Matt talks explicitly about memes 40 minutes in - raising the objection that memes are particulate, while culture doesn't have to be. He describes memes as being "a bit restrictive" and says: "I feel it's moved on since then".
I regard these objections as bogus ones. Memes represent heritable information in cultural evolution, just as genes represent heritable information in the organic realm. The idea that memes (and genes for that matter) are too 'particulate' is to do with the molecular biology definition of the 'gene' - not the evolutionary definition of the gene. Remember that genes are not sections of nucleic-acid.
Memes (and genes) are 'particulate' in the sense that they are informational - and so can be divided up as much as you like. Information can be subdivided into particulate bits and sent down cables. That's just a fact, and it isn't specific to memetics: most other theories of cultural evolution assume a basis in information theory, focus their attention on heritable cultural information and use some kind of meme synonym.
Here are a couple of other recent videos from Matt on the same topic:
Intelligent design creationism is famously opposed by evolutionists. However, few criticize the idea of intelligent design by humans. I think it is normally taken for grated that engineers have brains and so can intelligently design things.
Enter Matt Ridley. Matt characterizes intelligent design by humans as a form of creationism, and recently wrote a whole book, The Evolution of Everything, documenting its failures. Economies, religions, politics, companies and governments are all places where Matt sees this "creationism" - and its poor performance. I don't remember a single positive comment about intelligent design in the whole book.
As an antidote, I feel inclined to offer a brief summary of why intelligent design by humans is a useful tool. This didn't make it into my review - but I'm putting it here instead.
One of the tools of intelligent design is virtual prototyping. This involves constructing models in a virtual world and evaluating them there. This results in a rapid build-test cycle, low construction costs, and failures which are inexpensive.
A common construction technique among engineers is known as "rapid prototyping". This typically involves building and testing small models before constructing the final object. The virtual prototyping that takes place in the minds of intelligent agents is very similar to this "rapid prototyping" - and it has many of the same benefits associated with it.
Intelligent design is a form of evolution in which mutation and merging operations take place within a single mind. This rich environment permits a wider range of mutation and merging operations. The recombination operations include interpolation and extrapolation. This, ultimately, results in enhanced evolutionary dynamics: faster evolution and better ability to avoid getting stuck on local optima.
Intelligent design by humans does have some problems and limitations. In particular, human minds are small, have little storage. They are irrational and difficult to program. The virtual worlds they simulate are sometimes unrealistic and sometimes delusional.
However, rather than lamenting these problems, we can work on them. We can work on building bigger, better, faster minds, with access to more memory, and greater skills at performing inductive inference. Rather than relinquishing intelligent design as Ridley recommends we can improve it - using machine intelligence.
Rather to my surprise, I found quite a bit to disagree with in Matt's book. In my humble opinion, the basic problem is that Matt didn't take on the ideas described in Keeping Darwin in Mind. This leads him to regard intelligent design by human designers as a form of creationism - making it a foe to be vanquished. I don't think that this is a very well-balanced perspective.
I have long thought that the idea of incorporating intelligent design into Darwinism might cause some people to choke. So far, to the best of my knowledge, only Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett seem to have got into problems in this area. Ridley seems to be having more problems than Dennett did.
The blurb says: "Streamed live on Dec 3, 2015". You may want to fast-forwards to get to Matt's talk.
One notable moment is where Matt receives an audience question about whether his ideas are falsifiable at around 1:20:00. Note that the YouTube user involved edited and re-uploaded the video after I watched it - so you may find that the relevant section of the Q&A session has been moved or is missing.
Matt was also interviewed recently by CNBC's Rick Santelli here.
This one is from November 11th (two days ago). Ridley speaks for the first half, with Ronald Bailey taking over after half an hour.
Matt mentions the "Special" and "General" theories of evolution a few minutes in.
Matt irritates me by repeats]ing an old and ignorant objection to memes by anthropologists. He says (21 minutes in):
You don't have to have particulate information which is what people used to think about cultural evolution that the problem was that you don't have something equivalent to a gene which is a sort of specific, hard object.
The main problem here is the idea that genes are "specific, hard objects". In informational genetics,
genes are informational. They can exist in databases just as well as cells.
My article: Genes are not sections of nucleic-acid goes into more detail.
I feel that the idea that our understanding of cultural evolution has progressed from the idea that culture consisted of "specific, hard objects" to a less "particulate" understanding is a fantasy view of the history of the field which misunderstands and then denigrates the meme enthusiasts.
Memetics is often reductionist - in that it splits cultural inheritance into "bits" of culture. This reductionism is highly productive: a foundational technique in science is splitting complex things into smaller pieces in order to analyse and understand them.
The evolution I would like to see is in people's understanding of genes. Either genes are units of inheritance, or else we need a whole new science of heredity to replace genetics. Keeping genes as units of inheritance is the more conservative and sensible path, I claim. The idea that genes and genetics are confined to the "special theory of evolution" is an awful one. Genetics could be - and should be - quite general. My next post will be all about that topic.
Indeed, to borrow a phrase from a theorist of innovation, Richard Webb, Darwinism is “the special theory of evolution”. But there is a general theory of evolution, too, and it applies to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality. The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they show “path dependence”; they show descent with modification; they show selective persistence.
The special and general theories of evolution. I love it. What a great way to express the idea of Universal Darwinism. I don't like the term "Darwinism" being reserved for the "special" theory. Rather like Einstien, Darwin pioneered both the special and general theories of evolution; we should give him credit for that.
From the list of examples, it looks as though Ridley might be missing out on Darwinian Physics, though.
You may find that the first chapter is available free here. It's a philosophical/historical overview of bottom-up explanations.
Google Books has the first two chapters online here.
Malthus inspired both Darwin and Wallace in developing an understanding of evolution.
Today, many treat Malthus as a bad guy - morally and intellectually mistaken.
Malthus did advocate culling the poor by "facilitating" their mortality - for example by forcing them into overcrwoded conditions in order to encourage the plague. This doesn't make him a popular figure among modern thinkers.
Malthus was also concerned that resource limitation would lead to widespread human famines - unless something was done. In fact, since he wrote his An Essay on the Principle of Population - technological progress has outstripped human reproduction - resulting in a generally richer and less famished world population. This has led many to claim that "Malthus was wrong".
However, Malthus got a lot right. His big idea was that unchecked population growth would typically outstrip resource growth. This observation is both correct, and important. It is the basis of the basic biological idea of resource limitation.
People don't seem to want to hear that Malthus was right. The future availability of resources depends on technological issues that are not yet fully resolved - so it may legitimately be asked how the claim that Malthus was right can be justified. However, resources have a hard time increasing faster than time cubed - since that's how fast light cones expand. That's not fast enough to match the exponential growth of unchecked populations. Absent some pretty exotic physics, Malthus is right - by default.
Matt Ridley nominated "Malthusianism" as his scientific idea that is ready for retirement in the 2014 Edge annual question. By contrast, I consider Malthus to be a neglected and misunderstood scientific pioneer. He was ahead of his time. Following in the footsteps of Darwin and Wallace, we should pay attention to his views.
Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution.
...and...
Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution.
These ideas are, I believe, basically incorrect and misleading. Most sex in biology involves one donor and one recipient. Exchange refers to swapping things, with both parties involved giving and receiving. That's a pretty significant difference.
In the book, Ridley defines the term "exchange" as follows:
Exchange – call it barter or trade if you like – means giving each other different things (usually) at the same time: simultaneously swapping two different objects.
This is similar to the dictionary, which defines "exchange" as meaning:
an act of giving one thing and receiving another (esp. of the same type or value) in return.
Sex is different. Sometimes it involves a mutual exchange of resources - but it is a broader concept. Typically, in biology, sex involves one-way exchange - with the male acting as donor and female as recipient.
Of course, there is an equivalent of sexual recombination in cultural evolution. However, exchange is just one type of sex - among many.
Ideas have sex mostly in people's brains - and inside computer systems. Exchange need not be involved - since culturally-transmitted ideas can get into brains in other ways - e.g. by observing the behaviour or another, or by acquiring an artifact from them. Once there, they can combine with all the existing ideas - both individually-learned and socially transmitted ones.
The alleged equivalence between exchange and cultural sex seems basically wrong to me. Sex is a significantly broader category than exchange is. Muddling these concepts together seems much more likely to lead to confusion than enlightenment.
What does evolutionary science say about economics?
A special issue of the Journal of Economics and Organization Behavior
that was produced with the Evolution Institute addresses important issues
that impact how we understand economics and daily life.
Click here: here for the articles for a limited time.
Several of the talks relate to the topic of this blog: memes and cultural evolution.
Matt Ridley talks about our "collective brain." for one hour. This address, which was delivered on February 1, 2012, was one in a series of lectures that are sponsored by the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University and named after the economist Friedrich Hayek.
The first 22 minutes is all about progress. Then we get on to material about cultural evolution.
Author and rational optimist Matt Ridley spoke at The Centre for Independent Studies about the overwhelming evidence that shows life is getting better - despite an abundance of pessimistic counterclaims.
Today there are more than 6 billion people on the planet, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years...
Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years -- to keep on changing.
Matt Ridley discusses cultural evolution and the origins of modern humans, and how cultural evolution leads and DNA genes follow.
He gives the example of blue eyes, claiming it was a consequence of agriculture, followed by the colonisation of northern Europe. That seems plausible to me.
Matt is asked a question about memetics 58 minutes in, and he generally expresses his approval - saying:
Q: I was wondering how a theory of memetics maps on your account?
A: Yeah, um, good question: how does the theory of memetics map on to my ideas and the meme theory that ideas behave like genes in that they replicate - essentially remember I ran through a series of slides of things that you need to find for an evolutionary system to work - memetics is concentrating on that "replictoion" slide - where I showed a picture of aeroplanes on an assembly line - memetics is talking about whether ideas replicate and copy themselves, etc, and it's therefore part of the story - but I'm focussing on the other parts of the story, at least particularly the "recombination" part. It's another analogy for a genetic evolutionary process - which is all part of the story - so it's a different emphasis - it's a different side of the same coin.
In fact, memetic recombination is surely part of memetics, in exactly the same way that genetic recombination is part of genetics.
Matt wrote a whole book on cultural evolution recently. There's a lot of "ideas having sex" - but memes are only mentioned on one page. That was a spectacularly disappointing turn-out.
What about Matt's ideas about cultural recombination (starting around 22 minutes into the video)? Memetic recombination is probably ancient - predating the split with chimpanzees. For example, this video 27 minutes in, apparently shows a combination of chimpanzee ideas. They barter too a little - but they don't really have many artefacts to barter. So yes, recombination may well be important - but we are probably just talking about a cultural snowball that eventually got big enough to start picking up speed on its own. If you want an event to pin the birth of the recent human explosion on, the end of the last glacial cycle looks as though it is the most obvious candidate.
The other thing to say is that trade is not really the same thing as memetic recombination. Trade might well increase the rate of memetic recombination - but they aren't the same thing. I gave some examples of memetic recombination in my own book on memetics. My examples were "portmanteaus" - like:
cyborg - comes from cybernetic and organism;
ginormous - comes from gigantic and enormous;
Why doesn't trade qualify? Trade is more like two ecosystems exchanging organisms. That does "recombine" things - in a sense - but we don't usually describe moving creatures around between ecosystems as being a form of sexual recombination. IMO, memetic recombination ought to cleave functional units - at least sometimes - or it isn't really playing the same functional role that recombination plays in the organic realm.
Lastly, it is worth noting that recombination within minds doesn't discriminate between ideas that are the product of individual learning and social learning. Individually-learned ideas can recombine - and that has nothing to do with trade, or socially-transmitted memes.
Intelligent design creationism is famously opposed by evolutionists. However, few criticize the idea of 
My 
The book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge" by Matt Ridley is out later this month.
Malthus inspired both Darwin and Wallace in developing an understanding of evolution.
In his book 
The 
Matt Ridley discusses cultural evolution and the origins of modern humans, and how cultural evolution leads and DNA genes follow.
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