Hashtag gestural meme

OK, this is a current internet meme. My excuse is that it's a meta meme. Or at least it's about hashtags, twitter and social media. The blurb reads:

Jimmy Fallon & Justin Timberlake show you what a Twitter conversation sounds like in real life.

The video features a "gestural meme" that I hadn't seen before - the gesture for hashtags. Probably like a few other people who have watched this video, I might be using that one myself in the future.

The video has news coverage - here's CNET (Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon mock #hashtagmania) and TheVerge (Watch this: Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon show us what hashtag abuse really sounds like).

The divisive influence of cultural variation

Cultural variation can act to obscure genetic differences - or to magnify them.

On the left we see culture amplifying genetic differences - while on the right is an example of culture obscuring them.

There's a strong theoretical reason to expect cultural differences to be correlated with genetic differences: since both are correlated with distance between the populations being compared. Of course, in the modern world, egalitarian memes do their best to reverse this effect.

Probably cultural variation within groups is minimised by transmission processes and pro-egalitarian memes. However on larger scales, drift probably dominated over most of the course of human evolution. In this case, cultural variation seems likely to have acted as a significant divisive force between humans from different tribes. The effects of cultural variation can be large. Cultural differences may well represent a more powerful stimulus to kin recognition mechanisms than genetic variation does.

The divisive influence of cultural variation may go some way to explaining the human tendency towards xenophobia. Cultural variation may be acting as a superstimulus to kin-recognition mechanisms, causing strangers to appear especially alien.

Wanted: everyday examples of natural elimination

Elimination, as part of Universal Darwinism represents a ubiquitous collection of processes.

I've been looking for familiar and "everyday" examples of elimination - for my next book. I want to show how processes involving cumulative elimination which apply to inanimate objects - as well as to biological entities. Here are some of the examples I have come up with so far:

• Fridges gradually fill up with useless, rarely-eaten foodstuffs;
• Wallets gradually fill up with low-denomination coins.

These are useful and good examples. However, both illustrate elimination gradually making the situation worse via the removal of desirable items. I've got one 'everyday' example of elimination gradually making the situation better via the removal of dud or broken items. Here it is:

• Glasses in a drinks cabinet are not chipped or cracked - since any such glasses get trashed.

Can readers think of any better familar examples of elimination in action?

Marion Blute: Discussion of sociocultural evolution

Marion Blute discusses the current state of social and cultural evolution.

The Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab has a YouTube channel is here.

This video is from the 2013 Summer Interviews on Evolution playlist - from the 2013 International Summer School on Evolution.

Jerry Coyne embarrasses himself over the issue of cultural evolution

Jerry Coyne offers a spirited defense of the modern synthesis in his recent article:

Famous physiologist embarrasses himself by claiming that the modern theory of evolution is in tatters

Unfortunately, Jerry embarrasses himself over the issue of cultural evolution, writing:

Geneticists now know the genetic basis of dozens of adaptive traits that differ between populations and species. All of them reside in the DNA. If non-genetic adaptive change was common, we would have found it.

Jerry, we did find it. It's culturally transmitted. Memes let humans inhabit Greenland, live underwater and in space. They let Mormons and Amish have five kids each and led to the modern population explosion. Non-DNA-based adaptive change is very common in human beings - and it is quite common in various other animals that exhibit cultural transmission - from chimpanzees to fruit flies. Jerry appears to be simply unaware of this important discovery - describing it instead as among:

superficial and meaningless parallels with natural selection’s winnowing of genetic variation

The modern synthesis is toast. It is Jerry's attempted defense of it which is an embarrassment. His position is straightforwardly factually mistaken.

VEHBİ METİN DEMİR's memetics critique

A large criticism of memetics was published in 2012:

Can Culture be Considered In Continuity with Nature: Susan Blackmore's Memetic Appraoch and Its Critiques - by VEHBİ METİN DEMİR.

The author focuses on Susan Blackmore's 1999 version of memetics. That's not too disimilar from my own position - though I don't put so much stress on imitation - and generally benefit from the fourteen years of subsequent work in the area.

I've read Susan Blackmore's 1999 book and VEHBİ DEMİR's 2012 thesis criticizing it. I think it's a walkover for Blackmore. Her book is brilliant. By comparison, this thesis comes across as sour grapes.

Apparently, by claiming that ideas really exist, "memetics is Darwinizing Plato". Yawn. Claiming that memetics is Platonic, postivistic and reductionistic leaves me cold.

IMO, the thesis offers no credible technical criticisms of memetics. The author lacks a proper understanding of cultural evolution, and writes from a position of ignorance and misunderstanding of the topic. The work of other scientists in the field is conveniently not addressed - presumably since the target is Susan Blackmore. However, this approach seems silly to me - this just isn't a one woman field, and the work of other scientists is pretty relevant. Scientists are cited when they disagree with Blackmore, but the scientists who support her various positions are not referenced in her defense.

The author has apparently read Darwinizing culture, and cites from it liberally. Indeed, the thesis largely consists of citations of the positions of other memeophobes - Lewontin, Gould, Sperber and Kronfeldner. However, at least this critique is more readable than Maria Kronfeldner's massive 2010 effort.

Are meme components memetically linked?

One issue concerning the definition of memes is whether their parts are necessarily memetically linked together. With genes, their components are linked together via genetic linkage. You can't have a gene that is split between two chromosomes. So, perhaps the components of memes ought to similarly be linked together - via memetic linkage.

While this might sound sensible, few definitions of the term "meme" make any mention of the point. In most cases, the lack of a specification of linked parts allows memes to consist of components that lack memetic linkage.

The conception of a "cultural variant" in academia also typically lacks any specification of linkage. I've long claimed that the term "cultural variant" - used by some in academia - is a synonym of "meme", but I'm now starting to doubt that: "meme" now seems to have stronger implications of linkage than the term "cultural variant" does.

The main downside of having memes being defined as having linked components is that it seems to make their definition more complex. It would no longer be possible to say that memes are what meme frequency analysis studies - or that memes are small, inherited pieces of culture. Simple definitions are good. It also seems undesirable if linkage-related issues complicate the issue of what counts as a meme. This whole issue seems non-trivial to me.

Convergent cultural evolution

Convergence is on of the similarities between the cultural and organic realms. It largely arises out of the dynamics of selection.

Several factors prevent convergent evolution - among them are drift and fitness landscapes with multiple peaks.

Heritage constraints involving multiple origins can also act to prevent convergence.

Convergent cultural evolution is common. It can be invoked to explain most cases of simultaneous invention. However, proven cases of convergence are not so easy to come by - since common descent of cultural forms could also be involved in most cases. To find good evidence for "real" convergent cultural evolution, the easiest thing to do is to wind the clock back to eras in which formidable geographic barriers divided some human populations. Writing, baby slings, pottery and the domestication of animals, plants and fire were all invented many times independently. These events aren't explicable in terms of social contagion / common descent of cultural forms.

One cause of cultural convergence is technological determinism - which is an impotant historical force. Technological determinism provides a modern theoretical foundation for the progressive theories of evolution championed by Herbert Spencer.

There's also cross-realm convergence. For example, the wheel was invented independently by humans and by the bacterial flagellum. Similarly, walking invented independently by humans and by the kinesin proteins.

As I have argued elsewhere all convergence can ultimately be seen as a form of relatedness.

Bryan Wilder: Linking Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution

The blurb reads:

This work aims to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for investigating how individual level interactions aggregate to produce population level patterns of cultural diversity.

The video mostly discusses a particular computer model.

Inheritance and development diagrams

Here are some diagrams of inheritance and development - showing how genes - which are inherited - produce gene products (phenotypes) - which are not inherited:

The gene products do go on to influence the genes via selection - as illustrated by the dotted lines in this diagram:

However, for the sake of simplicity, we won't attempt to illustrate the effect of selection in the next diagrams. The next one shows a host lineage and a parasite lineage:

The parasite generations are faster than the host generations. Often many orders of magnitude faster, so the picture is not to scale.

The next picture is of a host lineage and the lineage of a cultural symbiont:

This represents our modern understanding of how culture evolves. Notice the similarity with the host-parasite picture. Like parasites most cultural symbionts have shorter generation times than their hosts, are more diverse than them, and are much more numerous than them.

In the last two diagrams, many of those in academia might choose to picture the gene products and meme products as being more entangled with each other than this diagram shows - but the basic picture is essentially the same.

Lastly, here's a diagram from Boyd and Richerson's 1985 book, page 6:

To me, it seems as though, back then, the pair didn't have a very modern-looking conception of how cultural evolution works. They pictured cultural inheritance as part of the phenotype. These days, most students of memetics usually regard cultural inheritance as more like a genotype - with a parallel inheritance track.