The authors advocate using the Price equation to divide evolutionary change into
selection and transmission bias components. They then claim that a high selection
component makes a process more "Darwinian" and a high transmission bias component
makes it less "Darwinian".
I think that this is a pretty strange approach. Darwinian evolution depends heavily on both
selection and mutation. One without the other generally results in a short-lived
evolutionary process. For me, selection and mutation are both core components of
Darwinism.
The mutation rate is highly variable in the organic realm. For example, around
Chernobyl, the mutation rate was massively elevated in the 1980s. Does this
mean that organic evolution suddenly became non-Darwinian in Chernobyl? I would
say "no" - harsh environments are perfectly compatible with Darwinism. However,
this paper's authors seem to think otherwise.
Worse for this proposed classification scheme, the split between selection
and transmission bias depends on how you partition the population into generations
before applying the Price equation. High levels of selection at one temporal scale (e.g.
parasite lifecycle) gnerally look like transmission bias at a longer temporal scale
(e.g. host lifecycle).
The authors give an example of what they see as a cultural process heavy in
transmission bias:
At the other end of the continuum is the case where
the transmission component is large and the selection
component negligible. Such a case would be where
individuals were exposed to ideas, but deliberately or
subconsciously modified them through their cognition
to such an extent that the trait they exhibit bore little
resemblance to the traits of the previous generation.
Changes in trait frequency would then be best
explained with reference to the (genetically evolved)
transformative properties of the human mind, not cultural
natural selection. Such a situation does not possess the
usual paradigmatic features of a Darwinian process
The evolution of ideas within minds is not Darwinian?!? Many
neuroscientists would disagree. See
Keeping Darwin in Mind for the details.
The problem here is that the authors have chosen a high level of partitioning
before applying the Price equation - namely, social transmission between
minds. High level partitioning favours the "transmission bias" component of the Price equation.
However a more appropriate level for studying the Darwinian evolution of ideas
would be to see how ideas are copied within minds. Or maybe how neural spikes
are copied as axons split. If you partitioned on these scales, you would see less
transmission bias, and more selection.
If you want to base a classification scheme on the Price equation, you need
to decide how to divide the entities you are studying into discrete generations.
Unfortunately, most real-world evolutionary processes have copying on multiple
different scales - and so the are many ways of doing this and it matters which
one you choose. Unless you keep the subjective aspect of the partitioning scheme
you are using in mind, using the Price equation in this way will just result in
reflections of your preconceptions.
Occam's razor is the principle that one should prefer the simplest explanation that fits the data. It is one of the foundations of the scientific method. Occam's razor has turned out to be a flawed way of managing hypotheses - but it's still not too bad an idea.
Occam's razor is a special case of a more general principle: that the least useful may be profitably discarded. This idea is associated with evolution via natural selection. In honor of Darwin, I propose that we call it "Darwin's razor".
Definition of "Darwin's razor": the least useful is best discarded.
Occam famously discarded all but the shortest hypothesis. However, from a more Darwinian perspective, that's often a bad idea. For one thing you lose a diverse breeding population of hypotheses. For another, it is harder to adapt if new observations no longer fit the previously-selected hypothesis. Lastly, if you only consider the shortest hypothesis, it turns out that you can't estimate probabilities correctly.
"Darwin's razor" represents the winnowing, destructive side of Darwin's theory. I've previously referred to this as being "natural elimination". Of course, Darwinism also has a creative side: the production of new forms. However, that is hardly well described as being like the operation of a razor. "Darwin's razor" is all about eliminating the old, the unwanted and the unfit.
Occam's razor famously had only one blade. Darwin's razor is more like one of those modern multi-blade razors. This analogy works in two ways:
Occam's razor said to only keep one hypothesis, while Darwin's razor allows you to keep a breeding population of hypotheses;
Occam's razor only applied to one thing: hypotheses, while Darwin's razor is a universal razor that can cut through practically anything.
To give some examples of the universality of Darwin's razor in different domains:
Wallet full of small coins? Apply Darwin's razor.
Too much spam? Darwin's razor can help.
Fridge full of useless jars? Darwin's razor works there too.
Garden full of things you never planted? Use Darwin's razor.
Also, using Darwin's razor regularly makes you irresistibly attractive to members of the opposite sex.
Occam's razor has turned out to be a somewhat-inaccurate approach. However, Darwin's razor does a much better job of surviving critical scrutiny. It isn't possible to keep all unrefuted hypotheses around (as Solomonoff induction might suggest) because there isn't enough space in the universe. You have to discard something. Darwin's razor recommends discarding the least useful stuff. It's simple and pragmatic advice that's hard to disagree with. Darwin's razor.
The Cambrian explosion
has become synonymous with the idea that evolution
is characterized by periods of explosive generation of diversity - followed by
shake-outs - in which that diversity is winnowed.
I think we can see examples of this phenomenon in cultural evolution.
Economists are used to the idea that marketplaces regularly see periods
of adaptive radiation followed by shake-outs. This is part of the
idea of a boom-bust cycle.
Human languages seem to be past their "explosion" stage - and we are now in
the "shake-out" stage - when diversity decreases.
By contrast, computer languages are still in the "explosion" stage.
TV channels are also still in their "explosion" stage.
Indeed, for most categories of memes you care to think of, we are currently
seeing explosive growth. We are living through the cultural Cambrian era.
Some explosions have clearly not started yet. We haven't yet seen much of
an explosion of fusion reactor designs, or an explosion of machine
intelligence. An explosion of machine intelligence is widely forecasted, though.
Rodney Brooks titled his 1999 book "Cambrian Intelligence". More recently
we have Dag Kittlaus claiming that
A Cambrian Explosion In AI Is Coming
It's not hard to believe.
What about the shake-out phase? We live in a world with a small number of search engines, a small number of social networks and a small number of popular operating systems. There's mostly only one internet. In some "winner-takes all" markets, competitors inflate - squeezing out the smaller players.
Biologists have long hoped for alien life to study - so that they can see what principles of biology are fundamental and which are accidents of history. Cultural evolution largely fulfills that dream - by providing new forms of life for biologists to study which are not based on DNA. In the case of the Cambrian explosion, speculation about multi-million year old events can be usefully supplemented by modern systems undergoing similar adaptive radiations followed by competitive winnowing. Evolutionary biology is likely to grow stronger and more mature by assimilating these new examples of the dynamics of evolving systems.
A diagram has emerged in the coverage of the S.F.I. workshop that Daniel Dennett organized earlier this year. I think it neatly illustrates one of the most common misunderstandings about cultural evolution. First, here is the diagram:
The main problems here are not with the "cultural evolution" column. It appears that people understand cultural evolution! The problems are all in the "biological evolution" column. Every entry is wrong:
It is not true that - aside from culture - traits are only inherited from parents. Alice might have gotten her flea bites from her daughter, her warts from her grandmother and her chlamydia from her second cousin.
It is not true that transmission which is not down host generations happens in cultural realm and not in the organic realm. DNA-based traits can be inherited from offspring, as happened with Alice in the last example.
The speed of cultural evolution with respect to the organic realm is much exaggerated. If you look at areas where the generation time is comparable - such as medicine vs bacteria and viruses, the ideas simply aren't outstripping the pathogens in terms of the speed of their evolution. When people argue that cultural evolution is fast, they are mostly impressed by its short generation time and the large number of ideas. However, bacteria and viruses can reproduce quickly too. Plus they are far more numerous than ideas (and so they can perform many more experiments). Perhaps one day cultural evolution will unambiguously go faster.
Traits acquired during a human lifetime can be transmitted genetically. Fleas can be acquired during a human lifetime and are propagated genetically; AIDS can be acquired during a human lifetime and is propagated genetically - and so on.
People can choose which genetic traits they inherit. If you choose to never have sex, you won't inherit any syphilis genes, or any chlamydia genes. It's not true that you don't have a choice.
DNA is not the only medium of inheritance - aside from culture. Organisms inherit resource boluses from their parents. They inherit accommodation - as seen with rabbit warrens, beaver dams and dental carries. They inherit their location. The idea that DNA is the only medium of inheritance is wrong.
If contrasting "cultural evolution" with "biological evolution" [sic] it is important not to use an out-dated characature of biological evolution that predates our understanding of the significance of symbiosis. If you mistkenly do that, you'll get the relationship between them all wrong.
I don't know who created this table. Anyway, they have helped to highlight a common misconception - so thanks are due.
Does our analysis suggest cultural evolution represents an autonomous system? In other words, once cultural
transmission is in place, does cultural evolution generally operate in an ancillary role, handmaiden of genetic
adaptation, or does it break free of the influence of genetic evolution completely?
Their answer is:
although cultural fitness is a distinct quantity, if it is not aligned with genetic fitness, then there is genetic selection to change the learning rules that underpin cultural transmission, making minds more discriminating. For these reasons, cultural evolution cannot become completely autonomous. In this, we echo Lumsden & Wilson’s (1981) famous conclusion that ‘genetic natural selection operates in such a way as to keep culture on a leash’ (p. 13)
I'm sorry - but this argument is a joke. It is not logically coherent. A. G. Cairns-Smith pointed out long ago that genetic takeovers were possible - describing the mechanism by which they could happen. The following diagram illustrates the process.
Just because there's selection acting on DNA that acts against it being phased out, that doesn't mean that we are stuck with DNA forever. I'm sure that there was selection on Dodos being phased out - but nonetheless, we don't have any Dodos any more. Just because selection at one level favours some outcome, it doesn't follow that that outcome will happen.
Broadly the same argument that these authors give about cultural symbionts "proves" that parasites will never wipe out their host species. However there are known cases of parasites driving their hosts to extinction. For example, according to a reference given at the end of this article, there is very good evidence that avian malaria and birdpox were responsible for the extinction of a substantial proportion of the Hawaiian avifauna in the late nineteenth century. Parasites can cause population instability that leads to increased risk of stochastic extinction. Or they can just decimate their host populations through gradual attenuation. Extinction of host populations becomes more likely when the parasites have multiple host species - and are not dependent on any one of them. So, when memes are no longer completely dependent on humans for their reproduction - and are capable of reproducing independently via networked machines, that's when the humans should start to watch out.
You can't plan to avoid particular outcomes if you have a theoretical precommitment to the idea that those outcomes are impossible. The idea that Wilson's leash is necessarily a permanent restraint is not just a silly mistake, it is a dangerous delusion - which it is important that not too many people buy into.
The analysis by these authors is so bad, its embarrassing. Cultural evolution really can help us to understand and navigate the future evolution of the human species. Just because some people have managed to mis-apply the theory and come to silly conclusions, that should not be taken as a reflection on the whole theory.
Cultural kin selection has faced some criticism. I'll try and track some of the most common objections on this page:
Humans are too good at tracking relationships
In 2008, Boyd and Richerson expressed frank incredulity at the idea that humans are being fooled into thinking that non-relative are relatives - and so behaving nicely towards them. They wrote:
Living primates are very good at discriminating between relatives and non-relatives and behave very differently toward each. It is hard to see why early hominids should have been less discriminating in their behavior.
I don't think this is a particularly challenging puzzle. Most primates don't live with rapidly-evolving cultural symbionts who need to manipulate them into coming into peaceful contact with other members of their own species in order to allow the symbionts to reproduce.
Additionally, memes don't just regard other humans as potential homes of their own future offspring. Other humans are often existing containers for their own offspring, parents and siblings. Memes use the kin-detection mechanisms in human hosts to preserve copies of themselves in other bodies via host manipulation.
It is these cultural symbionts - which humans have and most other animals don't - that means that the human kin-recognition mechanisms are so frequently the target of successful manipulative attacks. Essentially: the cultural symbionts have short generation times, evolve rapidly and actively seek out the holes in the host kin-recognition psychology.
Anthropologists have long recognized that kin categories are indeed influenced by culture. For example, they have distinguished between "biological kinship" and "social kinship" (Hawkes, 1983) and between "natural kin" and "nurtural kin" (Watson, 1983). That kinship relationships can be significantly influenced by culture is really a commonplace fact these days.
Also, other species are not completely immune from this sort of kinship-based manipulation. For example, cuckoo hosts are regularly fooled into thinking that cuckoo chicks are their kin - and into providing resources for them. Notice that active manipulation by a symbiont is also involved in this case. In the case of cuckoos, succeess comes to them not because their genes evolve rapidly compared to their host - but because they are relatively rare - and so are not worth defending better against.
Lastly, I think that there's a bit of a straw man in the framing of this objection. In cultural kin selection, people are not normally literally fooled into thinking that non-relative are really relatives. Instead they are fed sensory sitmulii that act as a superstimulus to kin detection routines in their unconscious minds. If you ask brother Mark whether brother John is a blood relative, he will probably give the correct answer. However this doesn't mean that their shared memes and shared monastic robes aren't relevant to the extent of their cooperation. Manipulation can take place unconsciously. Also: relatedness isn't a binary quantity; there are degrees of relatedness. Memes can and do massively increase levels of perceived relatedness between their human hosts - and it makes sense that they do this partly to increase their own inclusive fitness.
Relatedness is hard to estimate in cultural evolution
In the case of culture, the analog of kinship is very hard to estimate. Having two parents with equal genetic contribution makes the calculation of relatedness easy. In cultural transmission, one, two, a few, or many people in your social network are possible sources of culture. People may use different parts of their network for different cultural domains. No one has proposed a way to estimate cultural relatedness in the face of such problems.
I have previously worked through this objection in my article on cultural kin selection - in the section titled "memetic relatedness". To recap: it is not true that no one has proposed a way to measure cultural relatedness. Also, relatedness between two humans is one problem, and relatedness between two artifacts or two messages are different problems. The latter problems are significantly more tractable. Cultural information spends some of its time inside brains and some of its time moving between brains - and during these "external transmission" phases, it is often much easier to quantify it.
It is often harder to measure relatedness in cultural evolution - due to the lack of meiosis. However, this is not a show-stopping problem. Not all creatures in the organic realm feature meiosis in the first place - yet they still have relatives and must allocate resources between themselves and their offspring and parents. The theories associated with kin selection still apply in these cases.
Cultural relatedness is often easy to calculate. For example, Alice's dollar bill is related by around 100% to Bob's dollar bill, and around 0% to Charlie's Japanese yen. Also, having some relatednesses that are difficult to quantify is not a problem unique to cultural evolution. For example, in organic evolution, it isn't easy to measure the relatedness to two Portugese man o 'war individuals. The fact that they are a symbiotic conglomerate is a complication - but not a show stopping problem.
Maximization of inclusive fitness may not apply "commonly"
How deep is the analogy between biological and cultural
evolution? Memetics assumes that it is deep indeed; that
the main relevant details of the biological case have direct
equivalents in the cultural case, such that there is, for
example, a cultural phenotype, which achieves a certain
level of (inclusive) fitness, which will in turn determine the
phenotype’s relative success in the population.
This is good so far, though I would identify this as a conclusion from many decades of
observations - rather than an "assumption". The authors go on to say:
Darwinian selection leads to the maximization of inclusive
fitness, and this explains the appearance of design in the natural
world. Is there an analogous result for cultural attraction?
As selection is a special case of attraction, design is possible
and in some cases explicable in standard Darwinian terms.
Having said that, such explanations will not apply generally,
and may not even apply commonly.
The concept of "inclusive fitness" is a simplified model of kin selection which no-one believes applies generally. However, kin selection is a very generally-applicable idea - it is a consequence of natural selection itself in structured populations.
As for the generality of Darwinism itself - it all depends on what you mean by the term. I think most accept that evolutionary theory has moved on a bit since Darwin's era - with the incorporation of symbiosis, game theory and an understanding of self-organizing systems. However, many still use the term "Darwinism" for the resulting evolutionary theory - as a way of giving Darwin credit for coming up with the basic idea in the first place. Ultimately, this is a terminological issue.
Personally, I don't like Sperber's various terminology proposals. In fact, I think that they suck. "Attraction" is a basic concept in dynamical systems theory. If you want to redefine it, you had better have a good case. Sperber doesn't present such a case; he doesn't have one. Overloading the term with multiple similar meanings is not an attractive option.
Criticsms of group selection - and cultural group selection
The debate is not about selfishness versus generosity or individualism versus groupishness. The debate is about whether generosity, cooperation, altruism, etc. are instantiated by a psychology designed by individual or group selection. If the former, then this psychology should have design features that, on average and under conditions that match ancestral conditions, eventually lead to net benefits for the individuals or their kin.
However, this is a bad framing of the problem. Modern versions of kin selection and group selection are equivalent - and make the same predictions. If you argue against group selection on the grounds that kin selection is responsible, you haven't understood this - and so can't really usefully contribute to the discussion.
Another example is Steven Pinker. He criticizes group selection, cultural group selection and cultural evolution in The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker's arguments vary from being reasonable to being wrong. Overall, he has no coherent case against group selection, cultural group selection and cultural evolution - assuming the group selection variants are interpreted as being equivalent to the corresponding kin selection theories.
Pinker's article is remarkable in including a lot of commentary - which illustrates how much confusion surrounds these topics on all sides.
It all boils down to genes
Wilson-style sociobiology - and most evolutionary psychology - has long held the opinion that in biology, it
all boils down to DNA genes. That DNA genes are the only medium of inheritance in evolution that matters.
Memes are ignored - and all advantage is ascribed and attributed to DNA genes. From the perspective of
memetics, this position seems ridiculous - but it seems to be a remarkably mainstream position.
In the context of cultural kin selection, uniforms become a way for humans to manipulate other humans.
Holy fathers and mother superiors become ways for church leaders to manipulate their flock. Rather than
memes manipulating humans for their own benefit, humans are seen as using memes to manipulate other humans -
for the benefit of their own DNA genes.
There's obviously some truth to this perspective. Human genes do often benefit from the manipulations described
by cultural kin selection. Military leaders do benefit if their army behaves as though it is a big family.
The problem arises when advantage to memes is completely neglected. This tends to result in an impoverished perspective on the evolutionary process, which loses much of its explanatory power. Those who think that only genes matter are missing half of the picture.
Recent criticisms of kin selection itself deserve a mention here.
Group selection advocates have long been critical of kin selection -
arguing that kinship is only one of many ways in which organisms
can come to share features, that group selection is more general,
that inclusive fitness is a awkward, artificial concept, that kin
selection is too hard to apply - and so on.
In some cases widespread criticism from the scientific community
pointing out that some of the more extreme critics are plainly off
their rockers has helped with some of this.
Widespread recognition that kin selection and group selection are broadly
equivalent concepts and represent different perspectives on the same kind
of phenomena should help to damp down some more of these criticisms.
However, kin selection has had its flaws. The widespread failure to apply kin selection to cultural phenomena is one of these. This failure is explicitly
mentioned by some critics - e.g. here.
However, that is not so much a problem with kin selection, as it is a problem
with the scientific failure to get to grips with cultural evolution.
Anthropologists - whose job largely involves studying human culture -
are mostly-living in a pre-Darwinism timewarp - in which evolutionary
theory is not applied to their subject matter. The way to deal with
this is not to use kin selection less, but to use cultural kin selection
more.
While kin selection is not without issues, these seem minor
into comparison with the problems with group selection. Group selection
seems to be a fountain of junk science. I think it should come with
clear health warnings - and, generally speaking, it does do so.
Anyway, this probably isn't the best place to review the whole kin selection vs group selection debate.
I do have another blog where
that is one of the main topics.
Kin selection has been a tremendously useful and productive tool in the biological sciences,
and there is absolutely no reason why it can't be similarly useful and productive
in cultural evolution - and in the social sciences generally. At this stage, scientists just
need to pull their fingers out and start applying it. Hopefully, my reviews of the topic have
indicated the abundance of low-hanging fruit in this area.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video about cultural kin selection.
This is a big and important topic which must be condensed for this kind of format - so this is a "firehose" presentation on the topic.
Nepotism is a common phenomena in nature. It has long been understood that evolutionary theory could help to explain why organisms help their relatives. However it wasn't until the 1960s that the process responsible for nepotism was formally modelled.
William Hamilton visualized the germ line of organisms as being broken up into many genes. Each gene is surrounded by many copies of itself in its relatives. It then becomes possible to ask what behaviour the gene could promote that would help the swarm of genes to propagate itself. The answer indicates that there are circumstances under which genes can favour transferring resources to other existing copies of themselves at the expense of their own direct descendants.
The theory that quantifies and explains this phenomenon is known to biologists as "kin selection".
It is a commonplace observation that cultural similarity also results in cooperative behaviour. Empirically, there's a correlation between the memes that people share and how likely they are to cooperate with one another. Memes resulting in observable markers seem particularly significant - so the uniforms worn by the military, nurses, religious orders and corporate workers are especially closely associated with cooperative behaviour. The most conventional explanation for this is known as "fictive kinship". The idea is that shared uniforms stimulate mechanisms evolved to deal with kinship at the level of DNA genes. The kinship involved is not real blood kinship, but rather has been faked by leaders of these groups for their own ends - thus the term "fictive kinship".
However, another explanation invokes cultural kinship. The theory of kin selection is not confined to DNA genes. It can equally be applied to memes. Shared memes often result in cooperation in the same way that shared genes do. Like DNA fragments, memes are frequently surrounded by a swarm of copies of themselves. Again, it is possible to ask what behaviour promoted by the meme would serve to promote the propagation of the swarm of copies surrounding it. Again the answer indicates that memes will sometimes sacrifice themselves to promote the propagation of other copies of themselves. The theory that explains this is called "cultural kin selection" - and that is what this video is about.
Cultural kinship helps to explain why nurses wear similar uniforms to each other and cooperate with one another. Shared memes help to explain explains why your computer and your printer peacefully cooperate to print documents. Nuns form cultural "sisterhoods" and monks form cultural "brotherhoods". Their lives are often dominated by the memes they share, and their mission in life is typically to spread these memes to others. Patriotism memes illustrate that memes can sacrifice themselves if it helps copies of the same meme in others to survive. Cultural kinship is an essential tool for understanding how memes propagate the modern world.
In the organic realm close kinship sometimes results in eusociality - where a fertile queen is surrounded by multiple sterile workers. We see the same phenomenon in culture - banks are surrounded by millions of identical coins and bills. These are not themselves copied. Indeed there are cultural adaptations which actively prevent counterfeit copies from being made. The function of these multiple identical cultural entities is to divert resources to their cultural parents in the bank. Another familiar case involves digital books. these exist in multiple identical copies. However most of the copies themselves are not fertile. Digital rights management and legal threats are used to try and prevent them from being copied.
Sterile worker forms are one of the tell-tale signatures of kin selection. The other one is self-sacrifice. Memes that spread despite apparently aiding their personal destruction could be being spread via cultural kin selection. Patriotism memes and suicide bomber memes are possible examples.
Kin selection is famously associated with Hamilton's rule. To briefly recap, Hamilton's rule measures the cost to a donor and the benefit of a recipient associated with a behaviour and the relatedness between the actors. It then asserts that the behaviour can be favoured by kin selection if the benefit is greater than the cost multiplied by the relatedness. This simplified model of kin selection has proved to be quite useful in the organic domain. However its utility depends partly on the ease of measuring relatedness. In the organic realm, there's a simple approximation that can be used: parents are related to offspring by one half, cousins by one eighth - and so forth. Ultimately these fractions come from meiosis. However, there's not really a direct equivalent of meiosis in cultural evolution - which makes it harder to apply Hamilton's rule. Humans don't share half their memes with their parents and one eighth of their memes with their cousins. However they do typically share more memes with their parents than with their cousins. If you consider the topic of relatedness between artifacts, measuring relatedness often becomes easier - because it is easier to measure memes in artifacts than it is in brains.
It has long been understood by anthropologists that "cultural kinship" exists in humans. Humans treat all kinds of people who are not blood relatives as though they are honorary family members. Churches in particular are full of father, mother, brother and sister relationships which do not reflect any form of blood-based kinship. However, most anthropologists have historically had a weak understanding of evolution - and have reacted with hostility to the efforts of biologists to enter their territory.Many anthropologists seem to associate evolutionary theory with racism and eugenics. Cultural kinship has been regarded within anthropology as evidence that Darwinian evolutionary theory applies only weakly to human behaviour - and that cultural forces are more important. This wilful ignorance of evolution meant that they failed to find a coherent theoretical foundation that would account for their observations.
Cultural kin selection casts new light on this topic. On the one hand it shows that the anthropologists were correct to emphasize the significance of cultural kinship. However, on the other hand, it also shows that the evolutionists were right on target with their Darwinism. Cultural kin selection neatly explains the importance of cultural kinship in humans from within an evolutionary framework that includes the concept of shared memes.
Lastly, cultural kinship offers an intriguing glimpse of scientific history repeating itself. In the 1960s, group selection was a popular theory - before kin selection displaced it. Now, 50 years later, cultural group selection is a popular theory. However, kin selection is much better than group selection. It puts an entirely appropriate emphasis on the significance of close kinship, it more strongly encourages quantification and is less strongly associated with junk science. Group selection has proven itself to be a confusing and misleading tool for understanding essentially the same set of phenomena that kin selection explains. Consequently, the same dynamics that we saw in the 1960s are now evident again. A similar sequence of events seems to be playing itself out with cultural group selection and cultural kin selection. This case of history repeating itself in science gives us an interesting opportunity to quantify the scientific lag that cultural evolutionary theory suffers from. By this metric, it's about 50 years behind mainstream evolutionary theory.
There's a lot more to say about this topic - far more than can possibly fit into this video. Search online for "cultural kin selection" for much more information about this subject area.
This is apparently a book about evo-devo and complexity theory.
I would give "evo-devo" 1/10 for its revolutionary qualities. Complexity theory gets a 6/10 from me on this scale - with the proviso that the revolution dates back to the 1980s. I was taught it at university, and it's been orthodoxy for decades now.
The blurb for this book claims that: "Evolution is simply change over time". That is one definition - but it isn't a definition that makes it a scientific theory. The point of Darwinism was that it made predictions and was refutable. The idea that "evolution is simply change over time" makes "evolution" into an unscientific concept.
I skimmed the book. The contents are of poor quality. It offers a revisionist history of Darwinism. This is a conspiracy theorists book about evolutionary theory. That's unfortunate. I like the "evoluton revoluton" meme. I don't like seeing it being given a bad name in this way.
Oh well, at least Alan Bennet's book is better than Spetner and Shapiro's The Evolution Revolution. That one's a creationist tract!
I read an article about memetic fields today. There seems to be quite a bit of material about "memetic fields" on
the internet. The author of the article linked memetic fields to the morphic fields of Rupert
Sheldrake - saying: "Memetic fields are the mental equivalent of morphic fields". That seems
to be qute appropriate to me: both concepts are junk science.
That's not to say that memes don't sometimes have associated "fields" of
influence. For example, one might generalize the concept of a "reality distortion
field" to cover all kinds of memetic influence. The "reality distortion field"
that surrounds some cult leaders is a potentially-useful concept that could
potentially be quantified and given a scientific basis.
However, the biggest problem with memetic fields is that memetics isn't
ready for them yet. Maybe if memetics was decades-old orthodoxy, we could
consider the idea of some Sheldrake-free memetic fields with a straight face.
However that isn't the current situation - and "memetic fields" just sound like
too much of a joke at the moment. The term "field" sounds like it comes from
physics - and a "memetic field" conjours up some kind of metaphysical
emanations from memes. Just the sort of thing that Rupert Sheldrake would love.
I think we should skip the "memetic field" concept for now. It seems like just the
kind of fringe science that could potentially give memetics a bad name.
I reviewed the discussion of what makes a process "Darwinian" in the paper:
Occam's razor famously had only one blade. Darwin's razor is more like one of those modern multi-blade razors. This analogy works in two ways:
The 
If you search for "evoluton revoluton" and one of the things that comes up these days is Alan Bennett's book, titled:
I read 
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