Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes by William F. Harms
This book starts out with a 80-page critique of "replicator theories" - a term the author uses to cover the cultural evolution theories of Dawkins, Dennett, Blackmore, Hull and various other players. However, memes seem to attract most of the fire. We hear about how Dawkins backtracked apologetically after introducing memes, playing down their significance. How David Hull was only interested in memes to the extent that they helped him develop a scientific epistemology, and how Dennett got his memes second hand, and just wanted to use them to bolster his concept of the "intentional stance". Memes are based partly on G. C. Williams attempt to rechristen the gene. We hear that this rechristening never caught on, and the word "gene" today still has a totally different meaning in biology textbooks, leaving memes dependent of a dead definition. Further the definition of "gene" that Williams used makes little sense - since it defined genes in terms of selection pressures, which might fluctuate wildly in real life, causing genes and memes to flit in and out of existence. On page 67, Harms writes:
The reader cannot help be aware by now that I do not like the meme concept. It seems, in a word, "superstitious" to me - just the sort of concept that scientific progress will require us to abandon.
There's criticism of the concept of "selfishness" and criticism of the concept of "replication". Harms recognises the "meme's eye view" as a valid perspective, but claims that describing culture in terms of a symbiosis between memes and genes is "awkward". He writes, on page 51:
Methodologically, ontologically, the meme is a mess. For the purposes of popular appeal, however, it could not have been better designed by a Madison Avenue advertising exec. I must nevertheless urge that the only relevance that the meme and its shortcomings have to the application of evolutionary theory is as a distraction, or perhaps an embarrassment.
Harms does make some good points amidst the rhetoric. I agree that G.C. William's definition of a gene is not very usable - though not all information theoretic definitions of the term share the same problem. I don't much like the term "replicator" either. Many have been misled by its confusing connotations of high-fidelity copying. At best, it needs defining prominently by those who use it - to avoid misunderstandings.
However, I think his rejection of the meme is totally unwarranted. I think that all students of cultural evolution should find a sympathetic interpretation of memetics. If you don't understand memes you close yourself off from a lot of important literature on the topic. Further, you then have to find objections to memetics - and there aren't really any decent technical criticsms of memetics: it's a perfectly valid framework for studying cultural evolution with. Failing to understand memes isn't big or clever, it just means you didn't try very hard to understand them.
To respond to the specific criticism that "describing culture in terms of a symbiosis between memes and genes is awkward" - that's mostly nature's fault - the fact that creatures are symbiotic composites of multiple types of agent which exhibit partial genealogical independence is certainly a complication when constructing models. However, looking at the tangles the rival "inclusive phenotype" approach results in, a symbiotic union comes out looking like the simplest model which captures the observed behaviour. Such models of symbiosis have been widely, though sluggishly adopted by mainstream biology - though their impact on academic cultural evolution so far has been pretty minimal.
Having rejected the entire body of existing work on cultural evolution and memetics, Harms is, in his own words sent back to the drawing board in understanding cultural evolution. His idea of a replacement theory is one oriented around cells. He titles a section "cultural transmission as a cellular process", and explains that the cell is the basic explanatory nexus in biology. He says:
You can account for everything that memes are supposed to do in terms of the things that human beings do. The converse does not hold.
I think this proposed project has proved fruitless. Writing off most of the massive existing literature on cultural evolution was misguided. It isn't even clear that Harms is fully aware of the literature he is dismissing. Boyd, Richerson, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman get one mention, and that says that these folk "seem to find memetics a timely label for an established and respected approach to the study of cultural evolution and transmission". Since I don't recall ever hearing a positive word about memetics from Cavalli-Sforza or Feldman, this raises the issue of whether Harms has actually looked at their work. It certainly isn't clear from the book that he has. Certainly these days, many in the field will roll their eyes at an attack on Dawkins, Dennett and Blackmore. They have a point: why not criticise some of the actual scientists working in the area - rather than their popularisers.
The proposed explanation of cultural evolution that Harms offers - namely "the cells did it" - seems to me like no explanation at all. It is like explaining the function of the brain by saying that it "computed" something. The point of memetics is that it allows you to use the existing theoretical framework of evolutionary biology to understand culture. Recombination, mutation, selection, adaptation, drift, frequency analysis, phylogenetics all apply to culture as much as to DNA-based organisms. We don't really have a corresponding theory of cellular function - since cells are flexible, diverse and can do many things. Cells aren't even really on an appropriate level to offer an explanation of culture. Nor do cells help much with the increasingly common phenomenon of cultural transmission via computers. Harms discards a lot of useful material - and doesn't offer much to replace it with.
I was expecting the rest of the book to expound on Harms' own theory of cultural evolution, but it doesn't. Next he has rather abstract chapters on populations, information theory and selection. The chapter on populations sets up a framework for a kind of universal Darwinism. He observes the generality of selection, discusses the sorting of pebbles on a beach and discusses general population-based models with variation and selection. Harms focuses on philosophical foundations.
Towards the end of the book there are two chapters about a naturalistic approach to meaning. The first chapter is about epistemology, and the second one is about morality. Harms is a philosophy instructor with an interest in ethics, and these seem like the punchline of the book. Harms objects to the idea that you can't go from is to ought. Instead he thinks that evolutionary theory informs morality, without endorsing any particular moral position. Rather he thinks that evolutionary theory helps explain why we adopt a diverse range of moral positions. Harms writes these chapters a bit more passionately than the rest of the book, and I don't disagree with his positions.
However, this whole book is pretty dry and tedious. Though the subject matter is dear to my heart in many places, Harms ladles on Kant, Quine, Locke and Hume in hefty doses, sprinkles on dry mathematics and dissects the philosophical minutae involved until the topics become dry and lifeless. Part of the problem is that I have a scientific background, and Harms is a philosopher - so we aren't speaking the same language much of the time.
Apart from the memetics critique, my favourite part of the book was where Harms discusses Otto Neurath's boat. Harms writes:
Neurath likened conceptual progress to rebuilding a ship on the ocean while traveling in it.
This is a beautiful image that I hadn't encountered before. However, the fact that this was a highlight reflects rather poorly on the rest of the book.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a video about positional inheritance.
In universal Darwinism, copying is found ubiquitously in nature, from spreading ripples to propagating cracks, from growing crystals to scattering radiation. Copying - in conjunction with variation and selection - forms the basis of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
The copying in universal Darwinism includes DNA, culture, and a whole bunch of other aspects of the environment. To give some examples of environmental inheritance, rabbits inherit rabbit warrens, corals inherit their coral reef - and so on. The most common form of environmental inheritance is positional inheritance. To give some examples of this:
Raindrops - split and produce offspring that inherit their parents' position.
Cracks - have dividing tips and offspring crack tips start their lives near to their parents.
Atoms - split during nuclear decay - and the offspring particles originate near the parent atom.
Because of the property of physics known as locality, any form of inheritance is also accompanied by positional inheritance. That makes positional inheritance the most widespread form of inheritance in existence.
The products of positional inheritance often form tree-like structures. The roots and branches of plants resemble trees - and actually are phylogenetic trees of plant cells, laid down in order during development - in a combination of phylogeny and ontogeny. Similarly, lightning, propagating cracks, fractal drainage patterns, and crystalline dendrites are all associated with prominent visual trees. In each case, these are family trees, that show the path of descent. Sometimes the associated phylogenetic trees are less obvious. For example, in a landslide, each moving boulder has been pushed into motion by collisions with one or more parent boulders. Though each boulder can trace its ancestry back to the first falling stone, the resulting family tree is not obvious to casual observers. It's the same with raindrops in clouds and vortices in turbulent fluid flow.
Positional inheritance also results in adaptation - another hallmark of Darwinian evolution. Cracks adaptively seek the weakest path through matter, streams adaptively trace out the boundaries of their associated drainage basins and turbulence selectively forms where there is the most energy to feed it.
One thing that evolving systems typically need, in order to exhibit complex adaptations, is high-fidelity copying. Excessive noise often results in inherited information getting lost - and this leads to the disintegration of complex adaptations. However, positional inheritance often has pretty high fidelity - allowing complex adaptations based on it to remain stable.
Though positional inheritance is a pretty central concept in Darwinian evolution, it is a curiously neglected idea. While some seem to appreciate that organisms inherit their parents' environment as well as their genes, simple inheritance of position gets practically no recognition as a component of evolutionary theory. Sad times for Darwinism.
6:10 has Richerson's discussion of "cultural units". He says:
There's this idea that has been promoted, particularly by Richard Dawkins that inherited systems have to be digital - the way genes are supposed to be - that there have to be discrete units that are potentially infinitely long lived - and Rob Boyd and I think this is not correct actually - you can have "unitless" evolution without any trouble really.
I'm pretty sure this is a misunderstanding.
What Dawkins said (in "River Out Of Eden", page 19) was:
Only a digital genetic system is capable of sustaining Darwinism over eons of geological time.
The idea that I think Dawkins was getting at here is that evolving systems "go digital" after a little while, and discover the advantages of digital transmission. Genes went digital this before DNA was invented, and many types of meme went digital before computers were invented - in what is known as the digital revolution. They key driver of these transitions is attaining better copying fidelity - and thus gaining the ability to maintain the integrity of a larger genome.
Richerson attacks the idea that everything that is inherited is digital - but that claim seems to be a very silly one. I don't think that is a claim that Dawkins ever intended - or would endorse. Indeed, Dawkins himself gives examples of low-fidelity cultural transmission in the same chapter, namely: audio tape recorders and photocopying (see page 16).
Contagious Ideas: On Evolution, Culture, Archaeology and Cultural Virus Theory by Ben Sandford Cullen
Ben was writing this book when he died unexpectedly in 1995. His manuscript was subsequently combined with parts of his doctoral thesis on the topic, edited together and published in the year 2000.
In the book, Ben puts forwards his own theory of cultural evolution - which he calls the "Cultural Virus Theory". Though Ben says his theory was developed independently of memetics, the two theories are complementary - a fact that is recognised in the book.
Ben starts out with what he calls the cultural virus critique. He devotes his first four chapters to looking at alternative theories of cultural evolution, and explaining what's wrong with them. The first chapter criticises social Darwinism, the second criticises Ed Wilson's sociobiology, and the third and fourth chapters criticise cultural selectionism.
The critique of Ed Wilson's sociobiology is pretty accurate. Wilson's attempt to reduce cultural phenomena to things that benefit genes looks misguided retrospectively. However, since this book was published, Wilson's brand of sociobiology has mostly faded away - and been largely replaced by a more politically correct form: "evolutionary psychology". In avoiding all mention of differences between humans, this doesn't so much attempt to explain culture in genetic terms but rather belittles its influence and ignores it. Its practitioners typically don't have an understand cultural evolution.
The third and fourth chapters mostly look at what Ben calls "American Cultural Selectionism". This is characterised by explaining culture in terms of human traits, and tracing their passage between humans in terms of "oblique" and "horizontal" transmission of those traits. Ben classified these models as being "inclusive phenotype" models - since they include traits encoded by genes and memes in the phenotypes of human individuals. Rather than featuring distinct cultural individuals, phenotypes and populations - like memetics does - the "inclusive phenotype" models combine cultural and genetic influences within one human phenotype - in what Ben patronisingly refers to as a "bio-cultural muddle".
Of course, since cultural traits exhibit geneaolgical independence from the human germ line, modeling them in terms of a combined phenotype makes very little sense. It is rather like modelling a human population infected with smallpox by considering the DNA of the human hosts and the DNA of the smallpox virus as a single phenotype influenced by both sources, with the smallpox traits exhibiting horizontal and oblique transmission. Then you can consider one group of humans with the "smallpox trait" wiping out other groups of humans that lack it. However, biologists don't tend to do this much because of Occam's razor. Rather considering one phenotype, with multiple inheritance pathways, is simpler and neater to consider the smallpox virus to have one phenotype - and the human hosts to have another phenotype - and to consider their relationship to be a parasitic symbiosis between the two distinct entities. The exact same approach works very effectively with cultural inheritance.
Ben's critique of position of the American Cultural Selectionists is pretty devastating, in my opinion. It's much the same critique as I have previously offered, but spread out over two book chapters. I tend to use the term "extended genotype" instead of Ben's "inclusive phenotype" - but we are essentially talking about the same idea. Ben's critique remains relevant today - since the strain of American Cultural Selectionism involved is associated with the work of Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd, Richerson, Durham and Rindos - and it has subsequently gone on to become the most popular form of cultural evolution within academia. Understanding where these folk originally went wrong is important to understanding the history of the field. A better model of cultural transmission invokes cultural symbionts. This has previously been previously described by Cloak and Dawkins - in 1975 and 1976 respectively.
While a single "inclusive phenotype" with genetic and cultural traits isn't all that much use for modeling cultural evolution with, one thing it is good for making byzantine mathematical models that appear to be sophisticated and original. The correct perspective on cultural evolution reuses the same concepts of symbiosis that already exist in the realm of organic biology. However it requires practically no new science - and so isn't a great source of revolutionary papers. By claiming culture exhibits the strange new phenomena of oblique and horizontal transmission that were absent from the organic realm, the American cultural selectionists had found an excuse to develop their own innovative models of the process of cultural transmission. If you think of academia as a place where affiliations with prestigious individuals are cultivated, these complex mathematical models make a lot of sense - since advanced mathematics is an impressive thing. However, the combination of an awkward, complex model and the associated reams of complex mathematics had an unfortunate side effect: few understood the work. As a result, the important science of cultural evolution has stagnated in academia for decades.
How has American Cultural Selectionism survived for so long - when it is based on such misguided models? Some of the practitioners involved do seem to have tipped their hats hat towards the perspective of symbiosis in the mean time. The books on the topic from the 1980s typically made no mention of symbiosis, viruses, parasitism, epidemiology - or any of the tools you actually need to understand cultural evolution. However, if you fast forward to the 21st century, you will see occasional mentions of these things in the associated academic literature - where they are often described as being "analogies". This takes the sting out of the type of criticism given here - since the defenders of the theory can point out these occasional passages related to symbiology and say: look, we actually have that covered. However the symbiology remains little more than a cosmetic veneer. The incorrect "inclusive phenotype" model is still there, misleading a new generation of researchers about the nature of cultural transmission in humans.
After explaining the problems with the competing theories, Ben goes on to lay out his own proposal: the "Cultural Virus Theory". It is a symbosis-based theory - a lot like memetics, but with its emphasis on cultural phenotypes - rather than heritable information. Ben explains that memes act as the genotype, while his cultural virus idea plays the role of phenotype in his model. He says he thinks the virus perspective is more palatable than considering artifacts to be organisms - since historically most artifacts have hijacked copying machinery inside humans to ensure their own reproduction. Ben doesn't seem too worried about the negative connotations of culture as a virus. There are some helpful viruses and many viruses go on to become part of the germ line of their hosts - so viruses aren't all bad.
For me one of the most interesting parts of the book was where Ben expounds on the idea of cultural kin selection and cultural eusociality. Ben has a whole chapter on cultural eusociality - where he explains that many of the cultural artifacts that we see that don't conspicuously reproduce are really sterile worker individuals. He says that things like chairs and tables don't directly reproduce, but instead they act to divert resources (particularly money) back towards the factory that produced them - and the factory plays the role of "queen". Ben's ideas about kin selection and eusociality in culture are mostly good - and were well ahead of their time. However I think that in places they may go a bit too far. When you have a distributed organism with sterile castes it is sometimes best to describe it as one big organism - rather than as an advanced form of social organisation. Also distributed phenotypes need not necessarily be classified as cultural individuals - they could be more like hair or nails, feathers or tusks. My nit picking aside, Ben is pretty clearly correct about the ubiquitous nature of cultural eusociality - and many of his examples of it are good ones.
Lastly I should probably say some bad things about the book:
The book starts off slowly - and I didn't get along with much of the material about evolutionary progress and Lamarckism in the first chapter.
Ben was an archaeologist and he uses examples from archaeology ubiquitously in the book - but it is a general book about cultural evolution, and he should probably have cast his net wider when selecting examples.
The idea that cultural entities act as viruses may be easier to swallow than the idea that they are partly-independent symbiotic fully-blown organisms. However, it is difficult to deny that memes create their own manufacturing facilities - rather than simply hijacking the brains of human hosts. Computers and the internet are the product of memes, much more than genes. The "cultural virus" perspective is too narrow - as well as having undesirable connotations of parasitism and host harm.
Ben talks quite a bit about cultural predators preying on humans. It turns out that his definition of a predator is that it is a large parasite - and it makes no mention of quickly devouring the victim for food. Most require predators to kill their hosts.
Most of the book is fairly readable - but with the material imported from his thesis, the readability goes through the floor.
However, overall, this book is pretty great. It's nice to have a thorough critique of American Cultural Selectionism available in print - and Ben was a pioneer in applying the theories of kin selection and eusociality to cultural evolution. If academics had been smart enough to follow in Ben's footsteps, the theory of cultural evolution wouldn't be in anything like the mess it is in today - but alas, that isn't what actually happened - and there's still much work to be done.
In universal Darwinism, copying is found ubiquitously in nature, from spreading ripples to propagating cracks, from growing crystals to scattering radiation. Of course, copying, variation and selection are the basis of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The copying takes a variety of forms, but the most basic is positional inheritance - the topic of this post.
It is common knowledge that people inherit the environment of their parents - along with their parents genes. They inherit the local climate, the local language, government and religion - along with traits coded in DNA. These are examples of positional inheritance.
Many other organisms lack good dispersal strategies and exhibit the same kind of effect. Rabbits tend to inherit the warren of their parents. Corals inherit their parent's reef - and so on. Much the same is true of many inorganic natural forms. For example:
Splitting raindrops - produce offspring that inherit their parent's position.
Propagating cracks - when a crack tip divides the offspring crack tips start their lives nearby.
Nuclear decay - when atoms split, the offspring particles originate near the parent atom.
Because of multiverse locality, any form of inheritance is also accompanied by positional inheritance. That makes positional inheritance the most widespread form of inheritance in existence.
Since positional inheritance is so fundamental, how come you have never heard of it before? How come searching for the term just turns up this page? Well, there are some "nearby" terms, which have received more attention historically. Ecological inheritance, environmental inheritance and niche inheritance. These terms are fine - but they simply don't mean the same thing as positional inheritance. Positional inheritance is the inheritance of spatial position. That often comes with a bunch of other things as well - but not necessarily.
This book has a title which is obviously based on Charles Darwin's 1859 book. It's about the author's discovery of cultural evolution and memetics. The author imitates Darwin's trip to the Galapagos by seeking out cultural islands within the American mainland - mainly looking at artefacts - hats, barns and tepees. It is an unusual mixture of popular science and road trip.
The author uses the metaphor of view-point-altering googgles to help describe his journey. When he puts the goggles on he looks at things through the eyes of a cultural evolutionist - and the world looks pretty different and unusual to him.
The memetics in this book is good. Jonnie Hughes has a pretty good understanding of the topic, in
my opinion.
The author spends most of the book on cultural evolution, and then describes how the "gene" revolution - which transformed evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s - has a direct parallel in cultural evolution - which has its own little bits of inherited cultural information: memes. This insight has led to the "meme's eye view" - and other important developments.
If I made scientific criticisms, I would first point to the author's endorsement of internalism, which I find to be an unhelpful perspective. The other thing that I thought was wrong was his explanation for why memes have not made much progress in academia. He says it is the difficulty in actually identifying them in the brain. That isn't really the right answer. Plenty of other things that can't be directly observed don't face the same problem. There are several other reasons why academia has had trouble digesting memetics.
Much of the serious science in the book is confined to a bibliography at the end. It is four pages long. I would have preferred the whole book to have been like that. Memetics needs the attention of scientists more than it needs conversion stories by science writers.
Lastly I'll tell you about my favourite bit of the book. It's a bit near the end - where the author likens pioneer species colonising a new environment to memes colonising an infant's mind. Hughes explains in some detail how the early species in an environment create the ecosystem for those that follow them - in the same way that early memes create a mental environment for the more complex ones that follow them. This is a beautiful analogy, and in the hands of an eloquent science writer like Hughes, it is a joy to read.
Let's hope Jonnie keeps those memes coming in the future.
The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin - by Keith Stanovich.
The book is a manifesto expanding on Richard Dawkins' idea at the end of The Selfish Gene. Dawkins wrote:
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Stanovich turns this into the central thesis of his book. His book is about a type of morality and ethics which is informed by evolutionary theory.
Stanovich comes from a long line of thinkers that views nature as immoral, or at best amoral. Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and many other thinkers have painted nature as curel and indifferent - and evolution as bad and not to be imitated.
Stanovich - like Dawkins - proposes that humans rebel against selfish replicators - namely genes and memes - and instead promote their own interests: "the interests of the vehicle", as Stanovich calls them.
Most of the book is about why and how humans should rebel against their genes. He pictures humans as part-conscious and part-unconscious systems. He sides with the conscious component, or the ego, and characterises our unconscious minds as sub-human saboteurs, getting us to do things that make us miserable against our own best interests.
The whole topic is an interesting one, though the book is a bit on the dry and repetitive.
The book has a section on memes, which is quite good. Stanovich recognises memes as forming a second evolutionary system, and has a pretty good understanding of memetics. However, memes are just another type of selfish replicator to Stanovich. They no more have our interests at heart than our genes do. Indeed, he characterises many memes as being especially nasty - "nastier than genes even", as he puts it.
In the rest of this review, I will directly address Stanovich's main thesis. I should say at this point that I am not sympathetic towards it. The idea that evolution is bad has been opposed by thinkers such as Julian Huxley and Peter Kropotkin. Like them, I see in evolution's positive, cooperative side a guide about how to behave. The views of Huxley and Kropotkin have been mostly trampled on by subsequent thinkers, but their ideas about evolution and cooperation are essentially correct - even though they are not currently in vogue.
The idea of enlightened humans rebelling against the interests of sub-human replicating agents is an intriguing one, but I don't think it is founded in good science. The problem is that Stanovich's picture doesn't include all the copying processes that are taking place.
While Stanovich deserves credit for recognising both DNA genes and memes, he doesn't treat within-brain change as an evolutionary process. However the fact that individual learning also forms its own evolutionary process was recognised long ago by Skinner, Campbell, Calvin, Cziko, Dennett and others. Indeed, any non-trivial goal-directed system is going to have a fitness function and an evolutionary tree-pruning algorithm at its heart.
In rejecting genes and memes, Stanovich is just throwing has hat in with other evolving structures within the brain. Stanovich claims to be siding with "the vehicle", but, in practice this turns out to be something close to the ego, which itself is composed of a bunch of happiness-promoting replicating structures that Stanovich didn't consider. In short, all positions to this topic involve siding with some bunch of copying entities or other. Copying with variation and selection underlies every optimisation process. The issue is not whether to side with a bunch of copied entities, but rather which ones you side with. With this framing of the problem, much of Stanovich's rhetoric about the inhumanity of stupid mindless replicators falls flat.
There are indeed some reasons follow the dictates of your conscious mind - that part of you is often smart and forward thinking. However, the brain's analytic side is heavily dominated by the ego - which is rather like the brain's public relations department. A big part of its job is to convince everyone else how wonderful you are. Stanovich's proposal is rather like giving control over a company to its public relations department. Egoism is fairly common, but there's more to a human than their ego. Thinking of yourself as being your ego is an impoverished picture of yourself which ignores much of what makes you human. Egoism is partly a western disorder - those from non-western cultures are less likely to identify completely with their egos. So: I think Stanovich's idea takes things too far.
Since the ego is largely constructed by genes, we can expect most humans to not have rebellious egos - since those with a tendency to rebel against their genes would have left behind fewer children. So, one wonders what fraction of humanity Stanovich is preaching to.
Stanovich proposes redefining the word "rationality" to refer to actions that promote the interest of "the vehicle". This plan strikes me as being a hopeless one - that just isn't what the word "rationality" means. I think that idea that rationality consists of optimising the function that Stanovich recommends is a non-starter.
Stanovich's book can be regarded as an interesting example of an attempt at founding a secular religion based on science. Stanovich's memes do get cited from time to time and have found themselves an audience. There's a type of human that hopes that their ego will live forever - and isn't interested in reproducing - and some of them seem to approve of Stanovich's ideas.
However, my council is to consider Stanovich's book as another memeplex that wants you to divert your resources into propagating it - at the expense of your own genetic heritage. There are a lot of memes out there hoping that you will divert some of your reproductive resources towards their propagation. Stanovich promises you happiness - if you are prepared to get off the genetic train and - consign your genes to eternal oblivion. If you are normally OK with memes hijacking the goals that nature gave you, then, by all means, go for it. However, if you don't usually approve of that, then I recommend being as cautious of embracing Stanovich's memes as you are of any other ones.
The Origin of Everything via Universal Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Systems in Contention for Existence
...by D. B. Kelley. The book is clearly named after Darwin's 1859 book titled:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
My book is a review copy - which was sent to me ahead of its release by its publishers. The main topic is universal selection - and what an important idea it is. I'm pretty much on board with the author's views regarding the high level of significance of the topic. Universal Darwinism is a tremendously important subject - and universal selection is a big part of it.
Many people who are interested in expanding the domain of Darwinism only extend the theory to cover the social sciences, the brain and development - leaving the idea still confined to the life sciences. By contrast, this book extends the idea of selection far beyond the social sciences - emphasizing that selection applies to practically everything - including natural selection of moons, stars, atoms, galaxies, chemical compounds and all manner of other things. I think this emphasis is correct - Darwinism and natural selection do also cover the inorganic realm.
Some apply selectionist ideas to complex adaptive systems, but the author points out that even atoms qualify as being complex - and so pretty much any system you care to think of qualifies as a complex system. The author prefers to just call them "systems". I think this is a helpful perspective.
The book offers a symbiosis-friendly version of Darwinism - extending mutualism and parasitism into the organic realm as well. I think that makes reasonable sense - though some will probably view it as being a step too far.
The author presents selectionism as a part of physics. However, since it also applies in a wide range of universes with different physical laws - such as Conway's Game of Life - I prefer to think of it as a principle of statistics - broadly similar to statistical mechanics.
The book offers a treatment of universal selection and the anthropic principle. It's the best treatment of this topic that I have encountered. There is a discussion of memetics, although it is pretty small section. The book also discusses selectionism as a grand unifying principle in science, and the scale of its possible impact.
However, this is a book with a number of problems - some of which I will now describe:
The book is quite repetitive, making essentially the same point regarding the ubiquity of selection over and over again.
There's a lot of discussion of selection, but not much breaking this down into copying and destruction. Copying and destruction are very different ideas, which demand independent treatment and analysis. Bundling them together into the single category of "selection" doesn't really do either of them justice.
The author doesn't really distinguish much between cumulative adaptive evolution and degenerative evolution. This is a pretty critical distinction if extending Darwinism into the inorganic domain.
Other principles - besides universal Darwinism purport to explain the evolution of complex adaptive systems. In particular maximum entropy thermodynamics purports to explain the evolution of a wide range of living and non-living systems. Those discussing universal Darwinism need to discuss the relationship between it and existing ideas like these - but the author doesn't really do that. There is a chapter on entropy - but that addresses quite a different topic.
There's quite a lot of discussion regarding links between Darwinism and relativity in the book. I think this link is overstated.
The author seems to think the material in the book is quite original. However, I wasn't really convinced of that. I published an essay titled "Universal Selection" online in 2010 - which fairly plainly and clearly extended selection into the inorganic domain. I didn't come up with the idea either - my essay cites a paper from 1996 on essentially the same topic.
Radical extensions of Darwinism can expect to face criticism. For example, Massimo Pigliucci says:
Physicists talk about the evolution of the universe all the time but all they mean by that is: change over time. Now, if that is what we mean by "evolution", then pretty much everything falls under evolution - so surely we must mean something more specific than that.
I think those writing in the area should make an effort to anticipate and address such criticisms. However, this book doesn't seem to be written with critics in mind - rather it is a book of enthusiastic advocacy of the idea. I also think that those working on radical reformulations reformulations of Darwinism should probably take efforts to appear credible. The author could have taken more steps in that direction. For one thing, I spotted a number of mistakes. For example, the book claims that trees are asexual. It claims that monkeys and dinosaurs coexisted. It repeatedly reports a discovery of faster than light travel, which was subsequently widely discredited. These kinds of things don't make a positive contribution to making the case.
So, to summarise, this is a good and important book, but it also suffers from a number of flaws. However, because of the vaccuum in the area, any contributions to it are very welcome - and consequently this book makes essential reading for anyone interested in the issue of the domain of Darwinian theory.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler, this is a review of this book: Universal Darwinism - by John Campbell
This is one of a tiny number of books on the tremendously important - yet dreadfully neglected - topic of Universal Darwinism. The extension of evolutionary theory into fields beyond the realm of organic biology is long overdue.
The book adopts a perspective based on information theory - and makes many links to the concept of Bayesian updating. It suggests that knowledge acquisition by brains and the accumulation of survival know-how by evolution are closely related. This aspect of the book is excellent.
The book takes a rather conservative approach to Universal Darwinism - sticking to those cases with the best literature support. This conservatism has a positive side - in that critics will find fewer flaws in the book. However, it means that there is little discussion of Darwinism in prebiotic systems - such as whirlpools, crystal growth, propagating cracks and turbulence. Nor is there much discussion of the law of "survival of the stable", or natural selection on a cosmic scale - though Smolin's ideas do get a few lines.
The author correctly links Universal Darwinism to maximum entropy thermodynamics. This is a real and important link - but the author's treatment of the maximum entropy idea is very cursory: he just treats maximum entropy as a constraint. Universal Darwinism and maximum entropy thermodynamics are deeply-linked ideas, but although this book has a whole chapter on the topic, it doesn't really go into their relationship very much.
The book deals with four main examples of Universal Darwinism: quantum physics, biology, learning and human culture. The 'biology' section seemed rather unnecessary to me - application of Darwinism there is well known and this topic has been treated by many others. The sections about cultural evolution and brain evolution are both good. For me, it was also nice to see material about memetics in the book. Lastly, there is a large section about "Quantum Darwinism". Quantum physics doesn't make a great example to illustrate Universal Darwinism with simply because quantum physics is so difficult to understand. I didn't really get on with the author's presentation, because it was framed in terms of "wave function collapse" - a proposed physical process which, so far, we have yet to find any evidence for. A presentation that is more agnostic about its interpretation of quantum physics would probably have a smaller chance of alienating the reader.
I thought that probably the biggest problem with the book is what it omits. Application of Darwinism to complex adaptive systems is a large and important subject. It is also much easier to understand than quantum physics. I wasn't convinced that the author understood this aspect of the topic very well - otherwise, surely it would have been included.
So, overall, this is a very welcome contribution to the topic, but I think it leaves considerable scope for further light to be thrown on the subject.
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