Geoffrey Miller on who benefits

Another passage from Geoffrey Miller's meme critique (see also the previous post) reads:

genes and memes are not the only alternatives as beneficiaries – there are institutions that can be treated as self-interested agents for purposes of economic, political, sociological, and cultural analysis

That seems like a mixture of levels of explanation. "Institutions" are a mix of genes, memes, gene products, meme products - and maybe some joint meme-gene products. The "products" are phenotypes. In biology, genotypes are what is inherited and phenotypes are everything that is derived from them. From this perspective, only the genes and memes form important lineages and can qualify as beneficiaries. The "products" are more transitory - they are not inherited from they affect gene and meme frequencies via selection, but don't "benefit" because they die without leaving any offspring - and "benefit" in evolutionary theory is measured in terms of fitness. Only genes, memes and other forms of inherited information really qualify.

Of course you can also talk coherently about larger-scale entities benefitting in evolution. An animal might be said to benefit by having offspring. However it is just a different level of explanation. It is quite compatible with the meme's / gene's eye view. It's a lot like saying that their genes benefitted - on average. A focus on low level beneficiaries doesn't somehow exclude higher levels. I think this critique of Miller's doesn't really go anywhere. Meme enthusiasts aren't somehow ignoring institutions. Institutions are composed of memes, genes and their products. You don't need to do fitness accounting on memes, genes and institutions. That would be counting things twice.

Geoffrey Miller on memes

Geoffrey Miller comes across as yet another evolutionary psychologist who is clueless about memes and cultural evolution. However, I recently found and read Geoffrey Miller's review of "The Meme Machine". It has its moments. However, here I'd like to quote a section from it and then explain the problem with it.

To make a strong case for memes evolving contrary to our genetic interests, Blackmore would have to show that most of our memes lower our sexual attractiveness. This seems unlikely to be the case, given that the classic examples of memes – songs, fashions, moral ideals, religious convictions – are adopted and advertised by young adults precisely for their sexual appeal. Also, the fact that young males invent and propagate many more memes than other demographic groups suggests that meme-spreading remains genetically adaptive: males try to attract multiple sexual partners through various artistic, musical, and ideological displays, while most females still invest much less in this sort of courtship effort.

This is, I think a straw man attack. The evidence that memes have historically been adaptive on average from the POV of human genes is pretty strong. Humans have genetic adaptations for language - such as a "babbling" stage of development which other great apes lack. We have also been spectacularly successful in a wide range of ecosystems. I can't think of any meme enthusiast that denies this.

The basic idea in memetics is not that memes are maladaptive on average, but that some memes are sometimes maladaptive. Copying machinery might print out helpful manuals, but it also prints out fake news and other deleterious nonsense. Yes, we have cars and bridges, but we also have the obesity epidemic, the smoking epidemic, the heroin epidemic, etc. It is not: "all memes are bad for your genes" or even "memes are bad for your genes on average" - instead, it is "some memes are bad for your genes".

Having argued that meme and gene interests have been somewhat aligned historically, this does not necessarily mean that that situation will continue indefinitely. If population density increases, and horizontal meme transfer becomes the dominant force, memes could switch their strategy to one more like the ebola virus - i.e. treat the host as an expendable bag of resources and burn through it as quickly as possible. If humans are not the only hosts of memes - and many memes are also propagated by intelligent machines - such dynamics could drive the human population down dramatically. No law of nature demands that meme interests will remain somewhat aligned with the interests of all of their hosts. There are examples in nature of pathogens that wipe out one of their host species. It happens more when there are multiple host species. Then each individual species becomes expenddable. Clearly, we should bear this possibility in mind. However, you really need to have a basic understanding of cultural evolution to even be aware that this sort of possibility exists.