the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups, essentially viewing language as a culturally transmitted replicator with many of the same properties we find in genes.
Mark is based in Reading UK. His home page is here.
Cities as gardens (no memes)
Interview: Mark Pagel and the origin of the speciesMark Pagel and Wired for Culture on this blog
I note that Mark isn't technically correct about the role of randomness in cultural evolution in his (interesting) "Infinite Stupidity" video. Cultural evolution can use linear programming, extrapolation and other non-random search techniques for exploring solution space. Mark's idea seems to be Donald Campbell's "Blind Variation and Selective Retention" (BSVR) thesis taken to an unrealistic extreme - though he doesn't cite Campbell, Cziko, or anyone else who has weighed in on this issue.
Interestingly many of those involved (including me until recently) seem to be based in the United Kingdom. It remains a hot-bed of research into evolution, 150 years after Darwin.
Sterelny, Kim, and Griffiths, P. (1999) Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[criticism][book]
Sterelny, Kim (2001) Niche Construction, Developmental Systems and the Extended Replicator. in Cycles of Contingency, R. Gray, P. Griffiths and S. Oyama (eds.), Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 329'349.
Sterelny, Kim (2003) Thought in a Hostile World. Oxford: Blackwell.
William Wimsatt is a researcher in cultural evolution. Here he is in action:
Wimsatt is a meme critic. He prefers what he calls "Meme Like Things" (MLTs).
His case is all to do with development - and he presents what we might call an "evo devo" critique. Of course development complicates organic evolution just as much as it complicates cultural evolution.
The science of genetics typically treats development as a black box. The rationale is that development is very complicated and we have little chance of understanding very much of it - and yet there is much that can usefully be understood while completely ignoring it. As a result of this simplification, genetics has made enormous progress in understanding the transmission of heritable traits. Memetics does the exact same thing, for the exact same reason and gets the exact same benefits. So: population memetics and population genetics normally treat development as a black-box and just continue without attempting to flesh it out. This is really just how science works.
Wimsatt is yet another critic that doesn't seem to appreciaate the depth of the parallels between cultural and biological evolution. For example, about 30 minutes into the talk, he writes:
The fact that earlier MLT's (meme-like-things) affect the acquition and interpretation of later MLT's means that thet separability of heredity, development and selection in the architecture of standard pop. gen models is impossible. So the models are far more complex.
In biology, one breeding population does for all traits--you inherit the whole thing at once. For culture, we occupy a succession of partially overlapping reference groups throughout the life cycle, so the institutions and organisations that mediate this trajectory make culturally-induced population structure crucial.
Both of these points are incorrect - and they are wrong due to misconceptions about the organic realm - not the cultural realm.
Earlier infections do affect later ones. Cowpox infections affect smallpox ones. AIDS infections affect pneumonia, tuberculosis and many other infections. Hepatitis D requires a previous Hepatitis B infection - and so on.
In the organic realm, you simply don't "inherit the whole thing at once". Inheritance comes along in dribs and drabs, one food symbiont, gut symbiont, pet or persistent viral infection at a time. The idea that you receive your entire organic inheritance at birth is nonsense - rather it is acquired gradually over the lifecycle as you pick up pathogens and symbionts. In other words: the organic realm is just like the cultural realm in these respects.
References:
Wimsatt, William C (1981) Units of Selection and the Structure of the Multi-Level Genome.In P. D. Asquith and R. N. Giere (eds), Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2, Bloomsburg, PA: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 122–83. [criticism]
Wimsatt, William C (1981) Developmental Reductionistic Research Strategies and Their Biases in the Units of Selection Controversy.In T. Nickles (ed.), Scientific Discovery.Vol. II, Case Studies, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 60, Boston: Reidel, pp. 213–59. [criticism]
Wimsatt, William C (1986) Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction.In P. Betchel (ed.), Integrating Scientific Disciplines, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 185–208.[criticism]
Wimsatt, William C. (2010) Memetics does not provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution: A developmental perspective. In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology, Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72. [criticism]
Nathalie Gontier is a researcher interested in evolutionary epistemology. She has a background in both philosophy and anthropology. Her main research interests are philosophy of evolutionary biology - symbiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium and abiogenesis - evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language.
Tim Ingold is a meme critic. In fact he seems to be a critic of most kinds of Darwinian cultural evolution.
Ted Cloak is a pioneer in the field. He published "Cultural Microevolution" in 1966, "Is a cultural ethology possible?" in 1968 and "Cultural Darwinism: Natural Selection of the Spoked Wood Wheel" in 1968.
Cecilia's work concerns the evolution of cognition. She is especially interested in social cognition, and imitation.
Who publishes on memetics, cultural evolution and social evolution?
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