I just discovered the Mindful Hack site, run by Denyse O'Leary. It's quite good.
In a recent post, she cites an article over at Neuroanthropology that supports her dislike of memes. I want to offer a slight and feeble defense (I don't feel like doing a research article) of memes in this post, but I have no illusions of convincing anyone of anything.
Evolutionary psychology: Key concept of "memes" trashed as "one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades"Read the rest of her post.
Wouldn't you know, Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology agrees with me that memes - hypothetical units of thought that jump from brain to brain, perhaps in accordance with Darwin's theory of natural selection - is a load of nonsense:I think ‘memetics’ is one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades, hiding in the shadow of respectable evolutionary theory, suggesting that anyone who doesn’t immediately concede to the ‘awesome-ness’ of meme-ness is somehow afraid of evolutionary theory. (June 12, 2008)Some of us are hoping that respectable evolutionary theory will somehow emerge from the fog of nonsense and Darwin-hype.
Let's examine Downey's position a little more:
Let me just make this perfectly clear: I teach about evolutionary theory. I like Charles Darwin. I have casts of hominid skulls in my office. I still think ‘memetics’ is nonsense on stilts on skates on thin ice on borrowed time (apologies to Bentham), as deserving of the designation ’science’ as astrology, phrenology, or economic forecasting.What’s hard for me to understand is that I LIKE some of Daniel Dennett’s work, and I can’t cite Dennett’s other work confidently when he has picked up a ‘meme franchise,’ and is plugging away with the ‘meme’ meme, making it appear that I’m down with this later material. Blackmore, on the other hand, is a reformed para-psychologist, so she’s, at worst, made a lateral move in terms of respectability. I get particularly irritated during her talk because I think she does an enormous disservice to Darwin’s Origin of Species, but I will try not to late my irritation show too much (even though our regular readers know I won’t be able to manage). I wasn’t going to really heap scorn on Blackmore until I read her own account of TED on the Guardian’s website; gloves are now off.
And this:
Worst of all, memetics sucks the air out of the room for a serious consideration of the ways that culture, knowledge, technology, and human evolution might be interrelated. That is, like a theory of humours and vapors in illness, it provides pseudo-explanations in place of just getting the hell out of the way of serious thought. Memeticists often, perhaps intentionally, seem to generate confusion between what they are doing and what Gerald Edelman christened ‘neural Darwinism,’ a very different discussion of the physiology of neural conditioning; it’s unfortunate guilt by association for the latter, which seems to be grounded in actual evidence.Finally, he gives 10 problems with the field of memetics (I'm just giving the bullet points, so go read his fine blog for the more detailed explanations of these problems).
1) Reifying the activity of brainsDan Dennett gets a lot of flack in Downey's post, so here is his TED Talk on memes:
2) Attributing personality to the reification of ideas
3) Doesn’t 'self-replicating' mean replicating by one’s self?
4) The term 'meme' applied to divergent phenomena
5) Could memes transfer stably?
6) A host will not evolve traits in order for parasite to benefit
7) Trivial examples as analogy to ideological change
8) Gradual cultural transmission not like infection
9) Objective 'science' inconsistent with normative judgments about memes
10) Resistance to memetics is not 'anti-Darwinism'; Darwinism not a religion
I like Dennett, even though I generally disagree with his premises on the mind and consciousness.
I'm going to go out on a limb here -- materialists aren't generally going to buy into memetics because memes are not objects that can be measured or isolated in a lab. Simple as that. Memes are subjective material, something that anthropologists can study, maybe even psychologists and philosophers, but not neuroscientists or biologists. I'm actually quite amazed the term came from a biologist -- Richard Dawkins.
Here is a definition of memes, since we haven't actually covered that small detail yet.
[A meme is] a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene' . . . it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory' or to the French word même. . . .
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagage themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p.206)Personally, I don't see what is so difficult to understand or accept about this concept. Dennett is maybe the most respectable proponent of memetics, and certainly the most articulate. Here are some of his views on memes, taken from a much longer and more comprehensive defense of memes.
The important point is that there is no necessary connection between a meme's replicative power, its "fitness" from its point of view, and its contribution to our fitness (by whatever standard we judge that). The situation is not totally desperate. While some memes definitely manipulate us into collaborating on their replication in spite of our judging them useless or ugly or even dangerous to our health and welfare, many--most, if we are lucky--of the memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings, but because of our esteem for them. I think there can be little controversy that the following memes are, all things considered, good from our perspective, and not just from their own perspective as selfish self-replicators:So here are the main points about memes, from my perspective (for more information on some of these ideas, see the memetic lexicon) :
such very general memes as:
cooperation
music
writing
calendars
education
environmental awareness
arms-reduction
and such particular memes as:
The Prisoner's Dilemma
The Marriage of Figaro
Moby Dick
long weekends
returnable bottles
the SALT Treaties
undergraduate major
Other memes are more controversial; we can see why they spread, and why, all things considered, we should tolerate them, in spite of the problems they cause for us:
colorization of classic films
teaching assistants
grade point averages
advertising on television
Hustler magazine
Still others are unquestionably pernicious, but extremely hard to eradicate:
anti-semitism
hijacking airliners
computer viruses
spray-can graffiti
Genes are invisible; they are carried by gene-vehicles (organisms) in which they tend to produce characteristic effects ("phenotypic" effects) by which their fates are, in the long run, determined. Memes are also invisible, and are carried by meme-vehicles--pictures, books, sayings (in particular languages, oral or written, on paper or magnetically encoded, etc.) A meme's existence depends on a physical embodiment in some medium; if all such physical embodiments are destroyed, that meme is extinguished. It may, of course, make a subsequent independent reappearance--just as dinosaur genes could, in principle, get together again in some distant future--but the dinosaurs they created and inhabited would not be descendants of the original dinosaurs--or at least not any more directly than we are. The fate of memes--whether copies and copies of copies of them persist and multiply--depends on the selective forces that act directly on the physical vehicles that embody them.
1. Memes are unique bits of cultural information.Relying on purely Darwinian theory is not the best approach for memetics to be taking in the public sphere. Certainly, there are some parallels, but only by analogy, which was what Dawkins was doing in the first place.
2. Memes require hosts, or more commonly known as human minds.
3. Memes replicate in several ways: (A) By overt imitation, meaning we choose to perpetuate it, (B) By covert infection, generally through education, (C) By coercion, such as marketing or viral campaigns, or (D) By any other form of cultural medium.
4. Memes act like viruses, they are contagious. The most successful memes, such as Christianity, have built-in virus protection to prevent being displaced by other memes (in the case of Christianity, the protection is the fear of eternal damnation).
5. Memes rely on hospitable cultural environments for their survival. The communist meme can only survive in small pockets in this country due to an inhospitable environment.
6. Memes can evolve and mutate in order to survive, and also suffer from memetic drift, with increasing errors in the replication.
In the end, I won't convince any materialist, especially arguing in a blog post by recourse to experts. But for me, the bottom line is this: Is the theory useful? For me, the meme theory is useful in a variety of ways.
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