My take on Susan Blackmore's 'big brain' hypothesis

My idea that memes led to big brains has been compared to Susan Blackmore's idea that memes led to big brains - as presented in The Meme Machine - and some earlier essays of hers. I got the idea that memes might have been responsible for the great human cranial expansion from reading Susan's book. However, it seems to me that my idea is a bit different to hers.

Susan emphasizes that true behavioural imitation is hard - so hard that only a very smart primate mastered it. It requires the complex skill of putting yourself in someone else's shoes - in order to repeat their actions. Interestingly, this is almost the same ability that leads to empathy. For Susan, the difficulty of imitation is significant. SHe writes:

The first three processes alone will produce the selection pressures required to drive a runaway increase in brain size - if one further small assumption is made. That is that being good at imitation requires a big brain.

By contrast, my idea is more that ancestral human crainia were completely filled with memes. Memes were on average beneficial - and the more of them you had space for the fitter you were.

In my book, I compare the human skull to ant domatia, figs and Alder tree root nodules - all structures produced by plants to house symbionts. The human skull houses cultural symbionts - and that is the main reason why it grew so dramatically over the last three million years.

For a while I didn't realise that I had mutated her idea. I thought I had got my idea directly from her. Later, when I reread The Meme Machine I noticed that there were some differences between her idea and mine. Some mutations had taken place in my brain.

I'm not saying that Susan's idea is wrong - but I still like my take on the idea more. One of the virtues of my idea is that it is pretty specific - which should help with testing it. The idea of the big brain as a meme nest does not require Susan's additional "small assumption" that "being good at imitation requires a big brain".

Since practically every difference between us and our nearest primate relatives is down to our cultural symbionts, it is no big surprise that our big brains are too. However - as far as I know, Susan Blackmore was the first person who really took this idea seriously and promoted it.

I find it distressing to see the extent to which her contribution has been written out of scientific history. We have many modern papers on the idea that the enlargement of the human brain was caused by cultural transmission [see references here]. Few or none even mention Susan Blackmore's contribution. It seems like a revisionist history.

The Journal of Visual culture, Themed Issue: Internet Memes

The Journal of Visual culture, Themed Issue: Internet Memes - Edited by: Laine Nooney and Laura Portwood-Stacer.

The contents are freely available online.

Links between organic kinship and cultural kinship

Organic kinship and cultural kinship are clearly linked phenomena. They are linked in several ways:

• Cultural kin manipulate their hosts using mechanisms built by organic kin selection;
• Hosts manipulate each other using kinship cues they acquire culturally from each other;
• Cultural kinship may often be correlated with organic kinship;
• A big family represents a show of strength - but it can be faked with cultural kinship;

The first point is perhaps the most obvious one. For example, uniforms are a product of cultural kin selection: they are produced by making multiple near-identical copies of culturally-transmitted information. However the cooperation between hosts that they produce is largely the result of organic kin selection mechanisms in the brains of human hosts.

The second point is well-known to interview candidates. Mirroring the interviewer makes them like you more. Interviewees are coached to cross their legs the same way, copy the body language, posture and manner of the interviewer. Here culturally-acquired information is again used to stimulate organic kin selection mechanisms.

Thirdly, here's Robin Dunbar (2011) on the topic of kinship correlation:

If there is any degree of consistency between social and biological kinship, no matter how small, then, from an evolutionary point of view, investing in one’s social kin will have the consequence, on the long-term average, of investing in one’s biological kin.

Correlation between cultural and organic kinship may well be fairly mild - but these correlations probably help to explain why the "mistakes" of cultural kinship are not more strongly selected against.

Lastly, being part of a big family can help to create a positive impression. A warrior may think twice if his victim is surrounded by many brothers. A suitor may be more strongly attracted if a woman is surrounded by many sisters. Cultural kinship can be used to create the appearance of a large family.

References

• Dunbar, Robin (2011) Kinship in biological perspective - in Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction (2011);
• Hughes, Austin L. (1988) Evolution and Human Kinship.

Humans are not really the sex organs of technology

Jason is making videos almost as fast as I can blog them!

This one is titled: Humans are the Sex Organs of Technology:

This time I'm considerably more skeptical. There's more to this video than its title, but I'm only going to discuss the idea in the title - which Jason attributes to Kevin Kelly. It's true that ideas - including ideas about technology - mostly recombine inside human minds. However, the idea that "Humans are the Sex Organs of Technology" has quite a bit of bad poetry in it, IMHO.

The phrase implies that technology is an organism - whereas any reasonable classification scheme would identify technology as the product of a massive congregation of organisms. Technology is much more like an ecosystem than an organism. It's quite a bit like calling "Gaia" an organism. Most biologists will frown on such usage.

Jason compares technology to sunflowers, and humans to bees. However, the sex organs of sunflowers simply are not bees. The female sex organs are the carpels (including stigmas, styles and ovaries), while the male sex organs are stamens (including anthers and filaments). Not bees. Bees are distinct creatures with their own sexual organs.

The comparison between the flower-bee symbiosis and the technology-human symbiosis seems fairly apt to me. However, I think that this comparison supports the title of this article more than it supports Jason's title.

Incompatible memetic codes and the rise of machine translation

In the realm of DNA genes, there are only a handful of genetic codes. There are a few variations on a single near-universal code. Scientists can also create new codes in the lab. Most modern creatures use very similar genetic codes.

In memetics, there are many wildly-different memetic codes. Each human language represents a memetic code. The same goes for each computer programming language. There are millions of such langages.

An incompatible genetic code acts as a barrier to gene transfer. It represents a deeper divide than a species division - since this can be routinely bridged by horizontal gene transfer mediated by viruses. Similarly, incompatible memetic codes hinder the spread of ideas. However, technological progress in modern times has led to sophisticated machine translation tools. We can now often translate from one language into another - and from one computer programming language into another.

Incompatible memetic codes have been a big barrier in the past to the spread of ideas. Now it looks as though these barriers are coming down - or at least becoming much less severe. For memes that means a bigger and more diverse meme pool and more prospective recombination partners.

In a well-known biblical fairy tale, god saw that man was getting over-ambitious and divided him into tribes and gave him a fragmented linguistic heritage. It looks as though we are beginning to work around that issue. Soon it will be tower-building time once again.

Jason da Silva: Paying It Forward

Two minutes of meme-rich presentation from Jason. I'm pleased that Jason has kept promoting the meme meme.

I only have minor niggles with this presentation. Jason uses the terms "ethersphere" and "mindsphere". I prefer "ideosphere". Ideosphere certainly seems more popular.

On the topic of Jason, this recent video of his also gets thumbs up from me: Actualizing The Human Imagination.

Survival, survivors and survivalism

Fidelity, fecundity and longevity - the Dawkins trinity of replicator attributes - all share something in common: they are ways for patterns to persist over time. The most common term for this idea is "survival". Those who survive are known as "survivors". There's also an art of survival: "survivalism".

The main competitor for the "survival" terminology probably involves the term "persistence". Things that persist are described as being as "persistent". This terminology is less agent-centric. It can more conveniently be applied to non-living entities. It can be argued that it is more general. I generally favor the "survival" terminology - even when it comes to structures that are not conventionally regarded as being alive.

The most mainstream type of survivalism in evolutionary theory is genetic survivalism. In theory the idea of survivalism could be applied to practically any biological entity. A common biological entity that acts as though it wants to survive is the individual. However, many sexual individuals don't prioritize their own survival over the survival of their genes. Instead they are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their kin. So, there's a sense in which individual survivalism is a second rate idea in evolutionary theory. Much the same can be said for groups. Genetic survivalism explains pretty neatly the extent to which individuals and groups behave as though they are attempting to survive.

At least one clarification is needed. The term "genetic" should not be interpreted as being to do with DNA. Any inherited information will do - whether inherited via DNA, culture or some other aspect of the environment.

The popular idea of survivalism does not necessarily map onto the biological notion this article refers to. If disasters are sufficiently common, preparing from them makes sense - and most individuals will be recent descendants of those who prepared. However, many so-called "survivalists" seem to behave as though they have an unrealistically high probability estimate of the chances of a disaster taking place. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, many self-proclaimed "survivalists" look as though they are suffering from unhealthy levels of paranoia.

There do seem to be a few individuals who behave as though they are focused on individual survival. Many cryonics subscribers are possible candidates. However, such behavior is still compatible with conventional evolutionary theory. There are two main possibilities - these individuals are malfunctioning, or they are being manipulated - for example by memeoids.

An early user of the term survival was Edward Burnett Tylor. He used it to mean something a bit different.

References

• Bourrat, Pierrick (2006) From survivors to replicators: Evolution by natural selection revisited

Cultural superorganisms

Nature tends to produce hierarchies of organisms. For example, eucaryotes are composed of many previously-free-living cells - and eusocial colonies are composed of large numbers of independently-mobile animals. The easiest way for nature to make large organisms is by clumping lots of smaller ones together. When the interests of organisms in groups become sufficiently closely aligned, they can behave functionally like a single larger organism.

In modern times, we can see this process caught in action at various stages. In an ant's nest, there's still some conflicts between individual ants in a colony - as a result of them having different interests - for example as a result of not sharing all their genes with one another. A Portuguese man o' war shows another type of superorganism under construction. It is not an ordinary multicellular organism but rather a colony - a symbiotic union of a large number of much smaller animals.

Cultural evolution also produces superorganisms. Cultural kin selection and cultural eusociality are usually involved. Companies and religions are prominent examples of superorganisms with cultural components. However, it must be said that these contain organic components as well as cultural ones. Purely cultural superorganisms are mostly something for the future - but we do see some largely cultural superorganisms. Data centres are one of the best examples. There are unmanned data centres - sometimes called "lights-out data centres" - which have no human operators. These can't reproduce without humans yet, but their structure depends heavily on memes. In the future we can expect to see robot swarms - which are even more obviously reminiscent of eusocial insect colonies.

In the organic realm, superorganisms tend to remain colonial creatures. They can't seem to refactor themselves into proper whole organisms. Perhaps doing so doesn't pay - there are probably benefits associated with maintaining a modular cellular structure, to do with regeneration. However, perhaps cultural superorganisms will do a better job of refactoring themselves into first class organisms.

The major transitions in cultural evolution

In their famous work, The Major Transitions in Evolution John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry identified cultural evolution as being a Major Transition. However, a more fine-grained classification than theirs seems attractive to me - and so, in this post, I'll consider what changes qualify as being the major transitions in cultural evolution.

These are my picks for the major transitions so far:

• The origin of cultural transmission;
• The origin of digital transmission via speech;
• Human collectives with specialization (via agriculture);
• The origin of writing;
• Mass-produced written materials (via industry);
• Computers;
• The internet;

The list is heavily dominated by two kinds of improvements:

• Better storage;
• Better networking;

The evolution of cultural evolution has seen developments in computation, sensors and actuators - but these seem to have been more incremental - and less like "major transitions".

The next big major transition in cultural evolution looks set to be machine superintelligence.

Mike Lange's critique of cultural evolution

In my experience, critics rarely make videos (criticism is cheap) - but here is one from Mike Lange.

Mike mostly criticizes cultural evolution's concept of progress.

Evolutionary progress is denied by some cultural evolution researchers (notably Alex Mesoudi) - and is widely denied by evolutionary biologists. I call this "progress denialism". Evolutionary progress is obvious. Evolution is a gigantic optimization process. It seeks the fittest agents - the angels, so to speak. We are some of the first apes who learned to write - and are plainly not yet angels. Consequentially, the existence of progress is not very surprising.

Mike is mostly concerned with progressive unilinear cultural evolution. He says this is value-laden, false and racist. He says it has been used to justify colonialism. He describes it as as "problematic" and "insiduous".

Mike doesn't really attempt to make a scientific argument. Instead he mostly presents anecdotes arguing that belief in progress has led to negative social consequences.

I think this argument is like arguing that metallurgy is bad because guns can kill people. Yes, gun use leads to tragic deaths. However that's just one consequence of the findings of metallurgy.

I don't think there's any credible evidence that the idea of evolutionary progress leads to bad behaviour. If there was such evidence, I'm pretty sure that critics would present it. They seem unable to do this. Of course that doesn't mean that evolutionary progress is a harmless idea - but unless there's a good reason for thinking that progressivism is somehow worse than progress denialism, I don't think the progress advocates have too much to worry about when it comes to criticism on moral grounds.

The truth is rarely bad or evil. It is usually better to know than not to know.