Some time ago, my study of cultural kin selection (research for my next book) dragged me into the topics of kin and group selection. Rather than post related material here, I started another blog called Kin Selections. There are 23 posts so far. There is some material there related to memetics.
Probably the most significant material there so far are my lists of references for cultural kin selection and tag-based cooperation. This is technical material, but it should allow interested parties get up to speed on the topic before my next book is published.
We kind-of have that now, at long last. A least we have rigorous models which capture many of the most important aspects of the dynamics of cultural change.
Anyway, I checked out their site, and found they have a favourite set of memes: global warming. Yes, those are powerful memes to hitchhike on - but, alas, global warming in on my top ten list of bad causes - things that sap humanity's strength withouthproducing much of value.
If intelligent life is sufficiently rare, such messages may well just peter out ineffectively.
However, if not - and instructions for building an interstellar civilization are being sent out by aliens -
it seems tremendously unlikely that they will only be tagrgetting only immature civilizations.
A message that can improve most civilizations would have many more potential victims and much
better spreading power. An alien virus would face an competent immune system. However, an offer of meme-sex would not face such a
reaction. So: we should probably be thinking of alien pollen - rather than an alien virus.
SETI serch is or useless or dangerous, and should be stopped.
However, that seems like a paranoid conclusion. If aliens are broadcasting their memes,
we should absolutely make use of
memetic hitchhiking,
to add their technological distinctiveness to our own.
Many online cultural evolution researchers love Twitter - because of its open API and public data. Here's a cool image of twitter tribes they have produced.
The researchers grouped together those using similar words in their tweets. That associated news article asks Which Twitter tribe are you?
Dan Sperber responds at the end of the video. He proposes that we call adaptive peaks in the memetic fitness landscape (what he calls cultural attractors) by the name "memes". He says:
Here's a simple solution: a meme is an attractor. That's what it is it's a cultural attractor.
From my perspective, this it a daft suggestion. Memes are things that move around on fitness landscapes. Attractors are peaks on the fitness landscapes themselves. These are very different ideas - not to be confused. Memes may often be found on adaptive peaks, but they can also be found elsewhere on the fitness landscape as well. You need to have both concepts. Combining them into one concept absolutely will not do.
Peaks in fitness landscapes are a commonplace idea in population genetics. For a treatment of them which relates them to memes, see here.
One of Sperber's points is that some cultural information is transformed during copying (in a way that generates attractors that precede selection). However, he doesn't seem to think this happens during copying of DNA - while, in fact, it does. DNA has its own copying distortions, as a result of error-correction gone wrong, malfunctions of the copying machinery and other factors.
Transformations during copying are a type of mutation in genetics and memetics. Memetics, like genetics, has a modular structure that allows different theories of mutation to be used. A typical model of mutations in both domains is that mutations are random. This is, of course, incorrect, but it is a helpful simplification that makes models tractable - and avoids the charge that unrestricted mutations can predict any type of change, thus rendering resulting predictions useless. Use of such simplified models in the face of complex phenomena is absolutely routine for scientists.
Dan Sperber is quite insulting about memetics, claiming that its insights are OK for philosophers, but are inadequate for empirical scientists, who must deal with culture's complexities. Basically, like most meme critics, he doesn't really understand memetics - and so isn't in much of a position to offer intelligent criticisms. What he does say shows that he has a different understanding of the concept of "copying" from the memeticists. For me, the term "copying" has a technical meaning - linked to Shannon's concept of mutual information and the concept of causality. Perhaps the idea needs spelling out for the social scientists. Having said that, Sperber (2000) did a reasonable job of explaining the concept (calling it "replication"): He wrote:
For B to be a replication of A,
B must be caused by A (together with background conditions),
B must be similar in relevant respects to A, and
The process that generates B must obtain the information that makes B similar to A from A.
This doesn't say what "relevant respects" means - and causality isn't always an obvious concept - but, overall, this isn't too bad.
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.
This article has some fairly major problems from my perspective. One problem is this:
I will argue that cumulative selection is the distinctive and defining characteristic of Darwinian evolution.
Darwin didn't ever say that. He discovered the copy-variation-selection algorithm behind evolution. It seems insulting to his heritige to confine the term "Darwinian" to the subset of cases where there's cumulative adaptive evolution. Chris's proposal would mean that we would have to rename Universal Darwinism. However, Chris's proposal sucks - I recommend that people ignore it.
Another problem with this article is its memetics FUD. Sure, some people don't understand memetics, but that doesn't mean that nobody does.
Of course, nobody denies that the transmission of cultural information differs from the transmission of genetic information, if only because the former process generally does not involve sex.
Huh? Cultural evolution seems to me to involve recombination around as often as organic evolution does.
Chris presents an argument that organic mutations are directed, but he doesn't seem to understand the position that he is arguing against very well. The opponent's don't claim that mutations are entirely random. Showing mutations occur non-randomly seems to be arguing against a straw man. The actual position of critics is that organic mutations are not directed towards higher fitness. This position is indeed incorrect - but Chris fails to mount a coherent argument against it.
The general thrust of Chris's argument - that cultural evolution is less directed than critics say, and organic evolution is more directed than critics say - is essentially correct.
Overall, I don't recommend learning about memetics from Chris. If you don't understand memetics, find people who have a sympathetic understanding of the subject, and learn it from them. There aren't any valid technical criticisms of memetics. It's a perfectly valid and useful set of frameworks, perspectives and terminology for studying cultural evolution with.
Firstly culture is biological. It is part of biology which is the study of life. Culture is part of that - as opposed to being inorganic, like most geology. Contrasting "Cultural evolution" and "Biological evolution" is only possible if you don't grasp this.
From the bottom up:
Organic evolution does exhibit horizontal and oblique transmission. These terms are standard in epidemiology, and come from the organic realm, not the cultural realm. Cultural evolution students borrowed these terms from epidemiology in the 1980s. Horizontal transmission is the norm in bacteria - which represent most of the individuals and species on the planet. The idea that organic evolution does not exhibit horizontal and oblique transmission is completely wrong. Nor are horizontal and oblique transmission at all rare.
Massimo claims organic evolution is "non-intelligent". Yet there is selection by intelligent agents in the organic realm all the time. Large-brained organisms choose who to have babies with, when to fight, and when to run. The idea that organic evolution is "non-intelligent" is completely wrong.
Lastly, there's variation. Massimo claims that "a cardinal tenet of the Modern Synthesis (and indeed of the original Darwinism) is that mutations — the ultimate source of novelty in evolution — are random with respect to fitness outcomes". Of course, most mutations are deleterious. However after trying for a sympathetic reading, the claim that mutations are "random" with respect to fitness is outdated neo-Darwinian dogma. Organic mutations prefer junk DNA to coding regions. They also prefer recently-mutated regions. Both patterns bias mutations in the direction of being less maladaptive than "random" mutations would be. Selection acts on mutation rates in many ways - controlling its rate on a species-by-species basis - and a tissue-by-tissue basis. SINEs and SINEs also cause mutations in ways that are strongly subject to selection. Mutation just isn't a phenomenon which is random w.r.t. fitness.
I make that zero out of three. Not a good showing. Only the point about variation remains at all controversial.
Massimo says:
This is the section in which he cites the now classic work of people like Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman and others on gene-culture co-evolution. The thing is, if we are meant to take that (interesting, pioneering) work as a way to theorize about cultural evolution, we are at a dead end. Most of those papers are from the 1970s and ‘80s, with very little having been done since. That approach looks increasingly like what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos famously called a “degenerative” research program, i.e. an approach that seemed once fruitful but that has since ceased to bear fruits.
Of course most scientific fields are growing, but the field of cultural evolution is exploding - and, yes, some of those papers are doing meme frequency analysis based on population genetics.
In the comments, Massimo repeats one of his more ridiculous objections to cultural evolution:
No, there is a huge difference: what saves the theory of natural selection from being tautological is the existence of a functional ecology of living organisms: we can predict which characteristics of an organism, given a certain environment, are more or less likely to be selected. No such thing is available for memetics. In the latter case all there is to it truly is: the fittest memes survive. Which memes survive? The fittest ones!
Nobody in the field takes this kind of nonsense seriously. I previously destroyed this objection here.
Two kinds of agential narrative have a special psychological potency. The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a benevolent agent, often a large one, who intends that all is for the best. This category includes various Gods, the Hegelian "World Spirit" in philosophy, and stronger forms of the "Gaia" hypothesis, according to which the whole earth is a living organism. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit hidden agents, often small, pursuing agendas that cross-cut or oppose our own interests. Examples include demonic possession narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud's psychology (superego, ego, id), and selfish genes and memes. And while it is true that sometimes there are large and kind agents or small and nefarious ones at work, the psychological appeal of these ideas means that we tend to take up such stories too readily and run with them too far. The account of evolution in terms of "selfish genes" (Dawkins 1976) is a paranoid narrative of this kind. It relegates other entities in evolution, such as whole organisms, to the role of mere "vehicles."
This is a situation where a communicative device or heuristic has been allowed to take on too substantial a role; it becomes a kind of foundational description. Instead, the way to think of gene-level evolutionary processes is like this. Any collection of entities which vary, inherit characteristics in reproduction, and differ in how much they reproduce will evolve by natural selection. These include entities bigger than us, like social groups, entities smaller than us, like cells and genes, and organisms like us. As long as they satisfy the requirements of variation, heredity, and fitness differences, they will behave in a Darwinian way. The recognition that genes have the necessary features – they vary, inherit features in replication, and differing how much they are replicated – is the recognition of one of Darwinian population among others. It is not true that when we find small things doing this, inside us or underneath us, we're finding what it's all about, what it all means, the agents whose plots and programs are behind everything else we see.
I like this passage because it is eloquently put. However, I think we have to label it as misleading.
Richard Dawkins famously argued against individual and group selection because individuals and groups didn't "replicate" - and instead recombined. While there's clearly something to this, we have subsequently learned that this isn't really a convincing argument against all group selection. Wade's flour beetles convincingly showed that group selection and gene selection could peacefully coexist.
Godfrey-Smith is making much the same argument as Dawkins - but the other way around. Like Dawkins he's arguing that group selection and gene selection are incompatible. Peter likes the idea of selection at multiple levels, but thinks that this invalidates gene-level and meme-level selectionism. Dawkins apparently [1] thought that gene-level and meme-level selection invalidated group selection. The truth is more like: selection on memes and genes is one way of looking at things and selection at multiple levels is another. Individual and group-level selection don't disprove gene-level selection - they just show that it isn't the only way of looking at things. However, it was never claimed to be the only way of looking at things in the first place.
Compare memetics with atomism. Ballistics has different principles from atomic physics - and it is useful in cases where atomic physics is not. However, Ballistics doesn't disprove atomic physics. It's just working on a different scale. No violations of atomic physics are involved.
Stories of selfish genes and memes don't deserve to be described as "paranoid narratives". That really is what's going on. Sure: it's not the only way of looking at the world, but it is a valid way of looking at it. Indeed, it's the most complete and comprehensive way of looking at things - though the associated models are not always tractable. If you work at higher levels you miss out on the details.
[1] I realize that Dawkins was probably attempting to verbalise a valid point about how too much recombination often messes up the possibility of adaptations at higher levels.
Update: 2013-09-29: I notice that David Queller has an excellent Godfrey-Smith-smackdown on this topic here. Queller is right.
Some time ago, my study of cultural kin selection (research for my next book) dragged me into the topics of kin and group selection. Rather than post related material here, I started another blog called Kin Selections. There are 23 posts so far. There is some material there related to memetics.
Here, is 
Williams and Nesse famously called for 
Here's a new article by Chris Buskes on the evolution of cultural evolution: 
Massimo Pigliucci is one of the few remaining critics of memetics who still pops their head up now and again.
Here's 
Posts
