Darwinizing Culture ' the Status of Memetics as a Science' by Daniel Dennett (1-Apr-2001) Hardcover

by Robert Aunger

The publication in 1998 of Susan Blackmore's bestselling 'The meme machine' re-awakened the debate over the highly controverial field of memetics. In the past couple of years, there has been an explosion of interest in 'memes'. The one thing noticably missing though, has been any kind of proper debate over the validity of a concept regarded by many as scientifically suspect. Darwinizing the status of memetics as a science pits leading intellectuals, (both supporters and opponents of meme theory), against eachother to battle it out, and state their case. With a foreword by Daniel Dennett, and contributions from Dan Sperber, David Hull, Robert Boyd, Susan Blackmore, Henry Plotkin, and others, the result is a thrilling and challenging debate that will perhaps mark a turning point for the field, and for future research. Superbly edited by Robert Aunger, Darwinizing culture is a thought provoking book, that will fascinate, stimulate, (and occasionally perhaps infuriate) a broad range of readers including, psychologists, biologists, philosophers, linguists, and anthropologists.

Genres: Science, Sociology, Biology, Evolution, Psychology, Linguistics, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 11, 2001

Reviews

[Hakan Uzunlar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitabı Alfa Yayınlarının "Kültürün Darwincileşmesi: Memetik Biliminin Değerlendirmesi" çevirisinden okudum. Sanırım cümlelerin kuruluşu ve virgüllerin işlevsel kullanılmaması sebebiyle akıcı bir okuma yapamadım. Belirtmem gerekir ki kitap memetik üzerine bilgisi ve ön okuması olan kişilere hitap ediyor. İçerisindeki makaleler belirli bir çerçevede tartışmayı devam ettiriyor, dolayısıyla "aa şuna bir bakayım" diye alan benim gibi okuyucular için yararlı olmayabilir. Ayrıca unutmamak gerekir ki kitabın çıkış yılı 2001, bizdeki ilk çevirisi ise 2012; yani bazı bilgiler okuyucu için yeni olmayacaktır (ne kadar acıklı, arada 11 yıl var...). Memetik için kritik bir çeviri olduğu için Alfa yayınlarına teşekkür etmek gerekiyor, keşke daha nitelikli bir çeviri olsaymış.

[Deniz Cem Önduygu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been some time since I finished reading this book and I’ve been thinking on a few major points that bother me, not in the specific claims of the contributors but in the way the issue of the validity of memetics is often discussed. So even if this has started as a book review, it is in fact the expression of my general discontent about the “meme talk” and my suggestions on how it might be turned into a more healthy discussion.

First of all, I have trouble understanding why nearly all the arguments in the book revolve around human social behaviour and how hard it is for memetics to account for it. My opinion is that this perspective misses the real power of memetics.

Social behaviour is also present in animal species (many of which do not exhibit signs of proto-culture) and yes, it can be explained without much need for memetic theories. So why, when it comes to human social behaviour and psychology, leave this all behind and expect memetics to account for everything on its own? Humans are animals too, and possible memetic explanations will be additions to the basic ethological/psychological explanations. It seems to me that the reactions of psychologists and anthropologists against memetics are based on a misunderstanding that memetics is here to sweep their theories on human nature away and start from scratch.

The point I want to stress here is this: I believe that the strength of the meme theory will unfold when it’s applied to account for the relatively new layer of things which have covered the surface of the Earth within the last 10.000 years: tools, signs, books, roads, cars, ships, airplanes, buildings, cities, factories, toys, songs, computers, cable networks, satellites… Everything “designed” by humans. This is where we differ from animals on a very observable level and this, I submit, is the domain where memetics as a research program can produce its first fruits without too much hassle with other disciplines – thus, the domain where arguments about the validity of memetics should move towards.

Of course, the issue of what Aunger calls Mental Darwinism becomes important here: is human creativity the product of the evolutionary algorithm running in human brains as Susan Blackmore argues, or does this view depicting humans as mere vectors arise from an “insufficient understanding of the autonomy of (memetic) agents” as Rosaria Conte asserts in the book? I propose that two things should encourage us to operate under the assumption that Blackmore is right, and embark on the project of analyzing cultural designs within the memetic framework: (1) the stunning power of evolution in creating design, demonstrated in biology and in the digital evolutionary algorithms used today in many areas for creative design or optimization, and (2) the delusional nature of our introspections and intuitions about our precious conscious autonomous agency, as revealed by neuroscience and cognitive sciences (see Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained). The second point is echoed, strangely enough, in Conte’s chapter:

"But a decision-based process is not necessarily explicit and reflected on: mental filters do not necessarily operate consciously, so agents may not be able to report on them."

Substitute “mental filters” with “mental memetic selection pressures”, and you get a sentence by Blackmore! This simply is the essence of the memetic account of human creativity.

But the project of explaining human design with memetics needs one big adjustment in the way people conceive of memes. This is the second point that disturbs me in the discussions in general: the misguided use of the term meme.

The critics of memetics often talk of things like “the God meme”, “the chair meme” or even “the general relativity meme” in their refutations. These concepts may be straw men created by the early proponents of memetics (like Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene), and no wonder they are easily burned down by critics speaking in sarcastic tones. (see Adam Kuper’s section titled ‘The Ecology of Ideas’ for a perfect example.) This simplistic language, still adopted by some memeticists today, is turned against the memetic theory to condemn it as an oversimplification too funny to be true. But although it is true that memeticists haven’t agreed yet upon a single definition for the term meme, it seems obvious to me that, whatever it will be, it won’t be that simple a definition to allow us to talk about “the chair meme”, let alone “the general relativity meme”, for the same reasons why we don’t talk about “the bird gene”, or even “the wing gene”, or even “the feather gene”, and so on – to the point where we realize that there isn’t a one-to-one mapping between the features as we distinguish at the phenotype level and the genes. The genes constitute a recipe, not a blueprint. What makes us think that memes are much simpler structures?

In fact, the original operational definition by Dawkins of the meme as the unit of cultural selection is sufficient to reveal the absurdity of the “the x meme” talk: even a simple chair design is way too big and complex to be a unit of selection. Just like the biological organisms, cultural objects (artefacts, theories, institutions, etc.) clearly are products of complex interactions between tiny bits of information acting as units of selection. In this perspective, the general relativity theory is a memetic construct, resulting from the interactions of maybe thousands of memes that we may not readily map one-to-one onto the properties that we perceive and talk about on a semantic level.

As Dennett reminds us on various occasions and topics, we must be prepared to, if not expect to, discover that accurate scientific theories are often counter-intuitive. Our intuitions are not a good basis for building or refuting claims about the nature of our minds and the memes, as they lead us to overrate our conscious teleological control over our creativity or to engage in a semantic mapping between whole designs, ideas or theories and single memes.

So it is my belief that memetics should – in the beginning, at least – shift its focus from human social behaviour towards human creativity and objects of culture, and do that with a more refined definition of meme to do justice to the complexity of the phenomena to be explained as well as to the memetic theory itself. Imagine how far population genetics could have gone if geneticists were talking about “the dog gene” and “the human gene”; that’s how far memetics can go if we don’t quit talking of “the chair meme”.

Note: I just want to add that David Hull’s contribution titled ‘Taking Memetics Seriously’ was the best writing on memetics that I’ve read for a long while. Hull manages to remain crystal clear on muddy waters of theoretical memetics with his bold arguments supported by very appropriate examples.

[Gizem Kendik Önduygu · Rating 3 out of 5]

En okuyabildiğim kısım yine Susan Blackmore’unki oldu. Ben bilim insanı değilim galiba ya çok zorlanıyorum okurken. Ayrıca ne oldu memetik bitti mi şimdi, daha güncel neler var? Bilen birileri bana atsın lütfen.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book is clearly outdated by recent memetic literature standards, certain chapters still serve as useful. This book offers a survey of arguments that appeared in memetics in its very early years (late 1980s till early 2000s). While most people today write off memetics as simply being Dawkins' reductionist biological theory or Dawkins' science without data, this book suggests in hindsight that memetics had the potential to be otherwise and missed the mark perhaps because of Dawkins himself.

In particular, there is great use in reading David Hull's chapter (Ch 3), Dan Serber's position against memetics as a position that ultimately being the reasons why communication scholars largely abandoned Dawkins' perspective (Ch 8), and Maurice Block's use of historical anthropology of culture to explain the reason the historical trends of culture studies frame memetics to be an illegitimate child of their field.

[Aldo Campos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why yes, I do consider myself a memeticist, ever since I was introduced to it via Dawkins-Dennett-Blackmore. I think that the “meme’s eye view” solves some of the question with cultural transmission, but I am also aware of the problems within this new science, like the lack of applied memetics, or an empirical background for it. But here I won’t argue about the theory itself, but to see what Darwinising Culture adds to the discussion.

Alas, most of the essays conforming this book (by authors from very different backgrounds) don’t add anything new. Susan Blackmore is still insisting why “imitation” is the right way of the meme, but her discussion is becoming futile, even if she may have started this new fever for memetics. As for the other authors on the meme’s side of the argument I only found Rosaria Conte’s essay estimulating. First I wasn’t very convinced on the idea of “agents”, but I started to understand her point (and her use of artificial intelligence). Also, the ”niche construction” of Kevin Laland and John Odling-Smee is an iteresting take on cultural evolution.

On the other side of the argument, those against the meme theory, some of the essays weren’t very challenging and some of their arguments can be answered by Conte’s ideas. Adam Kuper’s essay make some criticism on Dawkin’s original idea of meme, but again, current discussion has come a far way since that initial outline. Only Maurice Bloch rises some interesting questions.

Memetics may not be as popular as before (the last Journal of Memetics was published in 2005 and they are no longer available), perhaps this is because the inability to develop any progress on meme science, but the conclussion of Darwinizing Culture<(i> by Robert Aunger (one of the few still theorizing about this) is stimulating and adds some key ways to explore within memetics.

[Kerem Cankocak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memetik bilimi üzerine Türkçedeki nadir kaynaklardan. Ünlü filozof Daniel Dennett'in harika önsözüyle başlayan bu derleme mem kavramının ve memetik biliminin en güncel tartışmalarını özetleyen temel bir kaynak kitap.


Akılsız Darwinci algoritmalar nasıl olur da, çevrenin bölüşülmüş zekâyı koordine etmeye yönelik çeşitli yollar içerip içermemesi gibi konulara karşı bilinçdışı duyarlı olan böylesi akıllı kültür yaratıcılarını açıklayabilirler? Fakat işin aslında, evrimci yaklaşımlar akılcılığın bu tür belli başlı koşullarına yol göstermektedir ve iletişim, dayanışma, normlar, geleneklerin kuruluşu ile kültür öğrencilerinin aşina oldukları diğer olguların arka plan koşullarını aydınlatmaktadırlar. Askıda duran soru, kültürün Darwinci bir teorisinin olup olmayacağı değil, öyle bir Darwinci teorinin nasıl bir biçim alacağıdır.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this one in the Quarterly Review of Biology.

[Ahmed Abdelazim · Rating 3 out of 5]

بحث نقدي لتحديد ما إذا كانت فكرة ميمات دوكينز تصلح أساسا لمسار بحث متقدم بشأن التنوع والتطور الثقافي ، وفيما إذا كان المخ البشري جهاز محاكاة على أساس انتخابي أم لا ؟