The eusociality symbiont hypothesis and epistemic hygiene

The eusociality symbiont hypothesis relating to the evolution of eusociality pictures a positive feedback loop of interactions between hosts and symbionts, with each new symbiont pulling the colony tighter together as the symbionts manipulate their hosts into coming into contact with each other in order to reproduce.

The positive feedback loop involved in the hypothesis is counteracted by negative interactions involving hosts and symbionts - in other words by parasitism. As hosts interact more closely parasites can also spread horizontally between them. Since horizontal transmission promotes misalignment between host genes and parasite genes, after a certain point, parasites start to dominate more helpful symbionts - and then the hosts start to behave as though they want to live further apart from one another.

The significance of parasites is evident in most social insect colonies. These are vulnerable to parasitism - due to the close proximity of the members - and it is not uncommon to see nests obliterated by parasites. On the other hand, because of the parasite threat, the nests themselves are often policed by cleaning squads. Disease eradication is a big theme. Sick individuals are exiled and everything is kept remarkably clean.

Humans are a case study for the eusociality symbiont hypothesis. Our symbionts are typically cultural, but the basic dynamics are much the same - the cultural symbionts manipulate the humans into coming into contact with each other in order to reproduce. The result is human ultrasociality.

We know that humans living in close proximity are more vulnerable to horizontal transmission of genes. We can see this by comparing sick city dwellers with their more healthy country cousins. Parasite transmission favors situations where humans are crowded together. We have institutions to deal with this - such as hospitals.

Close proximity also favors horizontal memetic transfer. Assuming that humans want to avoid exploitation by deleterious memetic parasites, we are going to need organizations and institutions that promote epistemic hygine. These will involve schools, as well as other types of training more focused on the memetic immune system.

The negative effects of memetic parasites are clearly evident today. We have an obesity epidemic driven by fast food advertising. There are smoking, drinking and caffination epidemics which are widespread. Over the counter drugs are widely abused. Paranoia epidemics are fostered by the news media with resulting scares about terrorism, global warming, vaccination, resource depletion, and so forth.

Epistemic hygiene can reasonably be expected to become a big focus. Not necessarily the 'thought police' pictured by George Orwell - but other government-level infrastructure to protect populations against the negative effects of bad memes.

Treating violence as a contagious disease

I've written about the war on violent memes before.

Now there's a TED talk about the topic:

Gary Slutkin: Let's treat violence like a contagious disease.

It reports on the successes of meme therapy targeting violence. It also discusses the difficulties in getting people to accept an epidemiological approach to violence. Of course, violence as a mind virus is pretty much part of memetics 101.

Here is the talk:

Meme therapy

Basics

Meme therapy aims to improve health and well-being with interventions that use or target memes. It's named after gene therapy. "Gene therapy" has historically been a rather narrow term. However, meme therapy is probably best interpreted rather broadly - referring to a wide range of therapies based on memes.

Some common forms of meme therapy resemble vaccinations. For instance, hearing a story about someone who got burned in a pyramid scheme can help protect people about pyramid schemes they might encounter in the future. As with organic immunity, vaccines - in the form of weakened versions of dangerous real-world memes - can subsequently provide protection against the real thing. Another approach is to combat bad memes with good memes. There are also forms of memetic preventative medicine - such as skepticism.

History

Meme therapy was an important part of memetics from its inception. The book Virus of the Mind had a strong self-help element. More recently there's the book Disinfect Your Mind: Defend Yourself with Memetics Against Mass Media, Politicians, Corporate Management, Your Aunt's Advice, and Other Mind Viruses. The theme of these books has generally been that your brain is under siege by a crowd of memes that seek to manipulate you - for the benefit of advertisers, politicians, religious leaders - and indeed the memes themselves. Only by mastering the self-help side of memetics can you hope to properly defend yourself.

Susan Blackmore is among those who have written about the self-help aspects of memetics - for example in her article, "Meditation as meme weeding". Sue talks about weeding out the bad memes, so that good ones might flourish. This gardening metaphor seems quite appropriate.

Mental illness

More recently, there have been more medical-based approaches. Hoyle Leigh has become one of the pioneers of meme therapy. He has written a fine book on the topic titled "Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness: Toward an Integrative Model". This notes that the symptoms of obsessions, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression and some kinds of stress appear to include over-growths of memes inside the minds of the patients - with particular memes often dominating their attention. It then goes on to propose treatment regimes - including meme therapy. Such meme therapy is part of Darwinian psychiatry.

Techniques

Common meme therapy techniques include:

• Meditation;
• Skepticism;
• Affirmation;
• Mantras;
• Music;

Classification

Meme therapies can be classified in several ways:

• Broad-spectrum vs narrow spectrum;
• Self-administered vs other-administered;
• Anti-biotic vs pro-biotic;
• Preventative vs restorative;

For example, meditation is an example of broad-spectrum anti-biotic meme therapy. It targets a range of memes, but the therapy doesn't really involve much in the way of memes. Affirmations are a form of pro-biotic meme therapy - they try to replace bad memes with good ones.

It's also possible to classify meme therapies based on the type of problem they treat. Treatable categories of disorder include excesses of negative memes, insufficient positive memes, and various kinds of auto-immune memetic disorders.

Ubiquity

Self-administered meme therapy is ubiquitous. People spend a lot of time listening to music and watching movies. These are basic forms of meme therapy.

Darwinian psychiatry

Williams and Nesse famously called for Darwinian medicine. However we also need Darwinian psychiatry. It is pretty clear that many psychological difficulties are caused by over-reproduction of ideas and memes. Obsessions, paranoia, schizophrenia, stress and depression, all often feature prominent meme overgrowths as either symptoms or causes. Memetic adaptations for reproducing inside minds combine in some individuals with a weak memetic immune system to produce pathological behaviour.

Darwinian medicine has adapted the exorcisms and casting out of evil spirits of primitive peoples into practical techniques that actually evict the invisible invaders responsible for pathology.

However, true Darwinian psychiatry is still in an embryonic state. There are psychological equivalents of antibiotics, vaccines and bleach - but these are often poorly studied and inexpertly deployed.

There has been pioneering work by Hoyle Leigh, but still much remains to be done.

The war on violent memes

Cultural epidemiology has found some new converts recently - in the area of combating violence. Here's cureviolence.org:

Treating violence as an infectious epidemic is effective

Three main strategies are used in reversing infectious epidemic processes. These are:

• detecting and interrupting potential infectious events;
• determining who are most likely to cause another infectious event and reducing their likelihood of developing disease and subsequently transmitting; and
• changing the underlying social and behavioral norms, or environmental conditions, that directly relate to this infection.

These methods have resulted in reductions in shootings and killings of 16% to 34%.

The Cure Violence method is designed around these principles. This method begins with epidemiological analysis of the clusters involved and transmission dynamics, and uses several new categories of disease control workers – including violence interrupters, outreach behavior change agents, and community coordinators – to interrupt transmission to stop the spread and to change norms around the use of violence. Workers are trained as disease control workers, similar to tuberculosis workers or those looking for first cases of bird flu or SARS.

- http://cureviolence.org/what-we-do/

Another recent article on the topic is: Can Murder Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease? by Shankar Vedantam.

Older articles on the topic include: Violence may be a 'socially infectious disease', Gun Violence Is Social Disease, Public Health Experts Say and Is It Time to Treat Violence Like a Contagious Disease?.

Meme inoculations, therapy and engineering have potential for treating other disorders besides violence. Drug abuse, road rage and many other mental health disorders could likely be treated as infectious diseases. However, first academics need to understand the idea of cultural epidemiology before they can properly investigate hypotheses based on it.

Parasite therapy

What to do if you have an over-active immune system - and are suffering from auto-immune self-strikes, in the form of allergies, lupus, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, etc.

One idea is to dose youself with parasites - and give your immune system some real work to do.

This interesting idea is discussed in the book An Epidemic of Absence.

The challenge is to find parasites that will give your immune system a good work out without actually causing too many serious problems. Intestinal nematode worms seem to be a favourite parasite - and are used in helminthic therapy. However, the idea is a controversial one.

Reading about it, I quickly found myself wondering whether there a memetic equivalent. Scepticism, suspicion and conservatism act against bad memes. If we systematically wipe out the worst memes in the world, is there a risk that these defense systems will turn on the good memes, just so they get some exercise? What about the possibility of these defense mechanisms attacking the psychological infrastructure of their hosts?

These are interesting questions - but perhaps not pressing ones. We seem far from wiping out the worst memes in the world. Memetic parasites are widespread, and I don't think there's really a shortage of work for our memetic immune systems to do.

However, we do have people with hyperactive memetic immune systems - who have various learning difficulties as a result. Could "parasite therapy" help them?

Maybe. We do already teach people about bad ideas, to help them better appreciate good ones. We tell them about phlogiston, pyramid schemes and cults. However, this seems more like vaccination than "parasite therapy". In the organic realm, vaccination and "parasite therapy" are rather different - but perhaps in the cultural realm, they are more similar.

Anyway, "parasite therapy" for auto-immune disorders is an interesting idea. I'll bear it in mind.

References

• Ridley, Matt (2013) The zoo inside you