There's no paywall. There's also an accompanying slideshow.
Most articles speculating about the future of human evolution are written without an understanding of the theory of cultural evolution - however this is not one of those articles.
The article paints a picture of longer-lived humans and
more effort expended by them on meme propagation
than gene propagation. These seem like extrapolations
of current trends.
However, the paper's forecasts extend out to 2050 - a
significant distance out - and in a zone where is
challenging to make reliable forecasts.
My own perspective is that we will probably see a large
explosion of artificial life significantly before then -
which will have a big impact on the terrestrial ecosystem.
Eventually this will turn the human world into a sideshow -
the coming memetic takeover
which I frequently speak of.
This is likely to be the real story of the next forty years. Life
extension and reduced fertility of humans seems like a rather irrelevant
by comparison - these things will have negligible socio-economic impact.
Indeed, they are less certain outcomes - since the transition to
a machine-based civilization might be a disruptive one. When
most humans become redundant and unemployable, it isn't immediately
obvious what will happen to them. No doubt here will be nature
reserves - but a nature reserve that accommodates ten billion humans
seems as though it might face significant budget scrutiny.
The article (irritatingly) contrasts biological and cultural evolution -
as though culture is somehow non-biological - which is a newbie mistake.
Even a full-blown memetic takeover
wouldn't be "the End of Biological Reproduction". Cultural reproduction is a form of biological reproduction
because culture is part of biology.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video about memetic hitchhiking and memetic linkage.
Genetic hitchhiking involves genes changing in frequency due to their proximity to other genes. Hitchhiking can involve either positive or negative selection - in other words, increases or decreases in gene frequencies. Genetic hitchhiking is based on genetic linkage - which is the tendency of nearby genes to be inherited together.
In cultural evolution, there are corresponding effects:
Memetic hitchhiking involves memes changing in frequency due to their proximity to other memes. It is based on memetic linkage - which is the tendency of nearby memes to be inherited together.
It's a commonplace observation that the proximity of two memes is correlated with the probability of them being inherited together. This is true across a large variety of meme types. Words are more likely to be copied together the closer they are together. Image components and video fragments behave in the same way. Generally, the closer two memes are, the greater their memetic linkage. The way in which linkage changes with distance can often be fairly easily quantified.
Memetic hitchhiking is an extremely important concept in marketing. Memetic hitchhiking is used by marketers because they frequently face the problem of how to memetically engineer content so that it spreads to a large number of users. Hitchhiking on an existing meme is a common solution to this problem. People attach product messages as payloads to viral videos, celebrities, beauty, news stories, humour - anything that people spread around. When the viral content is spread around the payload is delivered to an increasingly large audience at a low cost to the marketing department.
For marketers their payload acts as a parasite on the original content. As such there's a constant risk that the viral content will find a way to separate itself from the payload. Marketers have a range of techniques to avoid this happening. They can interleave the payload with the content. They can make the payload small, short or inconspicuous. They can transmit the payload subliminally. They can launch legal attacks on payload-free content.
Well-known popular experts at memetic hitchhiking include Weird Al Yankovic, The Gregory Brothers, and Ray William Johnson.
Memetic linkage is generally defined in terms of a distance metric. That metric need not necessarily be spatial distance - for example in the case of podcasts or videos, time is often the most appropriate metric to measure. Genetic linkage is always based on a spatial distance metric. However, it seems inappropriate to restrict memetic linkage to spatial distance metrics.
Genetic linkage causes functionally dependent genes to migrate towards each other. Each gene benefits from the proximity - due to the increased linkage reducing the chances of the genes being separated from one another. The result is that genes form functionally-linked complexes. In memetics, the same effect is seen: functionally dependent memes tend to migrate towards each other - which increases their memetic linkage and reduces the chances of the memes being separated from one another. The result is that functionally-linked memes form memeplexes.
Not all hitchhiking of memes on memes qualifies as being "memetic hitchhiking". In the organic realm, a snail can hitchhike a ride on a duck's foot. However, you wouldn't normally call that "genetic hitchhiking" - even though in a sense,snail genes are "hitchhiking" on duck genes. The term "phenotypic hitchhiking" seems more appropriate there. Similarly you wouldn't normally refer to a bumper sticker on a car as a case of "memetic hitchhiking". The germ line of the memes responsible for the car are in the car manufacturers headquarters, and the germ line of the memes responsible for the bumper sticker are in the sticker-making factory - which might be nowhere near each other. Again, the term "phenotypic hitchhiking" seems more appropriate in this case.
We need to descend to the level of the gene, rather than the individual, in order to see that the gene exists surrounded by copies of identical genes that exist in all its relatives [...] Seeing this swarm of genes that exists around a particular one, we can then ask what is the behavior caused by this gene that is most likely to cause the propagation of this set of copies in the relatives around it.
This "descending to the level of the gene" is known as "the gene's eye view".
Just as kin selection led to and helped to promote the gene's eye view - so cultural kin selection will help promote the meme's eye view.
The meme's eye view has always been part of memetics, but is has been largely ignored by social scientists. Many of them are absurdly confused about the 'meme' concept - complaining that it atomizes cultural wholes into isolated pieces, or that replicators are only one part of evolution - or a string of other equally silly objections.
In 1985, Boyd and Richerson explicitly focused on the human hosts involved, saying:
This does not mean that cultures have mysterious lives of their own that cause them to evolve independently of the individuals of which they are composed. As in the case of genetic evolution, individuals are the primary locus of the evolutionary forces that cause cultural evolution and in modelling cultural evolution we will focus on observable events in the lives of individuals.
This rather myopic perspective has lasted for thirty years - with most analysis of cultural epidemiology focusing on the human hosts - and not on the memes themselves.
As Steven Shennan put it in 2013:
The variation, selection and retention processes that underlie cultural evolution were laid out in detail more than 25 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson, 1985) and have been extensively elaborated on since (e.g. papers in Boyd and Richerson, 2005). However, this has mostly been done from an agent-centred perspective and not from that of the cultural lineages themselves - the "memes eye view" - and the two are not the same.
It seems reasonable to expect that the rise of cultural kin selection will significantly promote the "memes eye view". From the perspective of memeticists this will be a long overdue development - since it is what they have been saying all along.
Memetics has been ahead of its time for far too long. Looking at the scale of cultural evolution's scientific lag in academia, it seems reasonable to expect that cultural kin selection will start becoming more prominent in academia around about now. It seems practically inevitable that this will drag the "meme's eye view" (and thus a big chunk of memetics) into academia as well. It will be about time.
As part of the deep relationship between organic and cultural evolution, the history of the cultural versions of these fields seems likely to mirror what happened in the organic domain - though it is widely observed that cultural evolution and memetics suffer from a large scientific lag.
In the organic realm, group selection was popular until the 1960s - when it was practically wiped out by kin selection. At the moment, cultural group selection is a popular form of explanation. My expectation is that it will be largely wiped out by cultural kin selection.
If modern forms of kin selection and group selection make the same predictions, why is kin selection better?
The advantage of using kin selection is partly down to a difference in emphasis. The term "kin selection" emphasizes close relatedness - which is an important factor in why the theory works. The term "group selection" makes no mention of family or relatedness. This seems to cause group selection enthusiasts to neglect the significance of relatedness - and then go off the rails.
Group selection is probably more popular initially because it is easier to understand and apply. Without quantifying relatedness, armchair theorists are free to speculate about traits being adaptive at various different levels. However, for group selection, this ease of application also contains the seeds of its downfall. Scientists love to measure things, and kin selection's famous r, b and c encourages quantification. This leads to more rigorous science. It also gives kin selection a higher status among scientists.
In the organic realm, kin selection won out in the 1960s and 1970s. However in the social sciences, many researchers in the domain of cultural evolution - Richerson, Boyd, Bowles, Gintis, Sober and Henrich and Turchin - have adopted the term "group selection" - despite the fact that the term is historically mired in confusion and misunderstandings and has led to a substantial body of junk science. Practically the whole of the rest of the evolutionary biology establishment prefers the kin selection framework instead. Kin selection pushed group selection into the scientific fringes.
I think the most obvious hypothesis to explain the situation is that the social scientists are lagging behind the times. Cultural evolution's scientific lag explains the observed phenomena neatly. The social scientists are about forty years behind the times. The idea of cultural evolution having a scientific lag predicts that the current enthusiasm for cultural group selection will be largely replaced by a substantial blossoming of cultural kin selection.
The coming displacement also makes sense after looking at the way in which the theories have been applied to date. The group selection theorists have only scratched the surface of the topic - concentrating on large-scale conflict between human groups. However cultural kin selection has a vastly broader domain of applicability than this. The group selection theorists fail to concentrate on close relationships. Yet this is precisely where theory predicts that the largest effects will be found. The enormous significance of close cultural kin has been largely ignored. There's a wealth of material relating to cultural resource allocation and cultural parental care, which kin selection illuminates better than group selection does. The approach based on group selection approach has been tried by social scientists - and the results are in. The approach has been a miserable failure. Cultural kin selection will be vastly superior by a wide range of metrics.
Genes can promote their interests by causing their owner to help relatives - which is the familiar kind of kin selection - or by causing their owner to hinder non-relatives - which is generally known as spite.
Initially, it was thought that paying a cost to hinder non-relatives was rare. Several reasons were given. Harming others often has significant associated costs - they can bite back. Relatives are often neighbours - making them easier to identify and more likely to be interacted with. Also it was thought that a very large number of non-relatives would need to be harmed (especially in large populations). Overall it seemed as though spite didn't add up.
While plenty of individuals do deliberately harm other individuals, they often benefit in some way. This theory of "selfish competition" explains phenomena such as male combat, sibling rivalry and competition between saplings to replace their parent in the canopy. This theory seemed to make a lot more sense than Hamiltonian spite.
However, Hamiltonian spite did bounce back to some extent. Though initially the search for Hamiltonian spite focused on small populations, it was realized that the size of the population of local competitors was what really mattered. Population viscosity would often mean that this was just a handful of individuals. Gardner and West cover this revolution in their paper Spite and the scale of competition. They say:
When competition is global and fitness is proportional to absolute success, spite cannot be favoured, but as competition becomes increasingly local fitness is increasingly determined by success relative to social partners, so that spite can be a winning strategy.
With this background, we can now turn to cultural spite. As in the organic realm, cultural spite is predicted by theory,
but seems relatively elusive in practice.
Patriotism memes. These really do manipulate their hosts into fitness-reducing acts while benefitting near-identical copies of themselves in other individuals - comrades, generals, and propagandists. These appear to be a genuine case of cultural kin selection. Interestingly, patriotism memes sometimes seem to be implicated in acts that directly harm other individuals. In particular they are implicated in conflict and warfare. Could this be a real-world case of cultural spite?
Maybe - but there's some room for doubt. In many cases, warfare generates kill-or-be-killed situations. When the benefit is survival, "selfish competition" is a more obvious explanation for the resulting conflict. The situation in warfare is complicated, and the link to spite is rather speculative and indirect. Patriotism memes are an interesting candidate case of Hamiltonian spite in culture - but it doesn't seem like an open and shut case.
Negative advertising in politics. American politics regularly features negative advertising. As well as hearing the good things candidates will do, citizens hear all about the bad things associated with competing candidates. When they outsource jobs, when they raise their own salaries, when they act like puppets of other politicians - and so on. An explanation in terms of spite is straightforwards: this is a case where the effective population size is small (and so spite can work). Also, destroying things is easier than creating them. The winners do contain DNA genes, but politics is also a battle between rival memeplexes. The main problem with this example is that it can be argued that the behaviour is merely selfish - since the advertising sponsor (or their affiliates) gain many of the votes lost by the target.
Another promising area to look for spite is corporate history. There may well be cases where companies have a limited number of competitors - and there will have been scope for acts where a company hurts itself, but hurts its biggest competitor more. However, this is research that remains to be done. The problem here is that individual acts that look spiteful would not be too impressive. What we would really like to find is spiteful adaptations. Corporate history may be less promising in this regard.
These are the strongest case for real-world cultural spite that I am aware of. However, they are not very convincing. If more convincing examples of cultural spite come along, I'll update this page.
Memes. In this area I think there was a "move towards the middle ground" over the course of the week. Here is my attempt to make the middle ground explicit, combining elements from Dennett, Blackmore, and Sperber and linking them to the ideas above: meme-talk is appropriate as a way of discussing recurring cultural objects that are produced and used in a somewhat low-comprehension way. They need not be replicators, even in a relaxed sense. They might arise by hetero-impact. But there is (or should be) a real difference between a meme-based view of cultural variants and a traditional rational choice framework. It is not the case that memes are just whatever recurs in culture; Sperber pointed out that this would trivialize the meme framework, and I think that is right. But memes need not be copied. There might be a role for attractors, hetero-impact, and so on. So the viability of this relaxed view of memes is tied to the empirical disagreement described above about comprehension.
I guess I think that the future of meme-talk will be in informal summaries of low-comprehension processes of cultural change, rather than actual theory-building.
I'm quoting this because I think it is wrong. I think it is also pretty silly. There's no theory of memes as "low-comprehension" entities. Intelligently designed memes qualify too. One would not avoid calling a "gene" a "gene" because it was the product of genetic engineering. Memetically engineered memes are memes too. Peter's proposal makes no sense at all.
Of course it is also not the case that "memes are just whatever recurs in culture". Just as there are genes (copied) and gene products (not copied), so culture is composed of memes (copied) and meme products (not copied).
for most of memes’ relatively brief life there has been no germ-line phenotype distinction and so no meme vehicles or interactors. However, as one might expect, they have recently appeared and are spreading fast. Printing presses, car factories and computer software all copy the instructions for making more books, cars and digital products rather than copying the products directly.
I'm drawing attention to this because I think it is wrong.
I think that the best way to divide phenotype from genotype in biology is using information theory - as follows: genotypes are inherited from, phenotypes are genotype products that are not inherited.
If you adopt this perspective, there are very few "naked memes". Most memes have associated phenotypes that are not copied. For example, many memes have emotional salience - creating pleasure, fear - or some other emotion. These are meme products and are not themselves copied from / inherited.
I think that the idea that "naked memes" were important historically has to be based on some other conception of what "genotype" and "phenotype" refer to - and I think that all the proposed alternative conceptions are inferior. Sue appears to be using her "copy the instructions" / "copy the product" distinction - but this is a bit vague: what exactly are "instructions" and "product"? The information theory conception of the "genotype" / "phenotype" split is very crisp. In its terms, "instructions" refers to heritable information and "product" refers to the things it influences - but then there are hardly any 'naked memes'.
The popular hijacking of Dawkins’ term “meme” for any cultural item that “goes viral” on the Internet, regardless of whether it was intelligently designed or evolved by imitation and natural selection, has been seen by some to subvert the theoretical utility of the term altogether. There is also the unreasoned antipathy the term evokes in many quarters (reminiscent of the antipathy towards the term “sociobiology” that led to its abandonment). Alternatively, if one is “Darwinian about Darwinism” we should expect the existence of cultural items that are merely “memish” to one degree or another, and we might as well go on using the term “meme” to refer to any relatively well-individuated culturally transmitted item that can serve as a building block or trackable element of culture however it arrives on the scene. Other terms, such as Boyd and Richerson’s “cultural variant”, have been proposed, but the term “meme” has become so familiar in popular culture that whatever alternative is used will be immediately compared to, identified with, assimilated to meme(a Sperberian attractor, apparently), so perhaps the least arduous course is to adopt the term, leaving open its theoretical definition, in much the way the term “gene” has lost its strict definition as protein-recipe in many quarters. Since the long-term fate of such an item will be settled by differential reproduction (or something similar to differential reproduction) however much insight or “improvisational intelligence” went into its birth, it has a kind of Darwinian fitness.
This seems like a rather weak defense to me - it leaves open the reply that: all kinds of nonsense is sometimes popular - but that doesn't make it scientific.
The sheer popuarity of term "meme" is obviously a big factor in its rise - but the failure of its opponents to come up with a coherent technical critique is surely another significant factor. If there were genuine scientific reasons for not adopting the term "meme" that would be one thing - but the attacks of critics on the meme terminology miss the mark so widely, that it is hard to take them seriously. I for one would not endorse the adoption of the term on grounds of popularity if such a course of action was not scientifically correct.
Of course, there are also many positive reasons for adopting the term - but these may overlap with the reasons for its popularity.
The commentary contains relatively little enlightened discussion of memes - except for by Susan Blackmore. However,
Peter Richerson has some good things to say on the topic. In particular, he says:
I don’t have a big problem with the concept of memes so long as the meme-gene analogy is not excessively rigid. Susan assures is that Rob’s, Joe’s and my old fears in this regard are unfounded.
That sounds good! This, however, does not sound so good:
I have qualms about the concept of universal Darwinism. Culture/memes are a lot like genes in some respects and not like them in others. I see a shallow analogy where others seem to see a fundamental law-like similarity.
I am definitely in the "law-like similarity" camp. Darwinism: it's not just a good idea - it's the law.
Academia has mostly shunned memetics so far. Instead of memetics, one corner of academia has embraced the closely-related theories of Boyd and Richerson.
Of all the theories of cultural evolution that sprung up in the 1980s and 1990s, Boyd and Richerson's ideas were probably the second closest to memetics. It would have been a bit better if William Durham's work "Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity" had been more influential. Among its other virtues, this book actually endorsed and used the meme terminology. However, Boyd and Richerson kept plugging away at the topic over a long period of time producing more papers than any of the other teams involved.
Boyd and Richerson's ideas are pretty close to memetics. If you look at my most recent analysis of the differences, many are differences in emphasis - rather than serious technical disagreements.
While it's good to see at least some understanding of cultural evolution in academia, Boyd and Richerson's cultural evolution seems to be a poor substitute for memetics. To me it seems like a feeble and watered down version of the real thing. The revolutionary zeal of memetics is replaced by a "softly-softly" approach. The neat and simple terminology of memetics is discarded and replaced by wordy and ugly terminology - much of which seem destined to never catch on. The deep relationship between cultural and organic evolution are replaced by a bunch of muddled ideas about how different these processes are. Memetics is more symbiosis aware. It is just better - in most of the ways that matter.
Memetics should be the name for cultural equivalent of genetics. We additionally need
a cultural
equivalent of ontogeny. The proposal that we need a cultural equivalent of evolutionary
theory seems much more dubious: Darwinian evolutionary theory applies to both the organic and
the cultural realms. We should probably focus on
generalizing Darwinism -
rather than working on a culture-specific version of it.
One of the problems with Boyd and Richerson's influence on the field has been their
hostility to memetics. Their critical articles have included:
Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert (2000) Meme theory oversimplifies how culture changes;
Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert, (2000) Memes: Universal Acid or Better Mouse Trap;
Richerson, Peter J., Boyd, Robert and Henrich, J, (2008) Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution;
These articles show that Richerson and Boyd never developed a sympathetic understanding of memetics, and have instead concentrated on attacking misconceptions associated with it. Of course, criticisms are welcome, but they are most helpful if they are based on sympathetic understanding. In this case, I'm not really seeing it.
At the moment, a proper understanding of memetics in academia still seems far off. There aren't enough existing workers or interested parties to make it happen. Instead, what we seem to be seeing is academics revisiting issues that memetics studied years ago, and reworking them while stripping out the meme terminology and its history. Prominent examples of that include the recent revival of the "Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis" and the treatment of memetics in recent books on the topic - such as: Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion and the 2011 edition of Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour - which cut out its chapter on memes.
This is rather disappointing. Historically speaking, evolutionary theory pre-dated genetics by about 60 years. Now we are seeing a similar scientific lag with cultural evolution and memetics. You would think that academics would be able to learn from history - but in this case, apparently, the lesson is going to take a while to sink in.
Kin selection played a significant role in 
Kin selection has a well-known dark side: 
Here's 
In 
Academia has mostly shunned memetics so far. Instead of memetics, one corner of academia has embraced the closely-related theories of Boyd and Richerson.
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