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Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process
Analyzes the reciprocative relationship between genes in individuals and the production of culture and shows how predictions about genetic evolution within a cultural pattern can be made
442 pages, Hardcover
First published May 4, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 1, 2024
Misses the forest for the trees, similar to allele theory, but has some interesting ideas.
Good ideas:
- Meme bias and penetrance curve. Similar to genetic correlation and effect size of a meme from my model.
- Meme forgetfulness and innovation as meme mutation idea. In my current model, innovations are just new and there is no forgetting. Might add these in a more empirical way.
- Some interesting references to curve fitting for individual meme spread studies, incest inhibition developing between people who live together before the age of 6, etc.
Meh stuff:
- Too mechanistic, fills space. This could be a plus, lots of hypotheses, but they stray too far from the path of reality with some of it. Complex charts imagining the Newtonian brain mechanisms going on under the hood. We're not ready for that now, and this book was written 40 years ago.
Bad stuff:
- Some overly complex modeling decisions like ad hoc stuff about consensus bias. It's the 1980s, why not start by just assuming a constant desirability? Unscientific attitude here.
- Ridiculous math and a strange lack of statistics, few estimable parameters. Too economist basically, the math guy loves inestimable derivatives but doesn't know what a correlation is. When have behaviorally scientists ever estimated a derivative equation? An empirical model is going to be built around linear regression equations. That's as much as behavioral science in bear for the foreseeable future.
- The definition of culturgen. My definition of meme is this: observed information encoded in the brain (or body). That's it. Some memes have an effect on some behavior or phenotype. Behavior/phenotype is the object of decomposition, it results from genes, memes, and environment.
Their definition of culturgen: "Culturgen (pronounced "kul' tur jen") The basic unit of culture. A relatively homogeneous set of artifacts, behaviors, or mentifacts (mental constructs having
little or no direct correspondence to reality) that either shares without exception
one or more attribute states selected for their functional importance or at least
shares a consistently recurrent range of such attribute states within a given poly
thetic set. Culturgens can be mapped into node-link structures in long term mem
ory and in many instances can be treated as identical with them."
Whomp whomp. Failed to not conflate behavior with information. This is why I refuse to use the word "culture", almost everyone who does so fails to separate its several meanings from each other.
This leads to a severe flaw in their analysis. Half of the book centers around the dynamics of 2 competing culturgens. This makes no sense, brain space is not that limited. There is no "locus" for memes. Memes do not directly compete against each other, in fact, often people are aware of ideas with counter-acting effects.
Good ideas:
- Meme bias and penetrance curve. Similar to genetic correlation and effect size of a meme from my model.
- Meme forgetfulness and innovation as meme mutation idea. In my current model, innovations are just new and there is no forgetting. Might add these in a more empirical way.
- Some interesting references to curve fitting for individual meme spread studies, incest inhibition developing between people who live together before the age of 6, etc.
Meh stuff:
- Too mechanistic, fills space. This could be a plus, lots of hypotheses, but they stray too far from the path of reality with some of it. Complex charts imagining the Newtonian brain mechanisms going on under the hood. We're not ready for that now, and this book was written 40 years ago.
Bad stuff:
- Some overly complex modeling decisions like ad hoc stuff about consensus bias. It's the 1980s, why not start by just assuming a constant desirability? Unscientific attitude here.
- Ridiculous math and a strange lack of statistics, few estimable parameters. Too economist basically, the math guy loves inestimable derivatives but doesn't know what a correlation is. When have behaviorally scientists ever estimated a derivative equation? An empirical model is going to be built around linear regression equations. That's as much as behavioral science in bear for the foreseeable future.
- The definition of culturgen. My definition of meme is this: observed information encoded in the brain (or body). That's it. Some memes have an effect on some behavior or phenotype. Behavior/phenotype is the object of decomposition, it results from genes, memes, and environment.
Their definition of culturgen: "Culturgen (pronounced "kul' tur jen") The basic unit of culture. A relatively homogeneous set of artifacts, behaviors, or mentifacts (mental constructs having
little or no direct correspondence to reality) that either shares without exception
one or more attribute states selected for their functional importance or at least
shares a consistently recurrent range of such attribute states within a given poly
thetic set. Culturgens can be mapped into node-link structures in long term mem
ory and in many instances can be treated as identical with them."
Whomp whomp. Failed to not conflate behavior with information. This is why I refuse to use the word "culture", almost everyone who does so fails to separate its several meanings from each other.
This leads to a severe flaw in their analysis. Half of the book centers around the dynamics of 2 competing culturgens. This makes no sense, brain space is not that limited. There is no "locus" for memes. Memes do not directly compete against each other, in fact, often people are aware of ideas with counter-acting effects.
July 23, 2022
The math in this is far, far beyond my comprehension. However, skimming through and reading the overarching explanations and [tentative] conclusions was remarkably worthwhile. Some tremendous insights here.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews