Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

Jonathan has a book out on this topic: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

The above video is mostly about group selection. Memes get briefly mentioned at 07:00 - Jonathan says:

Many scientists who study religion take this view: the "New Atheists", for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, parasitic memes that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well, let me show you.

That's when the material about group selection begins.

Jonathan says:

In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection. This idea has been very controversial over the last 40 years, but it is about to make a major comeback this year especially after E. O. Wilson's book comes out in April making a very strong case that we and several other species are products of group selection.

Does Jonathan understand that the "new" group selection makes all the same predictions as inclusive fitness theory - which has been orthodoxy in evolutionary biology for decades? If so, that doesn't come across in this video. Kin selection doesn't even get mentioned - which seems to be pretty ridiculous in a talk about why humans are so other-oriented. Indeed, from this talk, it isn't clear whether Jonathan Haidt actually understands the issue he is discussing very well.

I notice that - like me, Jerry Coyne is not too impressed.

I also notice that the Jonathan Haidt page on Wikipedia says he was given the 2001 Templeton Prize in "Positive Psychology" - a hundred thousand US dollars.

Necrotrophic memes

Some memes are "necrotrophic" - meaning that they kill their hosts. Keith Henson once called the carriers of necrotrophic memes "memeoids".

Patriotic fervour and suicide bombing are examples of memes which are "to die for" - memes which have the potential to kill.

A common complaint about the possibility of necrotrophic memes is: "but surely the hosts would evolve defenses".

Peter Turchin expresses this complaint - in connection with deaths of volunteers in warfare - as follows:

Yes, “memes made me do it” is one possible response from Richard Dawkins and his followers. It’s a variant of what might be called the “great deception” hypothesis, e.g. Marxist explanations how people are fooled to fight and die for the sake of the ruling class’ interests. The problem is that fighting in war has very significant fitness consequences (roughly one-quarter of male deaths in small-scale societies is due to warfare). So by the “selfish gene” logic such fierce selection should result in the evolution of very effective resistance to such lethal memes.

There are a number of reasons why, in fact, such defenses do not arise that frequently in practice:

• Rapid cultural evolution - As with lethal diseases, deleterious memes typically have a shorter generation time and evolve more quickly than their hosts.

• Greater investment - Most lethal memes are memetically engineered by powerful agents. The memes responsible for the obesity epidemic are engineered by large corporations. The memes responsible for patriotic fervour are engineered by governments. The memes responsible for suicide bombing are the products of powerful and ancient religions. However, all these types of meme target individuals - who cannot afford comparable expenditure on defenses.

• Frequency-dependent selection - Memes that kill humans are not that common.

• Antagonistic pleiotropy - An "obey authority meme" might be useful most of the time - except when the authority happens to be sending you off to war.

• Only one chance - Fatal memes sometimes offer restricted opportunities to learn about their hazards. If they kill their hosts reliably, then conventional trial-and-error learning mechanisms may offer relatively little protection against them.

• Embryological tangles - Some of the memetic immune system is probably innate. That component has difficulty in identifying specific memes, since it must work through embryology. A "obey authority meme" might be generally positive while an "obey the general" meme might be generally negative - but it may be difficult to distinguish between them for a system which must manipulate its products via the tangles of embryology.

However, I don't mean to criticize the memetic immune system too much. Those with suppressed memetic immunity probably die from necrotrophic meme infections quite a bit more often.

The Social Evolution Forum

For those who have yet to encounter it, the Social Evolution Forum is a relatively new blog which discusses the evolution of society and culture. It seems to be administered by Peter Turchin and David Sloane Wilson. Those are two major group selection enthusiasts.

Peter Turchin's latest post there enquires after the alternatives to group selection - challenging visitors to explain deaths on behalf of unrelated strangers during warfare - if the humans (or their memes) are not acting "for the good of the group".

I attempt to keep the discussion straight in the comments there.

Peter Turchin's post Cooperation in Humans: Is It Really ‘Strong Reciprocity’? is another area where I attempt to straighten things out in the comments.

Daniel Dennet speaks at Creative Innovation

Professor Daniel Dennett, one of the world's leading philosophers and cognitive scientist talks about the 'Prospective gains and losses from the information explosion'. Cultural evolution is discussed in briefly the first three minutes.

Memetic takeover dramatized

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.

Cultural symbiology bibliography

Most memeticists understand cultural symbiology - but who else does?

Here's a provisional list of related works (in date order):

• Cloak, Ted (1975) Is a cultural ethology possible?
• Dawkins, Richard (1976) The Selfish Gene
• Kortlandt, Frederik (1983) A parasitological view of non-constructible sets
• Delius, Juan D. (1989) Of mind memes and brain bugs, a natural history of culture. In W. A. Koch (Ed) The Nature of Culture. Bochum, Germany, Bochum Publications. 26-79.
  
• Delius, Juan D. (1990) On the Natural History of Culture: Gene and Meme. In: Zeitschrift fr Semiotik; 1990, 12, 4, 307-321.
  
• Delius, Juan D. (1991) The nature of culture. In: "The Tinbergen Legacy". Edited by Dawkins, Halliday, and Dawkins. Chapman and Hall: New York .
  
• Dennett, Daniel (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea
• Lynch, Aaron (1996) Thought Contagion
• Brodie, Richard (1996) Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
• John Watkins (1998) Towards a reconsideration of social evolution: symbiosis and its implications for economics
• Ianneo, Francesco (1998) The Symbiotic Mind. A Memetic Perspective on the Human Consciousness.
• Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine
• Cullen, Ben (2000) Contagious ideas: on evolution, culture, archaeology, and cultural virus theory
• Hull, David (2001) Science and Selection
• van Driem, George (2001) The Language Organism. The Leiden theory of language evolution.
• J. M. Balkin (2003) Cultural Software - A Theory of Ideology.
• Kortlandt, Frederik Herman Henri (2003) The origin and nature of the linguistic parasite
• van Driem, George (2005) The Origin of Language - Symbiosism and Symbiomism
• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) Evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language – taking symbiogenesis seriously.
• Gontier, Nathalie (2007) Universal symbiogenesis: a genuine alternative to universal selectionist accounts.
• van Driem, George (2007) Symbiosism, Symbiomism and the Leiden definition of the meme
• van Driem, George (2008) The language organism: Parasite or mutualist?
• Leigh, Hoyle (2010) Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness: Toward an Integrative Model
• Changizi, Mark (2011) Harnessed - How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
• Tyler, Tim (2011) Memetics - Memes and the Science of Cultural Evolution
• Gontier, Nathalie (2012) Introducing universal symbiogenesis.

Boyd and Richerson also briefly acknowledge cultural symbiology in a number of their works. Most prominently in:

• Boyd and Richerson (2005) Not by Genes Alone.

In some of his articles (e.g. here) Geroge van Driem, traces back the history of cultural symbiology to 19th century linguists. There's an associated video of that here.

Related articles

• Why no cultural creatures in academia?
• Cultural organisms
• Cultural creatures

Nathalie Gontier - resources

Nathalie Gontier is a researcher interested in evolutionary epistemology. She has a background in both philosophy and anthropology. Her main research interests are philosophy of evolutionary biology - symbiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium and abiogenesis - evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language.

She's one of a small minority of researchers who actually understands the role of symbiosis in cultural evolution. Cultural evolution researchers are rare. Those who are up to speed with the significance of symbiosis are also uncommon. The intersection of these groups seems to be very small sometimes - but Nathalie is one of the researchers with a foot firmly in both groups.

Nathalie's home page is here.

Here papers on the topic are great. I particularly like her 2007 and 2012 pieces on "universal symbiogenesis". Here's a few of her papers:

Papers

• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) Evolutionary Epistemology. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  
• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) An epistemological inquiry into the ‘what is language’ question and the ‘what did language evolve for’ question. In: Cangelosi, A., Smith, A., & Smith, K. The evolution of language: proceedings of the 6th international conference (EVOLANG 6), pp. 107-114. London: World Scientific.
  
• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) Evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language – taking symbiogenesis seriously.
• Gontier, Nathalie (2007) Universal symbiogenesis: a genuine alternative to universal selectionist accounts.
• Gontier, Nathalie (2010) Darwin's legacy
• Gontier, Nathalie (2012) Introducing universal symbiogenesis

Cultural common descent

Evolutionary theory holds that organisms exhibit common descent - that they arose from a common ancestor.

A basic question that arises in cultural evolution is: is there cultural common descent. Are all the memes in the world related?

Cultural common descent is a problematical idea. For one thing, different creatures may well have came up with cultural transmission independently - e.g. humans and songbirds.

Even if we confine the discussion to humans - there are creole languages out there and other kinds of de novo culture.

Interestingly, lack of common descent in cultural evolution would pretty-much destroy the concept of common descent - when applied to the evolutionary process as a whole. Perhaps think about that for a moment.

However, novel memes which have no cultural parents - in a sense - could be considered to be the "descendants" of the creatures that created them - their "mind children" - so to speak. In that case, the common ancestor of all memes would be a primitive organic creature somewhere.

I think it is better to adopt this interpretation than to sacrifice common descent. Memes are another case of life coming from life - and do not represent a form of de novo creation.

Others may find the idea of organic creatures being the ancestors of memes impossible to swallow - and prefer to embrace the idea of de novo creation of memes. Those people would have to reject the doctrine of common descent, and embrace a view of the history of life that permits multiple origins.

Does cultural ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?

In a recent article titled: "A Simple Rule for Cultural Evolution", Samuel Arbesman gets in on the issue of whether "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in cultural evolution - in the Wired science "social dimension" blog.

Samuel starts out by calling the idea "completely wrong" in the organic realm - which seems a bit strong.

The answer Samuel gives for the cultural realm is that it's not always wrong in the case of cultural evolution - saying that "cultural ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

However, unfortunately, it turns out that Samuel isn't talking about cultural development processes at all! An example of a cultural development process would be where a recipe turns into a cake - i.e. memes turn into meme products. Instead, Samuel is talking about the process of acculturation - the way in which humans acquire memes during their own developmental process. Describing this process as being analogous to ontogeny in cultural evolution seems to be pretty misleading to me. That's the ontogeny associated with the human genome going on there - not a form of cultural ontogeny! I don't think that Samuel means what he says...

Anyhow, at least he is asking questions about the topic. This coverage arises from a paper by Alex Mesoudi titled Variable Cultural Acquisition Costs Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution - which I've previously given feedback on here.

Mesoudi doesn't make this mistake in the original article. Instead he says:

Individual ontogeny recapitulates cultural history for mathematical knowledge: children learn mathematical concepts in the same order that they were first invented historically.

That seems fine to me - he's talking about an individual human child. Though as an aside we do see computer programming before calculus these days.

Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny in the cultural realm? Probably less so than in the organic realm. The reason ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny at all is because developmental processes build on top of prototypes without going back to refactor them out of existence. There's also layering processes in development. So, for example, the "reptilian" brain appears in mammal embryos before the neocortex does - a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. The same kind of thing happens in the cultural realm - occasionally - and it's probably a universal evolutionary process. A skyscraper starts out looking a bit like a house (which was invented first) - because it is like a house with more layers added on top. However, ontogeny probably recapitulates phylogeny less frequently in the cultural realm - because engineers are so often involved there - and they are often better than natural selection at refactoring - and eliminating the sort of signs of phylogenetic history that residual prototypes and developmental layering often depend on.

The science of intelligent design

Memetics positions intelligent design as an important source of mutational change, and as a guider of recombinatory change in cultural evolution.

The upper levels of the Tower of Optimisation involve engineering - and thus intelligent design.

Of course, the role of intelligent agents in guiding evolution is not exactly new. Sexual selection and The Baldwin Effect provide clear mechanisms where the choices of intelligent agents can go on to influence the course of evolution.

However, intelligent design and engineering are new evolutionary forces. They are also relatively complex and difficult to understand.

There have been some attempts to break intelligent agents down into more comprehensible pieces - and to model intelligence as a Darwinian process. When that can be done, variation will no doubt be found to arise by a range of simpler processes - which will ultimately arise from basic physical processes. However, these kinds of model are not yet finished - and they don't yet work. Today there isn't much of an alternative to modelling choices made by intelligent agents at a high level - using primitives such as "agent" and "preferences".

Basically, this means that we need a science of intelligent design - to help us understand the evolution of culture. Of course, in some respects we already have this - science studies various aspects of engineers and engineering. However, there are a number of significant areas that remain not so well studied.

Designed entities have somewhat different properties from designoid ones. They show different kinds of evolutionary mistakes. Designers have better refactoring capabilities than simpler forms of evolution. They also typically apply different fitness criteria to their productions. However, designers have limited access to molecular nanotechnology - and they don't yet have access to much of nature's parallelism.

As a result of these kinds of factors, mobile phones and cats are very different kinds of entity. Also, the evolution of the mobile phone is systematically different from the evolution of the cat - though both exhibit the key evolutionary hallmark of gradualism.

So far, there hasn't been much scientific study of these kinds of differences. We haven't had a proper science of cultural evolution - so comparing cats with mobile phones has probably seemed pointless to most people. However, now, things are different. We now understand the importance of intelligent design to cultural evolution - and so next we need to study it.

I have long debated how to present the issue of intelligent design to the community of evolutionary biologists - without provoking a memetic immune reaction and immediate rejection. Intelligent design is commonly - but falsely - assumed to be a realm of boundless crackpottery.

One possibility is to call it something else. Engineering design is the most obvious alternative. However, I think that intelligent design is a better name. I'm not the only one to use it - for example, here is Daniel Dennett:

We are the first intelligent designers in the tree of life.

Here is Richard Dawkins, speaking at the Reason Rally on March 24th 2012:

Now at last, finally, after four billion years of evolution, we have the opportunity to bring some intelligent design into the world. We need intelligent design. We need it to intelligently design our morals, our ethics, our politics, our society. We need to intelligently design the way we run our lives.

I don't think that common use of the term "intelligent design" as shorthand for the idea of intelligent design of nature by god should be too much of an issue. That is indeed a type of intelligent design - or at least it would be if it actually existed. Yes, there's the issue of search term pollution. However, I think that it is more important to use the right words, than to bother too much about any squatters who are currently using them.

I think it's also useful to be clear about what Intelligent Design is not. It's not this:

Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose.

That's part of the subject area - but there's more to it than that. Science is about building models and making predictions; it's not just about recognition and classification.

Intelligent design surely is surely involved in genetic engineering and memetic engineering.

intelligent design may not have been an important force in the past, but it looks set to be an extremely important force in the future. We should start to study it properly now.