Why are some evolutionary biologists still meme skeptics?

One reason I have given for anthropologists rejecting evolutionary theory is that they regard evolutionists as alien invaders - to be rejected with a kind of immune response.

The same theory suggests that evolutionary biologists should be meme enthusiasts: proponents of expanding evolutionary theory to cover human culture.

Certainly, many evolutionary biologists have embraced the idea of cultural evolution. The list includes: Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, David Sloane Wilson, Eors Szathmary, Mark Pagel and Marcus Feldman. Meme-literate science writers have included Matt Ridley, Robert Wright and Carl Zimmer.

However some evolutionary biologists don't seem to be up to speed with the new application domain of evolutionary theory. these include Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Mark Ridley, Massimo Pigliucci, Steven J Gould and Richard Lewontin. As Steven Pinker has put it:

No one could be more sympathetic to the application of evolutionary biology to human affairs than I am, and I have made use of many of its tools. But group selection and memetics have been unhelpful, and even evolutionary psychology in its totality can take us only so far.

You might think these folk would be meme literate by now. Instead they appear to be confused - and are among those dragging their feet and resisting the transition into this new era for evolutionary theory.

The point of this post is to speculate about how this state of affairs arose. Is there a grand theory that explains memetics resistance by evolutionary biologists? Or do they all object for different reasons. Are these folk the tip of a larger iceberg of silent objectors? Or are they merely the dregs at the bottom of the barrel - soon to be mopped up.

I'm not sure that a grand theory of memetics resistance is needed to account for the facts in this case. Cultural evolution has been a big scientific revolution. Any such revolution takes time and there are early adopters and late adopters. In this case it just so happens that some evolutionary biologists are among the late adopters.

Some of the existing evolutionist critics are long-standing critics. They got into the anti-meme camp early on and then maybe felt commitment towards their position - or the need to be consistent. Another possible factor is conservatism. Textbooks are notoriously conservative and Mark Ridley is an author of evolutionary biology textbook.

My hope is that at this stage the remaining mopping up operation will go relatively quickly - at least among the remaining evolutionary biologists. It is true that the revolution has been going on for 150 years so far already - but science on internet time should result in more rapid progress. Anthropologists might hold out for longer - I picture most of them as being more out of touch on the relevant issues.

Dawkins on Darwinian human affairs

Richard Dawkins may have pioneered and popularized the idea of cultural evolution but he does't always seem to have a good handle on the topic these days. For example, I was pretty disappointed with his treatment of Darwinian economics recently. In The Genius of Charles Darwin, Dawkins discusses social Darwinism, the efforts of John Rockafeller and the evolutionary business practices of Enron - and then concludes:

Darwinism in business seems to be little more than metaphor an analogy.

This material is 107 minutes in. Next, Dawkins asks:

Can Darwinism be applied to other areas of human affairs?

His answer to this question: eugenics. Dawkins goes on to explain:

I've always hated how Darwin is wheeled out to justify cut-throat business competition, racism and right-wing politics.

That's all very well - but this presentation about how Darwinism applied to human affairs is "little more than metaphor an analogy" is distorted and wrong. It's a missed opportunity to explain how Darwinism actually does apply to human affairs. If Dawkins really thinks that "Darwinism in business seems to be little more than metaphor an analogy", he's simply confused and mistaken.

The evolution of the "meme" meme

I described the recent evolution of the term "meme" in a 2010 article.

Recently Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have attempted to characterise this evolution. Dawkins wrote:

Instead of mutating by random chance before spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity

Daniel Dennett recently stated:

Dawkins introduced memes to be evolvers, to be things that evolve by natural selection but internet memes are the creations of presumably intelligent designers. There's competitions on the internet: who can design the meme that goes viral best. An intelligent designed meme would seem to be a contradiction in terms. And I admit: for a while I thought so too and I deplored the fact that Dawkins' wonderful word and concept was being sullied, was being cheapened by being transformed in this way into the word it is on the internet... and then I suddenly realized: no! no! maybe this is a contradiction in terms - so what. After all the splittable atom is also a contradiction in terms. The word "atom" initially meant "unsplittable thing". Now we have splittable atoms.

The idea that memetic engineering makes the term "meme" less appropriate seems like pure nonsense to me.

We still call genetically engineered genes "genes". I see no reason why we should not call memetically engineered memes "memes". No definition of gene or meme that I am aware of excludes the use of engineering techniques.

The idea that internet memes are engineered is also an incorrect characterization of the way the meaning of the term "meme" has changed. Plenty of memes were memetically engineered before we had the internet - and plenty of internet memes were not memetically engineered - for example most "fail" videos.

The real difference in meaning is the one I mentioned in my 2010 article: that internet memes must be popular. The difference is well illustrated by the "Millhouse is not a meme" meme. Internet meme experts seem to agree with the sentiment expressed by this meme, while enthusiasts for the Dawkins meme think that the idea that "Millhouse is not a meme" is ridiculous: of course Millhouse is a meme. You got it by from someone else via human culture - and it has been copied millions of times all over the internet.

The new meaning of "meme" as an abbreviation for "internet meme" - referring to things that spread in massive numbers on the internet - is all very well, but it takes the term "meme" away from its origin as a unit of cultural inheritance. Scientifically, all culture should be made of memes. Memes that only account for some parts of culture are not a general enough concept to do very much useful scientific work. Meme critics have already had a field day with the idea that memes only explain culture that is copied with high fidelity. Soon we will probably be hearing the equally ridiculous objection that memes only explain popular culture.

Pop mememtics

These days there's a fair amount of pop memetics out there. Know Your Meme is one of the best-known examples, but these days, most news channels give some coverage to memes and there's plenty of idle speculation about topics such as why some memes are more successful than others. Marketing is another common source of speculative pop memetics.

Taking a historical perspective, it seems likely that memetics has been hindered by real scientists not wanting to associate themselves with the work of folks such as Richard Brodie and Aaron Lynch.

Evolutionary psychology illustrates the down-side of popular interpretations producing inaccuracies. There's a whole bunch of scientists that view evolutionary psychology as a giant cess-pool of poor-quality scientific speculations. While I don't think this is a defensible attitude towards evolutionary psychology, I can understand that looking down on dodgy science probably plays a signalling role for scientists.

Should memetics take care to avoid the fate of evolutionary psychology in this area? I'm inclined to think that a wealth of memetics "just so stories" are inevitable at this stage - and that there's not much that can be done about this.

Indeed, it seems to me that evolutionary psychology has suffered little from its reputation for consisting of just-so stories. Instead, if anything, controversy appears to have attracted attention to the ideas associated with the field. Sometimes, marketers claim that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Evolutionary psychology seems to illustrate this idea.

Memetics also seems to have considerable potential for controversy. Where evolutionary psychology focuses on human universals, memetics studies the causes of differences between humans. This is a potentially sensitive subject area touching on areas such as inequality, xenophobia, political differences and religion. One one hand this makes it all the more important to get the science in these areas right. However, it may also offers memetics controversy-based marketing opportunities. The recent piece of pop memetics This Video Will Make You Angrydescribes how warring memeplexes attract attention and energy of netizens. The term "meme" has does a good job recently of hitch-hiking - its way to success - by attaching itself to highly-spreadable viral content. Perhaps the term "memetics" can do something similar - by hitch-hiking on controversial scientific content relating to topics such as politics and religion.

Memetics and unilinear cultural evolution

The issue of unilinear cultural evolution was recently raised in a discussion of memes and cultural evolution:

A major critique with the concept of using memetics and the concept of cultural-evolution as analogy is that it perpetuates neo-evolutionary theories from the 1960's that posited ideas of culture unilineally evolving from simple to complex (the same stuff that Herbert Spencer was talking about in the 19th century).

My reply follows:

Cultural evolution is sometimes smeared by its opponents for promoting what is generally known as unilinear cultural evolution.

The biggest problem with this smear is that unilinear evolutionary theories have been out of fashion in biology for a hundred years. We now know that evolution produces tree-shaped bushes, not ladders.

This is an emotive issue, since the "ladder of progress" model with westerners at the top was historically used to help justify slavery and genocide.

Also, it has become pretty obvious that cultural evolution is directional - taking humanity from apes to angels. The cultural evolution theorists from a hundred years ago were factually correct about there being a direction to cultural evolution. In the era of Moore's law, progress denialism is looking increasingly stupid.

Darwin famously wrote in a notebook: "Never say higher or lower". There's some wisdom in this advice, but it seems stupid to apply it to cultural evolution - since that is so clearly and obviously directional.

I think the concern about the concept of cultural progress is that it will be again used to justify the extermination of those lower on the ladder.

It isn't clear whether this fear is justified or not. There's no evidence that knowledge of evolutionary theory is correlated with misdeeds. One thing is fairly clear: cultural progress itself has led to massively reduced rates of homicide and massively increased life expectancies.

Anyway, whether the idea of cultural progress causes people to exterminate each other doesn't bear on whether the idea is true. That would be like arguing that atomic theory is wrong because, if true, it might lead to atom bombs - which could kill millions.

A bishop's wife once declared:

My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.

This revulsion towards evolutionary theory has afflicted many historically, and caused them to argue against evolutionary theory - and in particular its applicability to humans.

In my opinion, the arguments by many anthropologists against applying evolutionary theory to human culture are best seen in this light. They are motivated cognition. Not only are biologists invading anthropological turf, they are doing so using a horrible, dreadful, theory that will only lead to economic dog-on-dog competition and a callous indifference to the suffering of others.

In my opinion, the best argument anthropologists have is that previous attempts to applying evolutionary theory to human culture have been simple minded. This criticism applies to Wilson-style sociobiology - which tries to boil everything down to genes - and to evolutionary psychology - which has mostly focused on human universals, and whose theories of culture have been things like the simple-minded 'jukebox' model. However, memetics acknowledges the importance of human culture, granting anthropologists one of the things they have been saying for a century or so - that culture is big and important influence on human behaviour. One of the early pioneers of the topic - Donald T Campbell - was an anthropologist.

Perhaps evolutionists will inevitably make some mistakes with their new theory. However Darwinian denialism is surely profoundly worse. This is the head-up-the-backside approach to evolutionary theory that has kept anthropology in a pre-Darwinian time warp for over 150 years now.

Heredity and development can be profitably treated as different topics

Memetics advocates separating the study of heredity from the study of development in the study of culture. These topics are somewhat muddled together today - by anthropologists and students of cultural evolution alike. I had a go at explaining why this split was desirable recently in a conversation. Here's the relevant section:

The concept of evolution of culture and memetics is generally panned off as "oldschool" in anthropology nowadays. One major criticism of memetics, at least from the side of linguistics/semiotics for example, is that it fails to account for the multifaceted aspects and historical contexts of ideas. In other words, the meme or the idea is simply a one sided idea that is only copied. Memetics in this regard fails to account for translation and interpretation which can have varied consequences.

My reply:

Saying that memetics fails to account for translation and interpretation is like saying that genetics fails to account for transcription and development. Memetics and genetics are sciences that study heredity - cultural heredity and organic heredity respectively. There are other branches of science (with different names) that study things like development and ecology. It is possible to argue that the divisions between these disciplines are in the wrong place or that a unified approach is important, but the criticism that memetics doesn't study every aspect of culture is surely misplaced.

If memes are like genes, memetics should surely be like genetics. Genetics studies heredity - the way in which genes mutate and recombine. Memetics, in turn, studies cultural heredity - the way in which cultural information mutates and recombines. It is absolutely standard practice in academia to break complex subjects up into a variety of specialist sub-disciplines. Increasing levels of specialization has been an important way in which civilization has progressed over the year. No single individual can know everything any more - and science has become a group effort.

Splitting the field of genetics off from development happened in the organic realm around the 1930s - some time after evolutionary theory was first developed. The split was a very productive one (genetics and development have different principles and are profitably studied as separate topics). The idea of memetics is to apply the same conceptual split to the study of human culture. As in the organic realm, changing a recipe and combining it with other recipes is quite a different topic from how recipes turn into cakes - even though both are important to understanding cakes. We now have a science of cultural evolution - but it is still struggling to spawn its equivalent of genetics. This makes a lot of sense - given what we already know about cultural evolution's scientific lag.

Philip K Dick on memes

Sci-Fi author Philip K Dick once weighed in on William Burrough's language-as-information-virus thesis. The first quote sounds a bit negative:

I cannot accept Burroughs' view that we have been invaded by an alien virus, an information virus, yet on the other hand I cannot readily dismiss this bizarre theory as mere paranoia on his part.

...but Dick then goes on to take the idea seriously:

Burroughs may have indeed detected an "information virus" or something like an information virus, but my supposition is that, if you grant its existence, it is of long-standing. World mythology supports this. Not just Christian.

Where Burroughs and I sharply disagree is that my supposition is that if-if-an information life form exists (and this is indeed a bizarre and wild supposition), it is benign; it does not occlude us; on the contrary: it informs us (or perhaps it has no interest in doing either, but simply rides our own information traffic, using our media as a carrier; that is entirely possible.

These quotes were unearthed by the Philip K. Dick and Religion blog in 2011. It offers more extended quotations than I give here.

Dick claims that memes are benign. Memetics famously suggests that Dick was wrong: gene and meme purposes may coincide - or they may not - and fairly often they do not.

Dick describes the idea of cultural lifeforms as "a bizarre and wild supposition". In a nutshell, that's probably why so many have a hard time digesting it. It is pretty amazing that evolution now has a second high-fidelity 'information superhighway' from parent to offspring - in addition to our genes - and that it has already generated adaptations that have lasted for thousands of years.

Disagree with Daniel: Are memes going out of date?

I don't much like many of Daniel's recent ideas about "DeDarwinizing" culture. However one particularly bad idea seems to me to be the one that the idea of memes worked best in the early days of cultural evolution. Here's Daniel:

Now, if you look at it this way, then one of the nice things of this is that it means that I can still cling to one of my favorite ideas — the idea of a meme — and say where the meme's eye point of view really works, and really when it is needed is in the early days. The best example of memes are words. Words are memes that can be pronounced; that's their genus and species. Words came into existence not because they were invented, and languages came into existence not because they were designed by intelligent human designers, but they are brilliantly designed and they're designed by cultural evolution in the same way that a bird's wing and the eye of the eagle are designed by genetic evolution. You can't explain human competence all in terms of genetic evolution. You need cultural evolution as well, and that cultural evolution is profoundly Darwinian in the early days. And as time has passed, it has become more and more non-Darwinian.

IMO, evolution is becoming more and more meme dominated. The copying fidelity of memes has gone up, and their volume and signifince is exploding. Another change is that memes are experiencing more and more horizontal transmission - horizontal w.r.t. the DNA genes of their human hosts, I mean. Dennett seems to think that intelligently designed memes are an oxymoron. However, genetically engineered genes are still called "genes". The involvement of intelligence makes no significant difference in either case. Memes aren't going out of fashion, they are in the ascendant.

Acerbi and Mesoudi on the differences between cultural and organic evolution

Acerbi and Mesoudi discuss the differences between cultural and organic evolution in a recent paper [*]. I don't think they get it right. Here is the passage:

While they adopted the same mathematical tools as used in biology, they were careful not to import assumptions regarding genetic evolution that are unlikely to apply to cultural evolution. For example, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) modelled the consequences of not just vertical cultural transmission (learning from biological parents) but also oblique cultural transmission (learning from unrelated members of the parental generation) and horizontal cultural transmission (learning from peers), as well as specific forms of the latter such as one-to-many transmission (typical of mass media). Boyd and Richerson (1985) modelled conformist cultural transmission (preferentially adopting the majority behaviour in the population) and model-based cultural transmission (preferentially learning from particularly high status or prestigious individuals), which again have no clear parallel in biological evolution.

IMO, this content is practically all mistaken:

• You can get memes from unrelated members of your parents generation. However you can also get genes from them: genes for coughs, colds and flea bites.
• You can get memes from peers. However you can also get genes from them: genes for AIDS, pox and warts.
• Memes exhibit one-to-many transmission. However so do genes (see measles outbreaks).
• Menes which are like population averages can spread - but so can average genes. Beauty genes are a common example - where extremes are avoided and average is beautiful.
• Memes from high status or prestigious individuals spread. However often so do their genes. The phenomenon is known as "sexual selection". High status and prestige are often sexually attractive.

The similarities and differences between cultural and organic evolution should be part of cultural evolution 101. These seem like pretty basic differences to me and I don't really understand why they are so persistent. Is it inertia? A failure to communicate? The slow adoption of symbiology? Or what?

References

• Acerbi and Mesoudi (2015) If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution

Daniel Dennett: Information, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

Cultural evolution starts 7 minutes in. Memes start 18 minutes in.

48 minutes in Dennett has a strange section about how internet memes are a contradiction in terms (because they are designed rather than evolved). Few meme enthusiasts would agree with Dennett here, I think.