Jonathan Marks and the view from anthropology

Confused critic of cultural evolution Jonathan Marks penned this article in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, reviewing several of the recent books in the area. It's called Recent Advances in Culturomics [sic].

For Jonathan Marks's previous efforts in the area see here.

I agree with Marks about at least one thing - there's too much "bean bag genetics" in cultural evolution - and not enough understanding of the role of symbiosis - mirroring the situation of organic evolutionary theory between 1930 and 1980. Marks attributes this trait to memetics - which ironically seems to be the most symbiosis-aware strain of cultural evolution to me.

The rest of the article is painful reading for cultural evolution enthusiasts. Not because it makes good points, but because arrogance and confusion don't mix well.

The rest of Evolutionary Anthropology is also a pretty strange place. As with many of those concerned with human evolution, it seems to be preoccupied with the distant past. There's an awful lot of modern data on human cultural evolution that not enough people seem to be looking at.

Critic Massimo Pigliucci offers daft objections to memetics

Massimo Pigliucci has another dopey article out on memes:

Scientists and philosophers have cast doubt on the usefulness, even the coherence, of the very concept. As my evolutionary biology colleague Jerry Coyne has said, it is ‘completely tautological, unable to explain why a meme spreads except by asserting, post facto, that it had qualities enabling it to spread’. We don’t know how to define memes in a way that is operationally useful to the practicing scientist, we don’t know why some memes are successful and others not, and we have no clue as to the physical substrate, if any, of which memes are made.

This criticism doesn't get any less stupid through repetition. Social scientists do know a lot of things about which memes spread. The problem here is that Pigliucci doesn't know about the relevant social science.

I made a video about this one a while back: Tim Tyler: Can memetics predict meme fitnesses?

New book on evolutionary economics from Geoffrey Hodgson

For details see here:

From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics without Homo economicus.

Helena Cronin: flat denial of cultural evolution

One of the most outrageous comments on Steven Pinker's misinformed anti-group selection rant came from Helena Cronin.

Helena Cronin once wrote the nice book The Ant And The Peacock, which included somne positive comments about memes. However, now we have this:

The eminent philosopher sat frozen in horror, forkful of lunch poised between plate and mouth. What enormity had caused the shock? The conversation had turned to cultural evolution. And I had suggested that there is no such thing. There's culture; there's history; there's change; there's progress; there's technological innovation; there's growth of knowledge; there's social learning; and there's lots more. But there's no cultural evolution.

It's flat denial of the large literature on cultural evolution. Helena Cronin obviously doesn't have a clue what she is talking about.

These days, it's rather weird for me to think of this parallel universe which some evolutionary biologists inhabit - where culture doesn't evolve. I think some of these folk still need to get on the internet and read up about the topic before opening their mouths.

Generalised genetics

Many people associate genetics with DNA. It often says in the definition of genetics that it is the science of heredity and inheritance in living organisms. However the phenomena of heredity and inheritance are not confined to living organisms. They extend to inorganic systems - raindrops, electrical discharges, propagating cracks, photons hitting dust. See the articles positional inheriance, velocity inheritance and darwinian physics for details about this.

If genetics is the science of heredity and inheritance in living organisms, what is the science of heredity and inheritance in non-living systems living called? It doesn't have a name. Most people don't know that it exists. There are no journals or conferences. It is a dark area of science.

Universal Darwinism requires generalised symbiosis. However, it also requires generalised genetics.

The most famous approach to generalising genetics is the "replicator" concept of Richard Dawkins. However, this concept is misleadingly-named and has caused widespread confusion - as documented in my references below.

Probably the next most famous approach to generalising genetics is the "mneme" concept of Richard Semon. This was conceptually pretty good, but it never took off, and its "mneme" doesn't roll off the tongue.
Other approaches are described in my essay:

• An inherited unit for Universal Darwinism.

The basic problem with genetics is that it is confined to living organisms. Many things in nature are copied with variation and selection that are not conventially considered to be alive. These include crystals, cracks, lighning, drainage patterns, refraction, reemission, turbulent eddies, etc. For more details see my essays:

• Tim Tyler (2012) Degenerative Darwinism
• Tim Tyler (2011) NanoDarwinism
• Tim Tyler (2011) Natural production and natural elimination
• Tim Tyler (2011) Universal Selection

Generalised genetics expands the concept of a science of heredity to all the cases where information is copied in nature. It uses conceptions of gene inspired by G.C. Williams - who described genes as:

In this book I use the term gene to mean 'that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency'

- Williams, 1966, page 241.

The existing concept of genetics could be described as "narrow genetics" - to distinguish it from the generalised version. The principles are pretty - much the same. Eventually we could deprecate the "narrow" version of "genetics" as being redundant - and drop the "generalised" prefix.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2012) An inherited unit for Universal Darwinism.
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Generalised symbiosis.
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Generalised epidemiology.
• Tyler, Tim (2009) Against Replicator Terminology.
• Tyler, Tim (2010) The role of high-fidelity transmission in memetics.
• Tyler, Tim (2011) The claim that evolution doesn't require replicators.
• Tyler, Tim (2010) Replicator rot.

Memes are not "atomistic"

In recent comments about memes, David Sloane Wilson is critical of the idea of:

memes as primarily atomistic free agents

He joins other meme critics in invoking atomism:

C. Herrmann-Pillath (2011) says:

As it stands, memetics is an approach to culture that is problematic in two respects. First, it is atomistic, and second, it is mentalist.

I Pörn (2002) says:

When atomism is transferred to the social sciences, individualism results. In cultural studies atomism appears as the presupposition of “memes”—that is, a cultural object or belief that can be replicated, passed on, and evolve, and which seems to have a life of its own.

The name atom comes from the Greek (atomos, "indivisible"). It means "uncuttable", something that cannot be further divided.

Words are memes. Words can be subdivided into syllables or letters. It is pretty obvious that some memes are divisible in this way. Similarly genes may be divided into nucleotides. Neither genes or memes are "atomistic".

Of course, no meme enthusiasts ever characterised memes as "atomistic" in the first place.

Instead, "atomism" is a term that has been applied to memetics by critics. This approach is known as a straw-man attack. Such attacks involve projecting undesirable traits onto the object of criticism and then making out that they actually belong to it. Straw man attacks are a well known form of fallacious arugmentation.

Memes are reductionistic, not atomistic - and reductionism is wonderful - one of the foundation stones of the scientific method.

Lapsed memeticists

Who do you go to if you want the dirt on your new boyfriend? Why his ex, of course!

So, what do the ex-memeticists have to say for themselves?

I can think of five fairly well-known ones:

• John Wilkins - used to write papers about memes, but in Dreams of memes and replicator machines he paints memetics as a neo-Darwinian theory of cultural evolution (can you have such a thing?) and distances himself from it a little.

• Kate Distin - eschewed memes in her 2010 book Cultural Evolution, saying that she could have described the ideas in terms of memes, but had tired of arguing with those with meme misunderstandings, and wasn't interested in fighting those battles.

• Robert Aunger - started off as a proponent, claimed to be agnostic in An agnostic view of memes and eventually came out against memes - in articles like Memes and What’s the Matter with Memes?. Augner had some strange ideas about memes. His book on the topic was a long argument for the case that memes must reside in brains (internalism). As an externalist, I thought his argument was nonsense.

• Bruce Edmonds - one of the most-cited ex-memeticsts - because of his shutting down the Journal of Memetics, while knifing the field in the back with the article The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results. I've previously rubbished the bad statistics in that article. AFAICS, On Modelling in Memetics was Bruce's longest article on the topic. In 2002 he described himself as being "memetic agnostic".

• Liane Gabora - she wrote a string of early papers about memes, but in How a Generation Was Misled About Natural Selection there's a pretty spectacular rant (on page two) about Dawkins, memes, dual inheritance theory - bashing them all. She now promotes the idea that cultural evolution is non-Darwinian.

John and Kate have fairly reasonable positions. Aunger seems to be in a meme muddle. Edmonds doesn't seem to have been that keen on memes in the first place. Liane seems to be completely off the rails to me. Although she is evidently an expert, she doesn't seem noticably less muddled on the topic than other meme critics.

Who are memes for?

David Sloan Wilson has an outlandish article out, titled: Human Cultures are Primarily Adaptive at the Group Level.

The article is a good illustration of one of my gripes about cultural group selection. Proponents often muddle together genetic and cultural groups - along the lines of the fallacy of the extended genotype.

Human DNA is influenced by kin selection. Similarly, memes which are influenced by cultural kin selection. Some like to describe kin selection in terms of group selection.

However, to apply cultural group selection to groups of humans - it's a conceptual muddling together of the cultural and organic realms. It is usually best to keep these realms separate - applying organic group selection to genes in the organic realm and cultural group selection to memes in the cultural realm.

This is not to say that the two systems don't interact, rather that attempting to mix separate systems - with independent gene pools - when discussing kin or group selection doesn't make much sense - and just leads to muddle and confusion.

Compare with smallpox. Guns wiped out many native Americans, and smallpox germs wiped out many more. If the gun memes are adaptive on the level of "groups", should we similarly say that smallpox is adaptive on the level of "groups"? The conventional response is to say that this is a wrong question. If we look at the features of the smallpox virus, they are adaptive mainly at the level of the smallpox virus itself. The fact that the virus acts to wipe out groups of humans is an irrelevant epiphenomenon - as far as the adaptive features of the smallpox virus goes.

It's best to look at culture the same way. Culture is adaptive for itself first and foremost.

Now, it is possible to have adaptations in one species that benefit another one. We see this in domestic crops, for instance. Maize's strange cobs are there to benefit the maize plant - but there's also a sense in which they are there to benefit humans. It is a legitimate question whether Maize cobs benefit humans or human groups - and George Price's methodology for approaching this question could be applied if you had a specific breakdown of humans into groups in mind. But surely it is pretty dubious to say that maize cobs are there primarily to benefit humans. Maize cobs are primarily adaptive to maize genes. They've just found a way of manipulating humans into planting maize seeds.

Many memes have a much more negative effect on the fertility of their hosts than maize cobs do. If you think meme adaptations are primarily there for humans then you lose the ability to explain phenomena such as the inverted J-shaped curve of meme adoption and the demographic transition in Japan. Memes do not exist primarily for the benefit of humans - or for the benefit of human groups. They exist for their own sake.

The inverted J-shaped curve of meme adoption

Memes, on average helped our ancestors. Our enlarged crainum and adaptations for speaking illustrate that, for our ancestors, more memes were better. However, in the west, the average effect of most memes on the DNA of their human hosts seems to be negative. The more educated you are, the fewer children you produce. The more memes you have, the fewer children you produce. This phenmomenon, widely recognised under the name of the demographic transition goes beyond r/K selection, and produces results that are positively maladaptive for human DNA. There's no way that the sub-replacement fertility levels in Japan are adaptive to the DNA of the human hosts there. The excess of memes in the developed world are simply bad for human DNA.

In memetics, the reason for this is fairly straightforwards - memes act to divert reproductive resources away from host DNA and towards meme production. The greater exposure to memes you have, the greater the chance of you becoming a victim of memetic hijacking.

Many of the interesting implications of this fact lie in the future. As rise of culture continues, we should not necessarily expect human DNA to be doing well in its new environment.

What discipline is evolutionary theory part of?

Once upon a time, evolution was considered to be part of biology. People called themselves "evolutionary biologists" - and even defined life in terms of evolution. For example, J. Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary - in "The Origins of Life", p.3 wrote:

What is life? [...]

An alternative is to define as living any population of entities posessing those properties that are needed if the population is to evolve by natural selection.

However, we can now see that this is wrong. Evolution applies to non-living systems, such as cracks, raindrops, erosion, and turbulence. Living systems involve accumulative evolution. However there's also degenerative evolution, which applies to both life and non-life. So: is evolution part of physics?

No. Evolutionary theory applies in a wide range of universes. It is largely independent of the details of physical law. This makes evolution part of systems theory - or alternatively part of statistics.