The
term "Holocene extinction event"
refers to the currently ongoing extinction of species.
It is apparently largely caused by the impact of humans on the environment. This makes it
the first extinction event caused by a proliferation of memes.
At the moment, the Holocene extinction fails to meet the criteria for a mass extinction.
In a mass extinction 75% of species go extinct in a short space of time. However,
knowledge of memetics suggests the possibility of a
memetic takeover -
in which the substrate of the heritable medium of biology changes - and the era of
the DNA molecule comes to an end. Such an event could be accompanied by a
large mass extinction. In such circumstances, many DNA-based creatures would
probably be preserved in nature reserves or historical simulations - and thus not
technically go extinct. However, it is far from clear what fraction of
the currently-known species would survive.
One problem with extinctions is that things of value get lost. Assuming that preventing
this is desirable, we can ask what steps could be taken to help prevent species loss.
I think a slower memetic takeover
would result in a reduced chance of things getting lost by accident.
Technological determinism
probably means that we can't do much to slow progress by machines down. However, what we
probably can do is speed up our own progress - and that of our companion creatures. The aim
would not be to keep up with the machines - which does not look feasible - but rather to
prolong the period of our usefulness - and prevent us from becoming an early casualty of
the current extinction.
In their famous work, The Major Transitions in Evolution John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry identified cultural evolution as being a Major Transition. However, a more fine-grained classification than theirs seems attractive to me - and so, in this post, I'll consider what changes qualify as being the major transitions in cultural evolution.
These are my picks for the major transitions so far:
The origin of cultural transmission;
The origin of digital transmission via speech;
Human collectives with specialization (via agriculture);
The origin of writing;
Mass-produced written materials (via industry);
Computers;
The internet;
The list is heavily dominated by two kinds of improvements:
Better storage;
Better networking;
The evolution of cultural evolution has seen developments in
computation, sensors and actuators - but these seem to have
been more incremental - and less like "major transitions".
The next big major transition in cultural evolution looks set to be machine superintelligence.
One of the reasons I got involved with cultural evolution and memetics was the belief that
humanity badly needed a solid science of cultural evolution to help successfully navigate
the transition to a world economically dominated by machine intelligence.
The coming memetic takeover will be a kind of genetic takeover - and there are good reasons
to believe that these are likely to be disruptive evolutionary events - accompanied
by mass extinctions and the loss of significant quantities of adaptive information.
A rapid transition seems as though it would be undesirable - with an
increased chance
of things getting lost or damaged.
One of the conclusions my my studies so far so far has been that the geologically-recent
explosion of cultural evolution that we are now witnessing was triggered more by social
networking skills than by factors associated with brain size or intelligence.
Human behavioural imitation apparently required the complex ability to mentally
put yourself in another person's shoes while watching them perform tasks. For our ancestors,
this appears to have required relatively advanced cognition - as ably explained by
Susan Blackmore in
The Meme Machine.
So, there is a limited sense in which the conventional wisdom that "intelligence did it" is correct.
However, in memetics, large brains are seen more as a consequence of cultural evolution
than a cause of it. Big brains have evolved to be meme nests.
Large brains are the nervous system equivalents of ant domatia.
They are homes for memes. Psychological support for cultural transmission -
rather than intelligence - was really the key here.
This strongly suggests that sub-human level machines could effectively reproduce
the human explosion in cultural evolution. Machines can copy each other easily.
We can engineer them to be social. I think this means that we can forget about
attempts to directly reproduce "human level" machine intelligence, and work
instead on swarms of relatively stupid minions. Then the power of collective
intelligence and the wisdom of crowds can be used to get them to perform
useful work for us. It will be a new kind of
society of mind.
Machine progress has occurred largely by them being strong in domains where
we are weak. If the aim is to reproduce human cultural evolution in a
machine-based substrate (in order to better make progress) then a
frontal attack on directly reproducing human cognition in machines
doesn't seem to make very much sense.
To a large extent, I think that using swarms of minions is largely
what humans have been doing anyway. We do already have huge numbers of
not-too-smart computer systems - and we have been a putting considerable
amount of effort into networking them together.
Today, much of the main action is in the process of moving out of brains
and into data centers. I expect data centers to become the main social
centers for machines. The coming explosion of machine intelligence looks
set to take place in the computing cloud.
Interestingly, data centers are usually out of town - where land is cheap.
The centers of machine civilization and human civilization thus look set
to be geographically separated - although intimately connected by high-speed
networks. This will create an interesting dynamic.
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.
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.
Technological determinism provides a modern theoretical foundation for the progressive theories of evolution championed by Herbert Spencer.
Technological determinism contains the term "determinism" - which some interpret to mean: "completely determined". However obviously the future is only partly determined by technological forces - chance events play some role.
Evolution is apparently getting at progressively better at crossing valleys between adaptive peaks - using techniques such as scaffolding and simulation to bridge the gaps. Unless the valleys are getting deeper and wider it would seem reasonable to expect technological determinism to become increasingly true over time - as civilization progresses.
Unless things go wrong, that is. Some models of evolution permit outcomes which do not involve extinction - and yet do result in constrained and limited growth. These models typically involve one agent taking over the evolutionary process and then guiding the process according to its own whims. Such messed-up, short-sighted agents would presumably be assimilated by the first aliens they meet - but, if they are plausible, they could curtail evolutionary potential for an extended period of time. This situation - while it lasted would probably represent a failure of the thesis of technological determinism to make good predictions.
We don't really have much experience with such universal monopolies. However, we can see the negative effect that various monopolies have had in human history. However, some believe that we should create such a monopoly - to avoid the harmful effects of conflict - or to coordinate on a universal scale. For instance, here is Michael Anissimov on the topic.
Apparently this is a desirable way to avoid burning the cosmic commons, via hardscrapple frontier folk.
Of course, such global monopolies are widely derided and denigrated as representing "the new world order" or "totalitarianism". Most seem to regard these outcomes as being undesirable. I share their views.
It is not clear whether such an outcome is consistent with evolutionary theory. Monopoly is like monoculture - and it quickly becomes the target of parasites. However, we can't yet be sure that such outcomes are completely implausible.
I expect that we'll have a widely-accepted consensus theory of cultural evolution at some stage.
That means that some of the current positions on the topic are likely to fall by the wayside.
One historical point of disagreement has been to what extent genes hold culture "on a leash". Memeticists have often insisted that any alleged leash could be broken - resulting in a memetic takeover. However, Wilson (2012) maintained his position on the topic, writing:
I am further inclined to discount the widespread belief that robotic intelligence will overtake and potentially replace human intelligence.
This was also one of Susan Blackmore's objections to Boyd and Richerson's position. She wrote:
Although Richerson and Boyd describe us and our culture as like obligate mutualists, they still maintain that “Culture is on a leash, all right” even if the dog on the end is big and clever.
Peter Richerson revisited the topic in a recent essay. He wrote:
Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson (1981) famously argued that the gene-culture coevolutionary process meant that culture was on a genetic leash. But if cultural processes are actually driving genetic evolution, it is by no means clear that genes control the coevolutionary process in the one-sided way they proposed.
This seems like a bit of an improvement. However, I don't see why we can't all be on the same page on this one. The possibility of a memetic takeover is widely recognized in the circles I move in. Denial that the "leash" could be broken would surely be irresponsible foolishness. A DNA-filled universe is the "Star Trek" fallacy - few futurists think it is at all plausible. It is the job of all scientists to make predictions. If the scientists involved fail to recognize this possibility, they are guiding the rest of us with a lamentable blind spot.
Cities can be usefully seen as being cultural blisters on the planet. Here is New York City:
As with many blisters, cities contains swarming organisms that are capable of
spreading the blisters to new areas - in this case, meme-infected humans. Roads act as the main vessels through which the infection is spread. Ships can spread the infection across the oceans.
It's hard to avoid epidemiological terminology in this sort of discussion, but I don't
mean to imply that humans or cities are bad or undesirable. They spread like a plague on the
planet, but that doesn't mean that we need a cure for the pox. Instead, encouraging the
spread of the phenomenon - using education - seems more appropriate. In the glorious future
it seems likely that the whole planet, includingthe oceans, will be covered.
The invasion of the biosphere by memes has had some rather negative consequences -
as well as some positive ones. In particular, memes are primarily responsible for the ongoing
Holocene extinction event.
Without memes, humans would have remained minor players in the biosphere - and
nobody would have obliterated the megafauna of South America and Australia.
If you look at the proximate causes of many of the extinctions you often find that
a newly-introduced parasite or predator is involved. So: superficially, it looks like ordinary genetic
evolution - and not to do with memes. However, appearances can be deceptive - and if you ask
why the parasite or predator involved has recently appeared on the scene, the answer almost
always involves human transportation technologies: planes, trains and automobiles. So,
memes really are implicated.
The meme's eye view suggests that we ask: "what is in it for the memes?" There are several answers to
this question. Sometimes memes just create a new environment,
with different winners and losers. Some creatures can hitchhike on
memetic creatures better than others can - and these get spread around, while the things they
prey on or parasitize suffer. In such cases, extinction seems like an accidental byproduct
of meme activity.
In other cases, competition is involved. Creatures with DNA genomes compete with memetic creatures for resources.
Memes at first promote a human world - since humans can host memes better than other animals can.
Then, after the development of computers, memes promote them instead - since computers are
better hosts for memes than humans. Its not that the memes are out to get other forms of life -
it is just that they need the same resources, and the memes are fitter and more viable.
One issue is whether the current extinction event will turn into a
mass extinction - with most species dying out. This may depend on the scale of our conservation efforts - which are difficult to predict. However, it seems quite likely that most species will either die or be confined to much more restricted ranges.
It seems like a fairly simple and straightforwards prediction of memetics that there will be a memetic takeover. The "one-size fits all" strategy of DNA will soon have had its day - and we are likely to enter a new era dominated by intelligently designed genotypes and phenotypes, which will displace most of the existing players in modern ecosystems.
Such a possibility has been recognised by Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, Evan Louis Sheehan - and various other students of memes. However, cultural evolution theorists in academia mostly seem to be blindsided with respect to this topic. No doubt some of this is down to sheer conservatism, but:
One problem is the focus on the distant past. Cultural evolution in academia seems to have mostly been looking at events in prehistory that affected the evolution of modern humans. Machines seem to be too recent a phenomena to be considered in most papers on the topic.
Some authors explicitly focus their attention on the human actors involved - e.g. here are Boyd and Richerson on page 7 of Culture and the Evolutionary Process:
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 is hardly an attitude that lends itself well to thinking about the evolution of cultural artifacts such as machines - except perhaps in the old-fashioned manner of "machines are our tools" and "computers will do what we tell them".
It is the job of science to make future predictions. Cultural evolution theorists should be uniquely well place to be able to forsee these coming changes. Participants need to dust off their copies of Genetic Takeover and Mind Children, put two and two together.
In the realm of conventional, organic biology, nature has often made complex
systems out of simpler ones by networking those simple systems together using
social groups.
Multicellular organisms arose by aggregating single-celled organisms together.
The social insects are similar aggregations of multiple individuals into a unified, functional whole.
Today, we see much the same thing with the internet - many smaller computers have
been networked together into a much larger and more complex system.
It seems likely that we'll see the same thing with intelligent machines, as these
develop. As humans get better at building smart machines, we will deliberately compound their
power by constructing social networks out of them.
The science of social and cultural evolution is not just important for understanding
the development of our own species - to applies equally to the growth of computer
networks and machine intelligence.
The development of machine intelligence is humanity's most significant task at the
moment. In addition to
memetic engineering and
memetic algorithms
being key to their construction in the first place, we will have to think about the
evolutionary dynamics of heterogeneous networks of humans and intelligent machines - since that's what we are
most likely to see going forwards.
One of the basic ideas of gene-meme coevolution is genetic assimilation. The concept refers to acquired phenotypic traits turning into genetic ones over time. In the context of cultural evolution it usually refers to learned behaviours becoming encoded in DNA genes.
Examples of genetic assimilation in action include walking, speaking and eating cooked food. These all started off as culturally-transmitted practices, but became successful - and went on to be encoded partly in DNA genes.
The best way to intepret the concept of memetic assimilation is probably to consider cases where traits coded in DNA genes get taken over by learned behaviours. To best carve nature at the joints, it seems best to ignore the distinction between individual and social learning in this case, and to lump them together.
Examples of memetic assimilation include:
Human fur - largely replaced by bedding and clothing;
Human large intestine - partly replaced by practices such as cooking and grinding foods;
Locomotion - largely instinctive in many animals - humans learn to walk from their parents;
Communication - largely instinctive in many animals - humans learn to speak from other humans.
Humans have large developmental plasticity. Many behaviours that used to be instinctual have been replaced by more flexible traits that are acquired through learning.
Since these are still civilization's early days, many of the more interesting examples of memetic assimilation seem likely to lie in the future:
Memory - largely outsourced, reducing the human brain's memory to a local cache;
Immune system - partly replaced by hospitals;
Repair systems - partly replaced by hospitals;
Digestion - partly replaced by food pre-processing;
Thermoregulation - partly replaced by air conditioning;
Transporation - scheduled to be largely replaced by cars and aircraft.
Since memes seem generally more flexible than DNA, it seems reasonable to expect that memetic assimilation will eventually go all the way - resulting in a memetic takeover. I.e. brains will be replaced by machine intelligence and bodies will be replaced by robotics and nanotechnology.
Terminology note: Memetic assimilation should be distinguished from meme assimilation - the latter being part of the process of meme acquisition - a normal part of enculturation.
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.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
The Mocking Memes:A Basis for Automated Intelligence by Evan Louis Sheehan
This is a great book. In fact I think the author's views of the topic of memetics are more similar to my own views that practically any other author I can think of. Like me, the author cites the work of A.G. Cairns-Smith on genetic takeovers, and discusses the possibility of a memetic takeover. Also like me, the author is interested in the link between memetics and machine intelligence.
The author doesn't seem particularly interested in orthodox views. He starts out by radically redefining the term "meme" to be the inherited unit in universal Darwinism. That's a radical break with tradition, and I can't say I entirely approve - though certainly the inherited unit in universal Darwinism is badly in need of a name. He also radically redefines the term "information" - to means something other than what the term means in Shannon's information theory. This seems to be getting more into crank territory, and I don't think the author pulls this one off. Like me, the author regards evolution as purposeful. Like me, the author sees deep links to moral behaviour in evolutionary theory. Both views are contrary to mainstream orthodoxy.
I love this book, and don't want to spend too much time criticizing it. However, if I have to say some bad things: the book doesn't refer to the scientific literature enough for my tastes. The literature on universal Darwinism is fairly patchy, but there's more to it that this book might suggest. I also felt that the universal Darwinism was of a rather mild kind, that only covered the biological realm. An extreme form of universal Darwinism that extends to propagating cracks, turbulence, flames and crystals seems quite defensible, but such ideas don't get coverage in this book.
Probably my favourite part of the book was where an argument for Lamarckism in the organic realm was presented.
Lamarckism - in the form of the inheritance of acquired characteristics - is an idea which is widely disparaged in modern times. One of the common arguments given against cultural evolution being Darwinian is that it works partly on Lamarckian principles, while organic evolution is solely Darwinian. A common response is that cultural evolution is not Lamarckian either - however here I will take a different position.
Lamarck apparently thought that all acquired traits could potentially be inherited. However the fact that some acquired characteristics are inherited in the organic realm is pretty obvious - such as when a dog acquires fleas and then its offspring inherit them. Indeed, with 8% of human DNA inherited from viruses, it seems difficult to argue that no acquired traits are inherited. At this point, there are various replies by those who still want to claim that organic inheritance is wholly non-Lamarckian - I won't go into those here. This book provides another type of case where we see the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the organic realm - one that doesn't involve symbiosis. The author argues that surgical breast enhancements are inherited, and tend to produce offspring with larger breasts. A mechanism is provided: those with breast enhancements tend to attract mates who prefer larger breasts, and some of that preference will have a genetic basis. Genes in men for a preference for larger breasts will tend to be statistically linked to genes whose expression produces bigger breasts when in women, due to their shared evolutionary history. So: we can expect breast enhancement patients to have offspring with larger breasts than would have been produced if no enhancement surgery had taken place. The reasoning here can be applied to most sexually-selected traits. It also works with traits that can be amplified naturally - using Lamarck's principle of use and disuse - such as large, bulging muscles.
The centerpiece of the book is a large section about the memory-prediction framework and bi-directional hierarchies in the brain. This material was inspired by Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. While interesting, this was the most long-winded and difficult section of the book. While I am sympathetic to the idea of the brain as a prediction engine, I think machine intelligence will feature a considerable quantity of bottom-up engineering, with neuroscience and biomimicry playing a relatively minor role. The author seems to envisage a much more neuroscience-inspired approach than I do. An aeroplane and a bird both make use of lift. Similarly, a computer and a brain will both be masters of inductive inference. However, they differ considerably in the details of their operation. The brain is hampered considerably by design constraints - like being made mostly out of cells - and having to squeeze through the female human pelvis. We should be able to do much better.
The book finishes by discussing the evolving universes of Smolin and Gardner, and proposing an alternative hypothesis - involving worlds simulating worlds which in turn are simulating worlds. Though labelled as speculation, such a scenario seems relatively unlikely to me.
Anyway, this is a great book. As well as hard copy, it's also available as a free download on the author's web site.
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.
It's a mashup of Susan Blackmore at TED, internet memes and the iRobot movie - featuring a narrated memetic takeover. "In the beginning was the meme"...
It's the "Hollywood" version - where the humans accidentally drop the ball - and do themselves in "through their own stupidity". This seems rather unlikely.
This is a rather weak blog post, full of pictures and short on substance - but it indicates that the idea of a modern memetic takeover may be gradually becoming more mainstream.
The
term "Holocene extinction event"
refers to the currently ongoing extinction of species.
It is apparently largely caused by the impact of humans on the environment. This makes it
the first extinction event caused by a proliferation of memes.
One of the reasons I got involved with cultural evolution and memetics was the belief that
humanity badly needed a solid science of cultural evolution to help successfully navigate
the transition to a world economically dominated by machine intelligence.
I expect that we'll have a widely-accepted consensus theory of cultural evolution at some stage.
As with many blisters, cities contains swarming organisms that are capable of
spreading the blisters to new areas - in this case, meme-infected humans. Roads act as the main vessels through which the infection is spread. Ships can spread the infection across the oceans.
The invasion of the biosphere by memes has had some rather negative consequences -
as well as some positive ones. In particular, memes are primarily responsible for the ongoing
It seems like a fairly simple and straightforwards prediction of memetics that there will be a 
In the realm of conventional, organic biology, nature has often made complex
systems out of simpler ones by networking those simple systems together using
social groups.
One of the basic ideas of gene-meme coevolution is 
Here, is 
Memes, on average helped our ancestors. Our 
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