Tim Tyler: Durham, Coevolution (review)

Transcript:

Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:

Coevolution - Genes, Culture and Human Diversity - by William Durham

This is a book on how genetic and memetic systems coevolve. It was written in 1992. At the time of its publication, it was probably the best available book on the topic.

The book is pretty good. It covers topics such as the coevolution of agriculture memes, malaria resistance genes and lactose tolerance genes. In each case, the memes and the genes evolve together and influence each other - usually with the memes leading and the genes following. The author has a good grasp of both the theory and the anthropological literature on the topic. I was also pleased to see that the book endorses and uses the "meme" terminology from Richard Dawkins.

There aren't too many flaws in the book. However, the author reviews the work of previous authors in the area - and does a pretty good job of pointing out the flaws in their work. One of the few problems that I noticed was that the author seemed to lack a good understanding of evolution within individual minds. This led to a number of incorrect statements relating to alleged differenes between cultural and organic evolution. However, for the most part the author focused on areas where the effects of this problem were minimized.

One slight oddity about the book is its subject matter. Most of the previous academic books in the same general area had focused on gene-meme interactions. This book has the exact same focus. Retrospectively, it seems as though academics were attempting to master the more complex and difficult topic of gene-meme coevolution over deep time before they had properly pinned down a decent theory of how memes coevolve with their host's brains in the short term.

A few theories could account for this curious progression: perhaps academics like to work on hard problems; perhaps they like to show off; or perhaps they were copying each other. The term gene-culture coevolution was first used by academics without much sign of understanding of cultural evolution as a Darwinian system. The term stuck and subsequent authors continued to work in the same area. This led to a curious bias in the field, where short-term cultural evolution itself was practically ignored, and the focus was on how genes and culture interacted over deep time. The focus of this field was events in the distant past. By contrast, cultural evolution itself is powerfully relevant to modern times - and can easily be studied using natural experiments and laboratory experiments. What it would have been nice to have seen in, the 1990s, was theorists escaping from the rut that academia had got itself into, and exploring the relatively uncharted territory of how culture evolves. However, this book didn't to do that - and instead ploughed deeper into the existing furrow - of how cultural variation influences genetic evolution.

Another omission from the book is meme-meme coevolution. A modern theory of coevolution relating to humans would normally include memes, DNA genes and ideas copied within minds that are not socially-transmitted. By my count these three basic types of copied entity give rise to six possible kinds of coevolution between quite different types of structure. This book only considers the case of meme-gene coevolution. However, there's quite a bit more to coevolution than that.

Nonetheless, for 1992, this book seems quite advanced. A lot of effort evidently went into its production. The book is fairly clear and readable. It was a promising start - which makes the field's subsequent slow progress more puzzling. Perhaps not enough people bothered to read it.

Enjoy,

Daniel Dennett on HARDtalk

• HARDtalk - Professor Daniel Dennett Part 1
• HARDtalk - Professor Daniel Dennett Part 2

Daniel Dennett: Religion is like 'the common cold'

The interviewer tries to lead Daniel on a bit here.

This is an excerpt from the HardTalk interview.

Universal Darwinism - proposed book cover

After my forthcoming Memes book, I'm planning a Universal Darwinism book.

Today I designed a prototype cover. Here is the idea:

Astute observers might notice some similarities with the cover of my 2011 book on memetics.

Susan Blackmore - short videos about memes

Here is Susan Blackmore in quite a number of short videos about memes:

• What are memes?
• The idea of memes
• Memes and the internet
• Memes today
• Avuncular advice from Daniel Dennett
• Richard Dawkins writes a foreword for The Meme Machine
• Imitating and memes are human-only features
• Serious illness and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea

These are all probably from around the year 2000.

Meme literacy

Understanding memes is basic to scientific literacy in the modern world - where memes are ubiquitous. However, due to a turbulent and muddy history, knowledge of memes and memetics is currently largely confined to a scientific elite. Large numbers of people are confused about the issue of how culture evolves - even though we are over 150 years since Darwin's landmark publication.

Because an understanding of memes is so important, I propose that we should have a term to refer to knowledge and understanding of what memes are - and how they evolve. "Meme literacy" is my proposal.

Those with a reasonable understanding of memes are meme literate. The term meme illeterate sounds a bit insulting - so maybe we could call the world's meme sceptics and critics meme challenged.

Tim Tyler: Boyd & Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (review)

Transcript:

Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:

Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson

This book was published in 1985. It is the best book on cultural evolution from the 1980s. It builds on top of earlier work by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, who had outlined a similar approach, in less detail in 1981. Boyd and Richerson do a better job than previous authors did of placing their material in its historical context, and offered a better review of other related material.

However, the book has quite a few problems:

It is full of densely-presented mathematical models. I think that these hinder more than they help. Maybe some people will be impressed by them, but I'm not really among them.

The book introduces terminology for cultural evolution. Much of this has not dated well. It uses the term "guided variation" - where, these days, most people would say "directed mutation". The book uses the term "biased transmission", whereas these days we would just say "cultural selection" or just "selection". Hardly anyone uses the term "biased transmission" these days. The book uses the term "cultural parents" and the term "cultural offspring" - but these are not used refer to memes, but rather to their associated hosts. This does not seem like good terminology to me.

The book is almost entirely free of symbiology. This is unfortunate, since any sensible modern theory of cultural evolution must necessarily be heavily based on symbiology. They do mention the concept at one point. They say:

Horizontal transmission is analogous in some ways to the transmission of a pathogen and Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman have used epidemiological models as a starting point for their development of theory. The item of culture being spread horizontally acts like a microbe that reproduces and spreads rapidly because it is "infective" and has a short generation length compared to the biological generation length of the "host". Fads and fashions and technical innovations are familiar examples.

This material is fine - as far as it goes. However three sentences is not really adequate coverage for this concept. You really need to cover cultural parasites, mutualisms, immunity, arms races - and so forth. Many biologists were still getting to grips with the significance of symbiology in the 1980s. However Cloak and Dawkins had previously managed to present a symbiology-aware version of cultural evolution in the 1970s. Boyd and Richerson failed to pick up on this. What do they offer instead? They say:

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 not a good approach. It is like saying: to study the evolution of smallpox, we should focus on the human victims. The problem with this is that insufficient attention is given to the smallpox virus. You could say that smallpox exhibits horizontal and oblique transmission between its hosts. It exhibits "biased transmission" - due to different levels of resistance from host immune systems. These processes can all be modeled. While this sort of approach would result in some progress, it seems like a fundamentally misguided way of viewing the situation.

Cultural information exists apart from its human hosts. As well as spending some of its time residing in host brains. It exists in libraries, on discs, inside computer memory, in air vibrations and as radio waves. Libraries can burn down, sounds can suffer from interference, and compute memory exhibits senescence. Culture partly evolves outside its primary hosts. The result is a symbiosis between two different kinds of living and evolving systems. If you focus on observable events in the lives of individuals, you are likely to miss all this material.

Though this book presents a closer link between evolutionary processes in the organic and cultural realms than most previous authors managed, Boyd and Richerson don't really take the links far enough.

The main problems seem to be that, at this stage in their thinking, they didn't appreciate symbiology properly, and they didn't understand that evolution happens within minds, during individual learning - as well as between them, during social learning.

The authors have a section at the very start of their book comparing genetic and cultural evolution. They argue that humans get genes from their parents, but their memes come from a range of individuals. However, humans get viral and bacterial genes from a wide range of individuals as well. This is not really a valid difference between genetic and memetic variation. They argue that meme lifespans are different from host lifespans. However, this is true for DNA genes inside parasites too, and isn't a special feature of cultural evolution. They argue that humans get their genes at birth, while they acquire their culture gradually. However, humans acquire DNA genes gradually as well - it is just that these genes are sometimes inside parasites. They argue that cultural transmission occurs after some development has taken place. Yet this too also happens when acquiring parasites. They argue that cultural variation may be affected by life events, and then transmitted to others. Yet again, this happens with parasites. If you consume antibiotics, you may subsequently transmit antibiotic-resistant bacteria that you have acquired during your lifespan to others.

Boyd and Richerson's list of differences between cultural and organic evolution seems almost entirely invalid. This would not matter, except for the fact that much of the project of studying cultural evolution revolves around the issue of what the differences are. Where cultural and organic evolution exhibit the same dynamics, we can mostly use existing models. The rest of the book is largely devoted to mathematical models of the differences they identified.

While it would be interesting if researchers needed a broad array of new mathematics to model cultural evolution, for the most part, the dynamics of cultural evolution are largely shared with epidemiology and symbiology - and models from these fields can be adjusted to deal with culture with relatively minor tweaks - to cover phenomena such as conformist transmission which have few parallels in the organic realm. What needed doing in the 1980s was strengthening and expanding the models of epidemiology and symbiology to cover culture. Instead what we got was an attempt to drive a mathematical wedge between our models of cultural and organic evolution.

In the book, Boyd and Richerson put in a plea for simple mathematical models. Can their approach be excused on the grounds that they are simplifying? Not really. It isn't "simpler" to develop many unnecessary mathematical models based on illusory differences. Rather it results in increased complication through the proliferation of models. Nor is it simpler to only focus on one symbiont in a symbiotic relationship. The result is a byzantine maze of horizontal and oblique transmission vectors. Best to recognise both partners in the relationship and stick to two types of lineage with pure-vertical transmission within each of them. This is what is done with parasites and symbionts in the organic realm. The cultural realm is no different in this respect.

Overall, this was an important book. It probably wasn't as influential it could have been - since its mathematical models and technical style probably presented a barrier for many readers. Still, most modern workers in the field do cite it, recognising its pioneering role. Since its publication, Boyd and Richerson have continued plugging away at the topic. They have produced a steady stream of papers on the subject - including many valuable ones - along with a few more muddled ones. Despite its virtues, this book's problems - or perhaps the perspective of its authors - seems to have resulted in a bit of a hangover for cultural evolution within academia. Dawkins had clearly presented a framework which was more correct in a number of respects many years before. However, over time, these two camp's relationship increasingly turned into a rivalry. Instead of a synthesis, the result seemed to be tribalism and conflict.

The book was probably the first detailed treatment in academia of maladaptive forms of culture - the insight that cloak and Dawkins originally presented. It pointed out that kin selection apples to memes. It applied runaway selection processes to memes. It modeled memetic conformity. It discussed the possibility of memes sterilizing their hosts and diverting their reproductive resources away from gene propagation and into meme propagation. Overall, there is much of interest in it.

Enjoy,

Memetic engineering

The term "Memetic Engineering" refers to deliberative meme creation, modification and combination. It was named after genetic engineering.

Many memes and memeplexes are engineered - rather than being the product of unconscious selective forces.

Engineered memes are used in marketing, advertising, entertainment, politics, warfare, religion and education - among other fields.

Techniques

Many techniques are used while engineering memes. Prominent among them are:

• Memetic hitchhiking;
• Random and deliberative recombination;
• Random and deliberative mutation;
• Retromemes;

One of the techniques used in genetic engineering involves recombinant DNA. Memetic engineering similarly features recombinant memes.

As with practically any engineering project, memetic engineering is likely to involve an iterative generate and test cycle - as well as use of evaluation under simulation.

Memes interact with the human brain - specialists in psychology are often involved. Many modern memes also interact with computers - and modern memetic engineers often use computer networks to distribute their products.

Memes typically face prepared memetic immune systems. Penetration can be assisted by finding holes in the defenses, disabling them or taking advantage of naturally-weakened states.

Once memes are engineered, they are distributed using seeding. One technique there is big seeding.

Examples

An early example of a deliberately-engineered meme was described in Wired magazine - in the form of Mike Godwin's Meme, Counter-meme article.

Another example is music videos. Gangnam Style was memetically engineered - and now has over 2 billion views - an indication of its success.

Web sites

Within the last decade various memetic engineering sites have sprung up associated with internet memes - among them the imageboard 4chan and a wide range of image macro generators.

Double-edged sword

Like most powerful technologies, memetic engineering is a positive force which also has significant negative potential. Social engineers could use memetic engineering to create a benevolent utopia - as envisaged by B. F. Skinner. However, today, memeticallly engineered pathogens currently cause a significant quantity of damage. In particular the obseity epidemic, addictive drugs, pornography, movies and computer games represent widespread memetically-engineered plagues.

In some areas, indoctrination targetted at children uses memetically-engineered propaganda to turn kids into soldiers. In other cases, memetic engineering is used to recruit new cult members. Memes can have a dark side - and engineered memes are not excluded from this.

Reputation

Genetic engineering has acquired a dubious reputation. With memetic engineering the situation is less clear. Few object to engineered memes on the grounds that they are engineered - since so many memes are engineered.

Sometimes engineered memes are inferior to their naturally-evolved counterparts. For example, Esperanto is a memetically engineered language. It was designed - rather than evolving over a long period of time - and has a very regular grammar. However it is widely recognized that Esperanto sucks. This situation mirrors some of the objections that are made to genetic engineered products.

Eumemics

Much as Eugenics is a movement based on improving the human genes in the gene pool, eumemics is a movement based on improving the memes in the meme pool. As with eugenics there are "positive" and "negative" forms of eumemics. However unlike eugenics, eumemics seems relatively uncontroversial.

Prevalence

While genetically engineered pathogens are rare and cause little damage, memetically engineered pathogens are common, largely unregulated, and cause damage in a massive scale. While there are some attempts to restrict addictive drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine are widely available and many millions are addicted.

Consciousness spectrum

Memetic engineering can be seen as one end of a spectrum, that runs from natural selection, through unconscious selection and domestication to engineering.

Books (fact)

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007) - Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Contagious: Why Things Catch On - Jonah Berger (2013);
• The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies - Dan Zarrella (2013);
• Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas - Dan Zarrella (2011);
• Walden Two - B. F. Skinner (1948);
• Beyond Freedom and Dignity - B. F. Skinner (1971);
• Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches - Nicholas DiFonzo
• The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future - Riane Eisler;

Books (fiction)

• Orwell, George - 1984 (1948);
• Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange (1986);
• Asimov, Isaac - The Foundation Novels;
• Gurdjieff, George - Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson;
• Stephenson, Neil - Snow Crash;
• Stephenson, Neil - The Diamond Age;
• Chambers, Robert W. - The King in Yellow;

References

• Wikipedia (2013-) Memetic_engineering;
• David Hales (1996)Memetic Engineering and cultural evolution;
• Michael Wilson (1993) Memetic Engineering - PsyOps and Viruses for the Wetware;
• Mike Godwin (1994) Meme, Counter-meme;
• James Gardner (1996) Memetic Engineering;
• Dan Zarrella (2008) How to Make and Spread Rumors;
• M. Alan Kazlev (2001) Memetic Engineering, Memgineering;
• By Alex Burns (2001)Memetic Engineering;
• Tim Tyler (2012) The science of intelligent design - ;
• Tim Tyler (2010) Military memetics;
• Aaron Muszalski (2010) Weaponizing Cultural Viruses;
• Jeremy J. Whitlock (2002) Memetic engineering and public acceptance
• Rushkoff, D. (1996) Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture;

Cultural evolution's scientific lag

The "gene" revolution in evolutionary biology came after the discovery of the molecular basis of DNA genes - and around the time that kin selection came on the scene. Probably both events were significant facilitators of the revolution.

Cultural kin selection has been fairly rarely mentioned until recently, and there's a lot to say about it - as I am finding out by writing by book chapters about cultural nepotism, and cultural eusociality.

Kin selection - more than most aspects of biology - forces you to adopt the genes' eye view, in order to understand which behaviours are likely to promote which genes. It's the same with cultural kin selection: you're really forced to adopt the meme's eye view - in order to understand what is going on.

Another factor that parallels the situation in the organic realm is group selection enthusiasm. In the 1960s, many of the same topics that were eventually modeled with kin selection were attributed to group selection. When kin selection came along, with its explicit quantitative models of relatedness - it more or less ate group selection's lunch. I expect a broadly similar phenomenon to take place in the realm of cultural evolution.

This picture of parallels between the sciences of cultural and organic evolution puts academic cultural evolution some 40 years behind the organic evolution. Other pointers suggest that sort of lag as well - for instance the poor understanding of symbiology. Of course, in some respects things are both more and less advanced. Cultural evolution still lags behind where evolutionary theory was the 1930s - in some respects - while a few individual pioneers have raced on ahead.

The good news is that cultural evolution seems to be slowly catching up. Science done on internet time looks a little different. In the last five years, the picture of the field has changed dramatically.

Peter Richerson and Paul Ekman: Evolution of human communication