Design in nature

I haven't yet weighed in on the controversy over whether adaptations represent real design or merely the appearance of design. Dennett and Bejan claim it is real design - calling it "design without a designer". Dennett writes:

The work of exploring the grand unity of Design Space is distributed between the slow ratcheting of natural selection of genes, and the swift trial-and-error explorations of individual brains (and their numerous artifactual exploration vehicles), so I will continue to use the umbrella term “design” to cover it all.

...and...

I have gone to considerable lengths over the years to show how “design-without-a-designer” is no more a contradiction in terms than “splittable atom”

Bejan complains, in Design in Nature:

Design may be the foundation of the built world, but it is anathema when the conversation turns to nature. Its six letters have become the four-letter word of biology and physics.

By contrast, Richard Dawkins says much adaptation represents merely the appearance of design. He calls many adaptations, designoid. Dawkins wrote:

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs).

"Design" is an ordinary English word - so this is mostly an issue for dictionaries. My reading of the dictionary is that Dawkins is correct - while Dennett and Bejan are not. Should we make an exception, and try and redefine the term "design" - or give it a special scientific meaning? I don't see much of a case for that. We already have multiple words for the "with-or-without a deigner" category, in particular the terms "adaptated" and "optimized". These are seem like perfectly good words to me.

References

• Richard Dawkins Design and Designoid Objects
• Adrian Bejan Design in Nature
• Tim Lewens Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere

Axonal and dendritic growth tip selection

I covered axonal and dendritic growth tip selection in my 2011 book on memetics. They are important forms of natural selection in the brain.

These days, animated scanned tissue images are available - which illustrate what the process looks like:

These images were originally from http://www.neuralimages.org/.

Memes and omega three fatty acids

Historically memes needed more real estate. They were dependent on human brain matter. To grow, they needed bigger brains - and more of them. Eventually they got both of these, but it took them a while.

Brains are expensive organs. One of the main things they are made of is fat, which provides the myelin sheaths around axons, and gives the brain its whitish appearance.

Among the necessary fats are omega three fatty acids. These are though to be one of the main limiting nutrients in brain growth and development.

These days our food is often fortified with omega three fats. However, in the ancestral environment, good sources of these fats were not so easy to come by. Probably most of our more recent ancestors obtained many of their omega three fats by eating other animals. They hunted them with the assistance of spears, gutted them with the assistance of knives, and cooked them with the assistance of fire. Memes contributed at every stage to feeding those ancestral brains stoked with the fats the memes needed to sustain themselves.

The idea that human evolution was facilitated by lifting nutrient constraints is the theme of the book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and the Future by Michael Crawford and David Marsh.

Humans are water-friendly apes. They fish and eat seafood. Various explanations have been offered for this, but the most obvious one is that humans acquired memetic adaptations to watery environments - involving swimming, fishing and seafood consumption. No doubt the added seafood helped provide the resources to fuel the development of the brains of our ancestors.

Memes and baby slings

Baby slings were probably an important technological development that facilitated the expansion of the human brain as our distant ancestors evolved.

Baby slings provided an external womb - in which immature infants could continue their development in reasonable safety and security. The innovation broadly resembles a marsupial's pouch.

Sling manufacturing techniques are culturally-transmitted today - and probably this was always the case.

Baby slings are ancient - the date of their arrival has been traced via the study of lineages of associated lice.

Baby slings probably reduced infant mortality, providing a strong survival advantage to newborns of mothers with the relevant memes. The relaxed selection pressure on cranial size turned out to be a highly significant phenomenon for all memes. Larger brains meant more space for the memes. By providing the technology to facilitate the growth of the human brain, the memes had come across a way of dramatically expanding their own living quarters.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2011) Big brains as meme nests
• Tyler, Tim (2011) The big brain as a meme nest
• Tyler, Tim (2012) The external womb
• Caldwel, Duncan (2008) The Baby-Sling Hypothesis for Human Evolution
• Taylor, Timothy (2010) The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution
• Taylor, Timothy (2010) Slings & arrows

Stuart Kauffman on memes

Stuart Kauffman is a famous complexity theorist. Along with many other pioneers in studying complexity, Kauffman claimed ground from Darwinism, proposing self-organizing systems as an alternative to Darwinian evolution when it came to "the origins of order". These days, Universal Darwinism is slowly clawing much of that turf back again.

Stuart Kauffman once made some critical comments about memes. He wrote:

the concept of meme, and its descent with modification, is taken as a (or perhaps the) central conceptual contribution to the evolution of human culture. But the conceptual framework is so limited as to be nearly trivial. Like NeoDarwinism, it suffers from the inability to account for the source of new forms, new memes. Moreover, mere descent with modification is a vastly oversimplified image and understanding of how in cultural and technological evolution, new concepts, artifacts, legal systems, modes of governance, and modes of coevolving organizations at different level have come into existence in the past three million years, of how culture continues to transform today.

"Descent with modification" is an incomplete characterization of evolution - since most evolution also includes merging. Merging is very important in both genetic and cultural evolution. So: criticising the phrase "descent with modification" on these is reasonable - but it doesn't seem to have much to do with memes.

As for the alleged "inability to account for the source of new forms" - that's a vague and weak critique of modern evolutionary theory.

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Update 2014-10-08: More critical comments from S.K. here: A Holistic, Non-algorithmic View of Cultural Evolution.

Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

The blurb reads:

Construct a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed, and then analyze that corpus using advanced software and the investigatory curiosity of thousands, and you get something called "Culturomics," a field in which cultural trends are represented quantitatively.

In this talk Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel — co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google — show how culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.

I think the term "culturomics" should probably die. It isn't a good word.

Susan Blackmore: Meme machine

Here's Susan Blackmore on memes in 2013:

Nicholas Humphrey: The Family that Walks on All Fours

This is a documentary called "The Family that Walks on All Fours". Nicholas Humphrey is the presenter. It presents evidence that relates to a theory that I covered in my 2011 book on Memetics - that the distinctively human bipedal gait is partly culturally-transmitted.

This is an important hypothesis for students of memetics, since it places cultural transmission at the origin of our species. Maybe memes were present in a big way from the beginning. Maybe memes contributed to human speciation via symbiogenesis.

The documentary covers a family with multiple individuals that never learned to walk. By the end of the documentary, a number of them learn to do so, via social learning. These individuals are mentally handicapped - but it still adds to the evidence on the topic from feral children.

Another family that Walks on All Fours has also been found.

Observation selection classified

Observation selection effects can be classified as follows:

Observation selection includes selection between observers and selection within observers.

Selection within observers could be further subcategorized into unconscious filtering and deliberative filtering.

Unconscious filtering has dynamic and static components. Static unconscious filtering includes perceptual limitations.

Selection of observations within observers is rarely seen in the context of observation selection - and it seems to be a neglected topic. Sometimes observation selection is used as a synonym of observer selection. This seems like bad terminology to me - it's important to distinguish between these different phenomena.

Examples

• The availability heuristic;
• Attention;
• Psychological disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD can affect the brain's filtering mechanisms;
• Some types of drug can be used to disable some of the mind's perceptual filtering mechanisms;

Ernst Mayr on memes

Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins and his gene-centric view of evolution. He wrote in The objects of selection:

Dawkins (19) has introduced the term “meme” for the entities subject to selection in cultural evolution. It seems to me that this word is nothing but an unnecessary synonym of the term “concept.” Dawkins apparently liked the word meme owing to its similarity to the word gene. In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts. Concepts are not restricted to an individual or to a generation, and they may persist for long periods of time. They are able to evolve.

By long convention, memes are socially transmitted - whereas concepts and ideas need not be. All memes are concepts - whereas not all concepts are memes. This simple observation destroys the criticism that "meme" is a synonym of "concept". "Meme" and "concept" refer to different sets of things - and have done so since 1976.

Memetic terminology offers a benefit which the term "concept" does not. As I put it in 2008:

One good thing about the term "meme" is its link to the term "gene" - which immediately conjours up the intended association. The term "concept" does not do this. This association helps people to grasp the basic idea of cultural evolution.

Of course, we still need the idea of conceptual evolution - since individually-learned ideas evolve too.