Timothy Leary on memes

Psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary was a meme enthusiast. He discusses memes at 09:47, 14:10 and 20:40. This was back in 1989.

Update 2023: content taken down - sorry. Will see if I can find alternative sources. Here's one - from the same year:

Matthew Zimmerman: Cultural evolution of human cooperation and conflict

Matthew Zimmerman is someone who has a reasonable understanding of cultural evolution. Matt's publications include a paper on the topic of this video: Cooperation, Evolution of - Matthew Zimmerman, Richard McElreath, Peter J Richerson. I commented on the paper here.

Video introduction to memes and temes

This one is a brief and concentrated video introduction to memes and Blackmore's "temes" - in three minutes. The supplied title is: "Can Meme Haz Science?!"

Jonathan Zittrain: Memes and society

Here's Jonathan Zittrain on internet memes at ROFLCon III. The blurb for this one reads:

Jonathan Zittrain delivers the keynote address to ROFLCon III at MIT, May 4, 2012. In this talk he considers how memes arise, why some work and others don't, and what values they represent.

On Lewontin's principles

Lewontin's pioneering 1970 article "The Units of Selection" was an important milestone for universal Darwinism, and helped to promote the science of cultural evolution. Lewontin wrote:

Darwin's scheme embodies three principles (Lewontin 1):

1. Different individuals in a population have different morphologies, physiologies, and behaviors (phenotypic variation).
2. Different phenotypes have different rates of survival and reproduction in different environments (differential fitness).
3. There is a correlation between parents and offspring in the contribution of each to future generations (fitness is heritable).

These three principles embody the principle of evolution by natural selection. While they hold, a population will undergo evolutionary change. It is important to note a certain generality in the principles. No particular mechanism of inheritance is specified, but only a correlation in fitness between parent and offspring. The population would evolve whether the correlation between parent and offspring arose from Mendelian, cytoplasmic, or cultural inheritance.

Lewontin's principles boil down to variation, selection and heredity.

Lewontin offers a description of evolution by natural selection. However, other types of evolution don't require fitness to be heritable - namely genetic drift. In some respects, it would be better to have a characterization of evolution, rather than just one mechanism of evolution.

Note that Lewontin's principles don't guarantee that adaptations will accumulate. The conditions required for cumulative adaptive evolution are much more demanding. Lewontin's principles cover devolution and the loss of adaptations as much as adaptive evolution.

Lastly, Lewontin's principles tend to lead to a kind-of distorted neo-Darwinian perspective. They are a bit vague about what counts as a "parent" and what counts as an "offspring" - but they clearly include splitting, but make no reference to "joining". Merging is very important in evolution - and should be classified as a form of evolutionary change. Merging includes symbiosis and sex. The most common forms of merging involve parasitism by viruses - which are ubiquitous.

Merging has been systematically neglected by evolutionary theorists in the past. It still needs more emphasis.

Treating violence as a contagious disease

I've written about the war on violent memes before.

Now there's a TED talk about the topic:

Gary Slutkin: Let's treat violence like a contagious disease.

It reports on the successes of meme therapy targeting violence. It also discusses the difficulties in getting people to accept an epidemiological approach to violence. Of course, violence as a mind virus is pretty much part of memetics 101.

Here is the talk:

Universal Darwinism and the definition of life

When I was a child I learned in science class that distinguishing living systems from flames and crystals using a definition was hard, and that the best approach was to use a 'MR GRENS' definition - an acronym which defined life as involving: Movement, Respiration, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition, and Sensation. As a fairly intelligent child, this definition was not very satisfying.

Later in life I learned about evolutionary theory. It became clear that life was what evolved. I found this idea had been codified by J. Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary - in "The Origins of Life", p.3:

What is life? [...]

An alternative is to define as living any population of entities possessing those properties that are needed if the population is to evolve by natural selection.

Still later I learned about Universal Darwinism, and the project of Darwinizing physics. The principles of Darwinian evolution were not confined to biology. They applied to inorganic systems - propagating cracks, electrical discharges, turbulence, drainage systems, etc.

At this point it became clear that the Maynard Smith / Szathmary conception of living systems had some issues. Either practically everything was alive, or this definition of life was in need of a rethink.

The latter option seems much more attractive than attempting to change the meaning of a common concept.

I think the concept of systems that exhibit cumulative adaptive evolution is more appropriate as a definition of life. Evolution by natural selection just isn't enough to pin the concept on life-as-we-know-it.

One problem with this idea is that it arguably includes structures such as drainage basins - which evolve adaptively over extended periods. For would classify drainage basins as being "alive". This definition may not be perfect - but it seems like a step forwards. At least cumulative adaptive evolution excludes many cases of degenerative Darwinism.

Darwinian physics

Positional inheritance and velocity inheritance offer high fidelity transmission of information when physical objects split - allowing for adaptations to arise in physical systems. Copying with variation and selection in physics is a relatively simple and obvious application of Darwinism.

Darwinian physics is currently mostly an unknown topic in the mainstream. There's some Quantum Darwinism out there - but it is hard for most people to assess the worth of this material. Darwinian models apply well to fairly simple Newtonian systems. These models are more comprehensible and should be easier for most people to understand and accept.

Darwinian physics lacks some of the complications that cause social scientists to get into muddles about memes. For instance, simple physical systems have pretty undirected variation - allowing the standard neo-Darwinian assumption that mutations are random with respect to fitness to be applied - without much loss of modeling realism. The simple physical systems used as examples in Darwinian physics are easier to understand than the complex structures involved in human cultural evolution.

Darwinian physics has been worked on. Bickhard and Campbell's 2003 paper covers the topic - listing crystal growth, convection cells and catalysis as targets of explanation. D. B. Kelley's book on Universal Darwinism also covers it. However, for whatever reason, the subject area has not yet become mainstream knowledge.

Physicists are reasonable people. It seems reasonable to expect that they will regard the project of Darwinizing physics with less hostility than social scientists regard the project of Darwinizing culture.

Another reason to put energy into Darwinian physics is that physics has historically been a "high-status" science. If physicists come to accept that Universal Darwinism applies to basic inorganic physical systems, that will be a big and important feather in the cap of Darwinism.

One of the things I think that physicists will expect to see is the relationship between Universal Darwinism and the maximum entropy principle. Another is the relationship between Darwinism and the anthropic principle.

Social science is still the area of greatest social and political importance for evolutionary theory. It's the area where there's the greatest need for correct, Darwinian science. It's the area where backwards, pre-Darwinian science is doing the most damage. It's an area where religious attempts to distort science get a lot of funding. However, Darwinian physics can contribute to this project indirectly - by helping to apply increased pressure to the social scientists on multiple fronts.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2014) Darwinian physics (the video!)
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Positional inheritance
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Velocity inheritance
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Observation of the observable
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Universal Darwinism
• Kelley, D. B. (2012) The Origin of Everything
• Campbell, John (2015) Darwin Does Physics
• Campbell, John (2014) Darwin does physics
• Campbell, John (2012) Universal Darwinism (Welcome)
• Dawkins, Richard (2009) Applying Darwinian Evolution to Physics

Production and elimination diagrams

In my 2011 book on memetics, in the chapter on Universal Darwinism, I proposed that there were numerous advantages in classifying evolutionary events into the categories "production" and "elimination" instead of "selection" and "drift". The concepts are especially appropriate when teaching evolutionary theory.

My proposed division broadly matches the "creation" / "destruction" dichotomy - though we can't easily use those terms, because they are not always technically correct.

I later made a video promoting the idea titled Natural production and natural elimination.

Today, I have some new diagrams - showing how the concepts of "production" and "elimination" are orthogonal to "selection" and "drift".

These concepts are similar to those proposed by Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen at the beginning of Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution.

Hodgson and Knudsen's proposal is in chapter 1 - which is available online here. They call the intersection of selection and elimination "subset selection" and the intersection of selection and production "sucessor selection".

My proposal is better, though. Hodgson and Knudsen subdivide selection, but they don't seem to notice that precisely the same division can naturally be extended to subdivide drift as well.

Meme contexts and gene contexts

Apparently, one of the things anthropologists dislike about memes is the way they subdivide culture.

Here is Maurice Bloch in 1995:

In sum, the culture of an individual, or of a group is not a collection of bits, traits or memes, acquired from here and there, any more than a squirrel is a collection of hazelnuts.

[For context for the quote, see [here.]

My usual (patronizing) reply is that it's a basic scientific modeling technique to split thing up into pieces and analyze the pieces. It's called "reductionism" - and it is one of the most successful tools in the scientific toolkit.

Nonetheless, some anthropologists apparently think that memeticists focus too much on the bits of culture, and not enough on how the bits interact.

My way of framing this criticism (within the terminology of memetics) is that they are saying that memeticists focus too much on the memes, and not enough on meme contexts. By "meme context" I mean: everything else in the universe, apart from the meme in question.

Memetics does pay some attention to meme contexts. There's memetic hitchhiking, memetic linkage, meme-gene coevolution, selection pressures, development - and other effects.

However, I think that phrasing the criticism this way illustrates that there's a grain of truth to the accusation - and also suggests why meme contexts might be being somewhat neglected: they are large, complex and difficult to analyze.