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Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Is cultural evolution a Darwinian process?


by Massimo Pigliucci

The “Darwinian” theory of evolution is here to stay. I used the scare quotes to refer to it in the previous sentence because the current incarnation, known as the Modern Synthesis (and incorrectly referred to as “neo-Darwinism,” which actually was an even earlier version) is significantly more sophisticated and encompassing than the original insight by Darwin. Indeed, my opinion — which is certainly not universally shared — is that evolutionary biology is currently undergoing another gradual but significant change, referred to as the Extended Synthesis, that will expand its domain of application and explanatory tools even further.

But will it expand them to the point of providing us also with a coherent theory of cultural evolution? Chris Buskes, in a recent paper published in Philosophia and entitled “Darwinism Extended: A Survey of How the Idea of Cultural Evolution Evolved” seems to have no doubt that the answer is in the affirmative. I am not so sure.

Buskes’ paper is worth reading in its entirety, as it is a lucid survey of a number of ideas attempting to connect Darwinism and cultural evolution, including concepts like niche construction, gene-culture co-evolution and, of course, memetics.

The basic argument advanced by Buskes is that cultural evolution is best thought of as a Darwinian process because it shares the fundamental elements of Darwinian processes. These elements have been laid out in a famous paper by geneticist Richard Lewontin back in 1970. The list looks like this:

* Variation: members of a population that evolves in a Darwinian fashion show some degree of phenotypic differences in a number of traits.

* Selection: some individuals are more successful than others at surviving and reproducing, because of their phenotypic characteristics.

* Inheritance (which Buskes calls “replication”): there is a statistical correlation (regardless of specific mechanism) between the fitness-enhancing characteristics of the parental generation and those of its offspring.

While this basic summary — which Buskes refers to as “Darwin’s formula” (though, as such, it’s really Lewontin’s formula) — has been criticized for being actually too bare-bones (see, for instance, the discussion in Okasha’s excellent book on multi-level selection theory). As we shall see, my problem with Buskes’ conclusion is in part a result of the excessive minimalism of the formula.

Of course, people have proposed before that Darwinian evolution is “substrate neutral” and that its principles can be universalized. Dawkins’ and Dennett’s ideas about memetics (which do enter, with caution, into Buskes’ considerations) are an obvious example. More recently, even chemists like Addy Pross and physicists like Lee Smolin have gotten into the fray, proposing extensions of Darwinism to chemistry and cosmology respectively (here and here is why I disagree).

Let’s take a quick look at the building blocks of Buskes’ argument, focusing in the end on why I think he got close, but eventually missed the mark.

After introducing “Darwin’s formula” Buskes move on to make the point that human beings are highly cultural animals, very different in this from pretty much any other species on earth (he refers to culture as a “major transition in evolution,” a popular term these days, though one that has a bit too much of a teleological flavor for my taste). Which means that there really is something to explain above and beyond the basic biology of being human. No argument from me there. The problems begin when Buskes makes the move of declaring (plausibly, but with scant hard evidence) culture to be a “complex adaptation,” immediately making the evolutionary psychology-like leap that it therefore could have happened only by way of Darwinian selection. This, in my book, counts as a pretty massive begging of the question.

Buskes’ next move is to introduce the concept of niche construction (from evolutionary ecology) and to present it as a way to understand cultural evolution. Niche construction is a way to think about repeated gene-environment interactions going beyond the simple standard model that sees environments as posing a “problem” for the organism that evolution “solves” by mutation and natural selection. The classic example of niche construction is beavers’ dams (also an example of what Dawkins called an “extended phenotype”), structures that dynamically alter the environment not just of beavers but also of other species in the local ecological community, thereby introducing new selective pressures, which in turn act also on beavers’ phenotypes and behaviors, and so on. As interesting as these ideas are, it isn’t at all clear what work the concept of niche construction actually does — other than as an interesting metaphor — in explaining the transition from straight biology to culture in human beings.

Indeed, it is here that the weaknesses of Buskes’ approach begin to appear evident to the attentive reader. This is the section in which he cites the now classic work of people like Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman and others on gene-culture co-evolution. The thing is, if we are meant to take that (interesting, pioneering) work as a way to theorize about cultural evolution, we are at a dead end. Most of those papers are from the 1970s and ‘80s, with very little having been done since. That approach looks increasingly like what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos famously called a “degenerative” research program, i.e. an approach that seemed once fruitful but that has since ceased to bear fruits.

Buskes then moves to an interesting analysis of how biological and cultural evolution might be connected. He examines two broad frameworks, neither of which he finds entirely satisfying. First, there is the sociobiology / evopsych inspired model according to which — as E.O. Wilson once famously put it — biology keeps culture “on a leash.” Here the locus of explanation is the pre-modern (for some reason, largely Pleistocene) evolution of Homo sapiens, with modern human behavior explained either as still adaptive but rooted in the past, or as recently turned into a maladaptation because of the sudden decoupling of culture and biology in post-Pleistocene times. Second, we have the memetic model of extensive decoupling of culture from biology, where new entities (the “memes”) compete for space in our brains, regardless of their effects on the fitness of their “hosts” (i.e., us).

Buskes is sympathetic to aspects of both models, but is also aware of many of the criticisms they have received. Frankly, I don’t think he goes far enough on his critical path on either count. It would take too much space (and it would bring us significantly off course) to rehash my problems with both evopsych and memetics, but you can find a summary here and here, respectively.

[On memes, however, I can’t resist two of my favorite quotations. The first one is by my colleague and sometime antagonist, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who aptly said: “{Memetics is} completely tautological, unable to explain why a meme spreads except by asserting, post facto, that it had qualities enabling it to spread.” The other one, even more damning, is by biologist Jeffrey Schloss: “It is not entirely clear how it is that positing unseen and undefined entities that infect human minds by unassessed processes involving the entities’ own quest for transmission and that cause people to do things that transcend their genetic imperatives is fundamentally different from medieval demonology or, in any case, qualifies as an empirically grounded explanation in terms of natural causes.” Ouch.]

We finally get to the crux of my disagreement with Buskes, which comes into focus when he gets around discussing the two most common (and interrelated) objections to thinking of cultural evolution as a Darwinian phenomenon: the apparent “directedness” of cultural evolution and its “Lamarckian” character.

In terms of directedness, the idea is obviously not that the outcome of cumulative cultural evolution looks teleonomic, as the appearance of teleonomy is typical of Darwinian biological evolution too. The eye, to pick on the standard example, appears to have been designed for the purpose of seeing. In reality, there was no such longstanding design or pre-ordained tendency, only a large number of haphazard mutation-selection cycles, which however did bring about the function of the eye as we currently understand it. In fact, years ago I have used this sort of insight to argue that evolutionary biology maps conceptually very well onto the famous four Aristotelian causes, including the so-called “final” cause, which answers the question “What is X for?” The answer is, of course, different from the one Aristotle would have provided, but such is progress in human understanding.

So, the issue here is not one of directedness of the outcome of evolution, but of the source of variation. Contra Buskes, a cardinal tenet of the Modern Synthesis (and indeed of the original Darwinism) is that mutations — the ultimate source of novelty in evolution — are random with respect to fitness outcomes. It is important to understand this point. Molecular biologists have long discovered that mutations are not random in the sense that they all appear with the same frequencies, regardless of genomic localization. There are “hot spots” along different chromosomes in different species, and some structural changes in DNA are more likely than others to occur because of the three-dimensional conformation of DNA. But — despite the occasional claim to the contrary — there is no convincing evidence that favorable mutations (in a given environment) are more likely to occur than unfavorable ones. Should the exceptional claims ever be confirmed and widely accepted that would amount to a rejection of Darwinism, though not, crucially, of the more encompassing idea of evolution (so creationists need not rejoice).

Now, cultural evolution is directed not just in outcome, which would be compatible with a Darwinian explanation, but also at the source. We direct it by consciously focusing on one problem or another, deciding to work on one solution or another. I am not, obviously, suggesting that all human cognition is conscious, we know better by now. But even if a relatively small fraction is (i.e., unless you belong to the “it’s all an illusion” school of non-conscious thought) then cultural evolution departs in a major way from its biological equivalent.

The second objection to a Darwinian model of cultural evolution raised (and quickly dismissed) by Buskes is connected to the dreaded L-word. Lamarckism is a really, really bad word in evolutionary circles, arguably undeservedly so. Lamarck, after all, was a pioneer of the field, one of the first modern thinkers to explore the idea of a naturalistic explanation for the history and complexity of the biological world. Yes, he got major details wrong, but that’s the way science works and makes progress. Moreover, let’s not forget that Darwin himself  who died without figuring out a mechanism to account for the origin of biological variation so crucial to his theory  flirted with Lamarckism and tried to incorporate it into his own view of biology. (Mendel, a contemporary of Darwin, had figured it out, but Darwin never read Mendel’s paper, even though he apparently received a reprint of it.)

It isn’t even clear, really, what Lamarck actually said. I have never read the original text (and, I guarantee you, neither have the overwhelming majority of people who have no qualms pontificating about it), but I understand that his famous notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics  because of which the L-word has enduring negative connotations  was a relatively minor part of his overall theory.

Indeed, the major component of Lamarckism, according to my colleague Eva Jablonka, who has thought a lot about this stuff (and has read Lamarck!), was the idea that organisms react actively to environmental challenges, as opposed to the more “passive” process of natural selection postulated by Darwin. So, really, the chief Lamarckian idea has more to do with directedness, the topic we discussed above, than with the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Nonetheless, the latter is there too, and it applies beautifully to cultural evolution. As Buskes himself readily acknowledges, biological evolution works (mostly, there are exceptions, especially but not only in the bacterial world) by way of vertical transmission of information, from the parental to the offspring generations. Cultural evolution does incorporate vertical transmission (you can and should teach stuff to your kids!), but also rampant horizontal transmission (peer-to-peer, so to speak), and even “oblique” transmission (as in from a teacher who belongs to the previous generation to students who belong to the next one).

To recap then, take a look at the figure below, which summarizes what I think are the differences between biological (Darwinian) and cultural (Lamarckian) evolution:





I think the divergence between the two is clear enough. Of course, we are still talking about evolution, and not just in the sense of “change over time” (as in the evolution of the universe, for instance). This is cumulative evolution that brings about complexification and adaptedness (though plenty of both biological and cultural structures/artifacts are not at all “adaptive,” and of course the fitness currency is much more clear in the case of biological evolution than in the cultural instance — there is quite a bit more work to do here!).

The conclusion that biological and cultural evolution are different also nicely accounts for the fact that cultural evolution is so much more dynamic (it happens much faster) and unpredictable than its biological counterpart. If we think of both as instances of Darwinism that difference becomes more puzzling.

All of the above said, we already know that Darwinian evolution is not confined to biological systems: computer programmers have worked with “genetic algorithms” for a long time now, in the process independently rediscovering many of the basic ideas of (biological) population genetic theory. At the moment, though, we don’t have any example of Lamarckian evolution outside of humanity. If we ever succeed in producing truly artificial intelligence, that would likely count as a second example on this planet (other than our own), and of course it may be that there are many other cultures scattered throughout the universe. Hopefully, we shall see about that at some point in our future.

99 comments:

  1. Hi Massimo,

    An interesting post which I enjoyed reading and largely agreed with.

    As my moniker suggests, however, I am incapable of reading anything without finding something to disagree with.

    I think cultural evolution has aspects of both Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution. It doesn't have to be entirely one or the other, and understanding both ways of looking at it might help to illuminate different aspects of human culture.

    Certain cultural features certainly did evolve through design as humans searched for solutions to the problems facing them, and these are perhaps best understood through the lens of Lamarckian evolution.

    However there are some aspects of culture which are more arbitrary and were not necessarily planned out as being good for society.

    I think religion is an example of this, because I think few religions were designed as social tools which would help societies to develop.

    Of course religions were designed and refined over many generations by intelligent minds, but I do not think they were (entirely) deliberately designed in a utilitarian fashion to help to propagate themselves and their societies. Rather I think they had other causes, such as an attempt to explain the world around us, to claim temporal power in the name of divine authority for the priesthood or to justify instinctive feelings about morality.

    So even though religions were not explicitly designed to benefit their cultures, nevertheless some of them would have done so by chance (while some would have been detrimental). The religions and cultures which propagated were those which adopted beliefs which promoted that propagation - the very essence of Darwinian evolution.

    I think the story of cultural evolution may be one of a gradual shift from Darwinian to increasingly Lamarckian evolution. As our understanding grows, so do we grow in our ability to foresee the consequences of our decisions and so deliberately engineer social change. While our ignorant pleistocene ancestors bumbled along with cultural change largely driven by Darwinian forces, it may be that modern culture is more Lamarckian in character.

    This is even more so when considered from the point of view of inheritance. In the past, culture was largely handed down from generation to generation. However, in the modern globalized mass-media age, culture can spread around the world in a breathtakingly short span of time.

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  2. Evolution theory is a creation theory of intelligent design.
    Science is a religion,

    =

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  3. Disagreeable,

    thanks for the kind words. I think, however, that I’m going to disagree with your pluralism about cultural evolutionary mechanisms - which is unusually for me, because I am often sympathetic toward pluralistic explanatory frameworks.

    > there are some aspects of culture which are more arbitrary and were not necessarily planned out as being good for society. <

    But that doesn’t make them Darwinian. The concept of neutral evolution, or that of evolution by byproduct, applies to both Darwinism and Lamarckism. The differences btw the two, as I wrote in the main post, have to do with the modes of transmission and with the way in which variation originates.

    To take your example of religion, even if the whole thing wasn’t planned for a particular purpose, bits of it were. And conscious choice - even arbitrary conscious choice, analogous to the ones we make in matters of fashion, say - are still qualitatively different from anything we see in biological evolution. Indeed, I am very sympathetic to the idea that religions, and even a sense of transcendence, evolved largely as cultural byproducts (there is a chapter about this in Answers for Aristotle).

    > While our ignorant pleistocene ancestors bumbled along with cultural change largely driven by Darwinian forces, it may be that modern culture is more Lamarckian in character. <

    It depends on how you see the interaction btw biological and cultural evolution: I see the latter as a product of the former (in the sense that culture isn’t possible unless a certain biology is in place), but then cultural evolution took off on its own. A major obstacle for a Darwinian account of culture is that it isn’t at all clear what entities are evolving and how. Pretty much the only offer on the table at this moment is memetics, and you may have noticed that I don’t have a high opinion of it...

    MJA,

    > Evolution theory is a creation theory of intelligent design.
    Science is a religion <

    Nonsense on stilts.

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    1. >But that doesn’t make them Darwinian. The concept of neutral evolution, or that of evolution by byproduct, applies to both Darwinism and Lamarckism. <

      You misunderstand my point here, I think.

      I was not talking about neutral evolution, I was talking about neutral sources of variation. Variation in Darwinian evolution works by applying selection to random mutation (neutral source of variation), while Lamarckian evolution works by having variation directly introduced as a result of interaction with the environment (adaptive source of variation). So, in cultural evolution, the source of variation (human decisions) is arguably somewhat neutral with regard to adaptivity (although getting less so as our expertise increases).

      >It depends on how you see the interaction btw biological and cultural evolution: I see the latter as a product of the former (in the sense that culture isn’t possible unless a certain biology is in place), but then cultural evolution took off on its own.<

      I also see the latter as a product of the former, however our ancestors had culture long before we had our current understanding. My point is that as understanding increases, so does cultural evolution become less Darwinian and more directed, although there will always be aspects of both.

      Chimps have culture. They use tools for various purposes, and this knowledge is passed on. I don't have a reference for this, but I seem to remember that they also occasionally pass on bizarre behaviours that seem to serve no adaptive purpose (e.g. spinning around on a certain rock every time they pass it).

      It is unclear how much they really understand what they are doing. If they have good understanding, then we might expect their cultural evolution to be directed by that intelligence. If they don't have much understanding, we might expect their culture to evolve even so because of selection effects.

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    2. Ye must have faith in the scientific giants too!

      =

      Delete
  4. As a biologist, I really loved your analysis. I'm more inclined to see cultural evolution as a bit more Darwinian than you do. I think there is a fair amount of evidence that large-scale cultural trends can be very random. Take the publishing industry. Everyone is trying to direct and predict the next big book trend, and the biggest predictor of THAT is what books have good word-of-mouth recommendation. Selection, therefore, is only semi-intelligent. We read what we read largely because our friends and trusted peers recommend it to us. We've formed opinions about people and social structures that we use as the framework for selection and develop our tastes.

    Your most valid criticism of this model is with inheritance. Culturally, there are more ways to pass on your ideas and tastes than there are to pass on your genes.

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  5. Im a molecular, not evolutionary biologist, but Im not sure I find the features you picked out to distinguish "Darwinian" and "Lamarkian" evolution to be persuasive. To borrow from Aristotle, these features (mode of variation, source of selection, mode of inheritance) seem to be accidental rather than essential features.

    I've always thought the essential explanatory role of Darwinian selection is to explain how it is that adaptations are so well adapted to their environment; the Darwinian answer is that differential reproduction results in well adapted individuals dominating. In a Lamarkian population, individual organisms and their descendants change (heritably) as a result of the environment, with no role for differential reproduction.

    So if we look at the cultures of human groups- do well adapted cultural forms come to be by differential reproduction (ie, Darwinian evolution), local innovation (Lamarkian), or something else (like demographic replacement or invasion: Darwinism working on the normal biological level)? I suspect you'd find all three, but its an empirical question.

    I think the focus on whether cultural evolution shares the specific mechanisms of darwinian evolution is just a red herring.

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    1. Hi Evan,

      That's a pretty good description of what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment. Well put!

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  6. I am wondering if the previous posts on this blog regarding emergence might not be very relevant in making progress towards a synthesis in evolutionary theory.

    Variation, inheritance, and selection always play a role but it seems apparent that there are multiple levels at play (interacting with each other) and that novel properties emerge at different levels (as shown in this post). I also think a unifying theory of information (at different levels of complexity) where meaning begins to emerge could support and complement this synthesis.

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  7. I'm not saying that what is happening is completely isomorphic to biological Darwinian evolution, but that by analogy certain ideas from Darwinian evolution might shed light on what's happening in cultural evolution.

    I agree that the origin of the variation in the population in biological evolution and cultural evolution is very different. In biological evolution it is random mutation, which has a significant bias towards harmful effects. In cultural evolution, it is the non-random (though arguably unpredictable) decisions made by people, the bias being more towards the beneficial side.

    As with Evan above, I'm not sure whether the source of the variation is as crucial a factor as the explanation for how and which changes over time tend to accrue.

    So, sure, there are differences, but it seems plausible that there are some (pseudo-)Darwinian effects which affect cultural evolution, namely differential rates of reproduction and survival, as Evan pointed out above.

    Take farming as an example. Jared Diamond makes the case in Guns, Germs and Steel that the adoption of a farming lifestyle actually resulted in a reduced quality of life for the early farmers. As such, some cultures decided not to adopt it even when exposed to it. Over time, these cultures were largely supplanted by farming ones which out-reproduced them.

    The spread of the farming "meme" (if you'll allow) therefore seems to show more of a parallel to natural selection to Lamarckian evolution. Cultures did not necessarily tend to adopt it because it was beneficial (Lamarckian), but it turned out that those that did out-competed those that did not (Darwinian).

    If you object to the description of cultural evolution as strictly Darwinian because of the differences you highlighted, that's OK, but I think we need to acknowledge that some of the same ideas may yet apply (namely selection according to differential rates of reproduction).

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  8. What kind of time scales are you thinking of in your view of cultural evolution? Is it the Diamond scale of a contintent or landmass? Or can a bio-evolutionary model be extended to explain the transition in English verse from heavily accented and consonantal patterns, to complex rhyme patterns, to blank verse, and thence to the predominance of the ryhmed couplet in the 18th century? Kramnick pointed out some of the pitfalls awaiting the careless application of frameworks from one field to another (http://fiction-science.com/against-literary-darwinism). A pro-evolutionary humanist messing with a scientific paradigm could end up doing with biology what the targets of the Sokal hoax did with quantum physics.

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  9. I'm always perplexed by how discussions on cultural evolution like this fail to draw on the past century of anthropological literature on the topic. Looking at the citations in the paper you've cited, I see only two or three anthropology sources. There is a whole body of literature in anthropology concerned with cultural evolution/culture change, though it's not really a topic most anthropologists concern themselves with anymore (which is a shame as I think it's an interesting question). People looking at this topic should take more seriously the work of anthropologists. Most of the work now takes a biocultural approach that does not privilege biology or culture over the other but looks at how they work in tandem. See, for example, Jonathan Marks "The biological myth of human evolution" (available for free on his website if you google it).

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  10. hlynn117,

    > Selection, therefore, is only semi-intelligent. We read what we read largely because our friends and trusted peers recommend it to us. <

    Sure, but that’s still an internally generated, willful decision. Nothing like that is part of Darwinian theory, no?

    Evan,

    > the Darwinian answer is that differential reproduction results in well adapted individuals dominating. In a Lamarkian population, individual organisms and their descendants change (heritably) as a result of the environment, with no role for differential reproduction. <

    I’m really not so sure that Lamarckism implies no differential reproduction. It just says that the driving motor is external rather than internal, but it is compatible with differential reproduction as well.

    > I think the focus on whether cultural evolution shares the specific mechanisms of darwinian evolution is just a red herring. <

    That was the claim of the author I was criticizing, and my broader aim was to make distinctions between different modes of evolution, contra what I think has become a bit too facile a call for “universal” Darwinism.

    Disagreeable,

    > So, in cultural evolution, the source of variation (human decisions) is arguably somewhat neutral with regard to adaptivity (although getting less so as our expertise increases). <

    I’m really not so sure that that is the case, in part because the very concept of adaptivity actually ill fits cultural practices. Some do of course have survival value (agriculture), but plenty don’t (the type of music you listen to). Unless one believes in demonology, I mean memetics... ;-)

    > My point is that as understanding increases, so does cultural evolution become less Darwinian and more directed, although there will always be aspects of both. <

    We may agree there, though in my case it is because I see cultural evolution as an emergent property (gasp!) of biological evolution, characterized by its own dynamics, and less and less constrained by its progenitor.

    > Chimps have culture. <

    They do, but it clearly has remained suck to a level where what matters most is still the biology. Why? Good question, I suspect it’s got a lot to do with small brains.

    > So, sure, there are differences, but it seems plausible that there are some (pseudo-)Darwinian effects which affect cultural evolution, namely differential rates of reproduction and survival, as Evan pointed out above. <

    I’m not sure why you and Evan seem to think that Lamarckism is incompatible with differential reproduction. It’s just that the differential reproduction is directed by internal forces, not just by external selection. At any rate, as I wrote in the main post, it’s hard to know exactly what Lamarck meant, so the term “Lamarckian” here should be taken with a fairly large grain of salt.

    > some cultures decided not to adopt it even when exposed to it. Over time, these cultures were largely supplanted by farming ones which out-reproduced them. <

    It’s not really that straightforward, because the concept of “reproduction” for cultures or groups is very fluid. Often it is certain people within a group that simply decide to abandon one practice and adopt the other.

    Erik,

    > What kind of time scales are you thinking of in your view of cultural evolution? Is it the Diamond scale of a contintent or landmass? <

    I’m confused, are you talking about temporal or spatial scale? At any rate, I think my considerations are actually scale invariant. I don’t see why either Darwinism or Lamarckism should depend on temporal or spatial scales.

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    1. > I’m confused, are you talking about temporal or spatial scale? At any rate, I think my considerations are actually scale invariant. I don’t see why either Darwinism or Lamarckism should depend on temporal or spatial scales.

      Its just that in short cultural shifts -- let's say a change in literary style -- the proximal forces constraining change are individual agents with fairly evident agendas. Yes, anthropology or ev psych have much to say about competition for status or the long-term evolution of our cognitive and expressive capabilities. But those disciplines are concerned with distal causes.

      Cultural history had to shake off a lot of clumsy borrowings from popularized ideas about evolution. Too many histories take an esteemed figure -- Shakespeare, say -- and trace British theatre history as a continuous upward development from a remote ancestor. That was the misapplication of evolution and a misrepresentation of the interesting actuality.

      But I actually support the employment of the models of change in the humanities that have been developed elsewhere, be it in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and so on.

      Franco Moretti attempted to do this in his history of the novel and his employment of quantitative methods and graphic representation to study the development of other genres.

      Back in the 60's Morse Peckham made some interesting observations about how different aesthetic features coalesce into artistic movements or institutions, which persist by incorporating those innovations that optimally balance innovation (so that they attract attention), familiarity (so that they are not rejected outright), and which best provide cognitive and affective training for the groups that consume them, so that such consumers can better negotiate their social environments.

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  11. Can we please stop citing/referencing Jared Diamond? His arguments are pretty thoroughly rejected by by cultural anthropologists who study the topics he writes about. (For example, see this post by Jason Antrosio: http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/guns-germs-and-steel/ or just search the Savage Minds blog for Jared Diamond).

    The notion that chimps have culture is a hotly contested topic among anthropologists. It is not clear that they do. Bringing attention to this highlights the fact that no one is defining culture in these discussions, and I don't know how anyone expects to explain cultural evolution when they're not even defining what is meant by culture. I would bet dollars to donuts that the ways culture will be defined by philosophers and biologists will be somewhat (if not strikingly) different than how anthropologists define it. This is not an unimportant problem, and it is something that must be addressed before any progress can be made on this topic.

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    1. I'm not going to defend Jared Diamond. I did find the book to be interesting and thought provoking but I am open to the possibility of his being wrong on a lot of it. I just used what he said about farming as an example.

      I think it's clear that chimps have culture if culture is defined the way I'm thinking. I would define culture as learned behaviour, especially behaviour that is not universal to all members of a species but to certain groups which are isolated in time or space. Whether this is your own definition or not, it seems to be the definition that applies in discussions of this sort.

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  12. Massimo:

    Darwinian evolution might be explained in terms of natural selection applied to random variation.

    You are focused more on the random variation part, while Evan and I seem to be more focused on the natural selection part. Lamarck, as far as I understand, did not appreciate the role of selection (i.e. differential rates of reproduction) as this was Darwin's major contribution, so when I consider the question of whether cultural evolution might have some Darwinian characteristics, I find myself wondering whether something akin to natural selection plays a role. I find it quite plausible that it might.

    So it might be only the label "Darwinian" that we disagree on.

    Let's say we want to ask the question "Why are so many historical cultures warlike?"

    I propose four different answers.

    1) Humans are biologically predisposed to be warlike. (Evolutionary psychology).
    2) Societies consciously decide to be warlike so as to defeat their enemies. (Intelligent design)
    3) Societies become more warlike over time due to exposure to conflict. (Lamarckism as I understand it)
    4) More warlike societies tend to displace and replace more peaceful societies. (Natural selection of cultures)

    It seems to me that any or all of these answers might be correct, which is why I lean towards a "plurality of explanatory frameworks".

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  13. Two philosophers were thinking along the same lines as Lewontin at about the same time.Karl Popper, "Objective Knowledge, an Evolutionary Approach" (1972). He is critiqued for saying that Darwinism is tautologous, but he recanted in: "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind," the first Darwin Lecture of Darwin College Cambridge (1977). And then there's Stephen Toulmin, "Human Understanding" (1972) - on the evolution of concepts.

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  14. @Massimo
    "the major component of Lamarckism, according to my colleague Eva Jablonka, who has thought a lot about this stuff (and has read Lamarck!), was the idea that organisms react actively to environmental challenges, as opposed to the more “passive” process of natural selection postulated by Darwin."
    So did Jablonka tell you she agreed with this or not? Because she and Lamb seem to strongly support this in their writing. And you don't.

    And then you wrote: "So, really, the chief Lamarckian idea has more to do with directedness, the topic we discussed above, than with the inheritance of acquired characteristics."
    I think you know very well that you're ducking the subject, because clearly Jablonka would have commented to the contrary that inheritance of acquired characteristics was exactly the idea, since these characteristics were reacting to their environment, except that Lamarck failed to distinguish behavioral characteristics from the physical ones they supported.

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  15. Hi Massimo,

    Can you elaborate a bit on your side comment about ‘Darwin’s formula’ versus ‘Lewontin’s formula’? It’s been awhile since I’ve read Darwin intensively, but my recollection is that Darwin put these three points together pretty clearly—although perhaps not by explicitly numbering them.

    On another historical note, was Darwin so insistent that “the ultimate source of novelty in evolution — are random with respect to fitness outcomes”? Again, you have read Darwin far more intensively than I, but this does not fit with my recollections of him being fairly muddled on the point.

    Thanks,
    Dan

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  16. //immediately making the evolutionary psychology-like leap that it therefore could have happened only by way of Darwinian selection.//

    I don't think this is correct about evolutionary psychology. I don't think ev-psych claims that the complex adaptation that is culture happened only by way of Darwinian selection, but rather that certain aspects of it can be explained in terms of Darwinian selection. Certainly I've seen no attempt by an evolutionary psychologist to explain why Samsung is gaining on Apple's smartphone market share.

    Anyway, I also object to your objection that ev-psych has only one sample. For example, evolutionary psychology predicts how the male and female of a low MPI species behave. You'd expect the male to try to get it on with anything that moves and the female to be more selective. Now you discover a new species that is low MPI and it turns out your prediction was right. So in that case ev-psych both had more than one sample, and made a testable prediction. Now you simply apply the theory to humans.

    Even within humans, the theory is tested several times because each culture is a sample. If you expect the human male to behave in a certain way because humans are low MPI (though not as low as dragonflies, perhaps), you'd expect to see that behavior (with only slight variation) in human males belonging to every culture, without exception.

    I mean, I find it ludicrous that we can explain the reason for human intelligence in Darwinian terms, but not the fact that the majority of child molesters in any culture is male.

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  17. Will,

    > I would bet dollars to donuts that the ways culture will be defined by philosophers and biologists will be somewhat (if not strikingly) different than how anthropologists define it. This is not an unimportant problem, and it is something that must be addressed before any progress can be made on this topic. <

    I’m not so sure. Do you really think participants to this discussion don’t know what the subject matter is? I’m pretty weary of formal definitions, though I’m all in favor of conceptual clarification. Would you like to get us started with a suggestion?

    Disagreeable,

    > Lamarck, as far as I understand, did not appreciate the role of selection (i.e. differential rates of reproduction) as this was Darwin's major contribution <

    That’s true, but again I don’t feel that I need to stick to the original Lamarckism anymore than my virtue ethics sticks to the original Aristotle. When all’s said and done, I think you, Evan and me at least agree that not all (likely not even the major part) of cultural evolution is the result of Darwinian processes. Further works needs to be done to separate Darwinian from Lamarckian processes when it comes to cultural selection.

    > I would define culture as learned behaviour, especially behaviour that is not universal to all members of a species but to certain groups <

    That does seem to me a bit too broad. By that standard, populations of a given species of birds with different songs have different cultures. Maybe, but it’s nothing like the human case, and my focus is on the latter.

    Erik,

    > Its just that in short cultural shifts -- let's say a change in literary style -- the proximal forces constraining change are individual agents with fairly evident agendas. Yes, anthropology or ev psych have much to say about competition for status or the long-term evolution of our cognitive and expressive capabilities. But those disciplines are concerned with distal causes. <

    Oh, I agree. In fact, in my book (biological) evolutionary considerations only constrain human cultural evolution very vaguely.

    > Too many histories take an esteemed figure -- Shakespeare, say -- and trace British theatre history as a continuous upward development from a remote ancestor. <

    Agreed, again. And that’s bad practice even in evolutionary biology, where the notion of linear progression has long been abandoned.

    > I actually support the employment of the models of change in the humanities that have been developed elsewhere, be it in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, and so on. <

    The examples I saw (for instance, an “evolutionary” study of Jane Austen) left me completely cold. I haven’t learned much from them other than generalities, and certainly less than what I could have learned from a good literary critic or cultural historian.

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  18. Baron,

    > So did Jablonka tell you she agreed with this or not? Because she and Lamb seem to strongly support this in their writing. And you don't. <

    Yes, she did, and yes, I agree (that Lamarck’s emphasis was on the internal responses of the organism more than on the inheritance of acquired characteristics).

    > you're ducking the subject, because clearly Jablonka would have commented to the contrary that inheritance of acquired characteristics was exactly the idea <

    Nope, you are just wrong about this. Did you talk to Eva? Because I did.

    Dan,

    > Can you elaborate a bit on your side comment about ‘Darwin’s formula’ versus ‘Lewontin’s formula’? <

    Darwin was indeed pretty clear, but Lewontin formalized the idea within the context of mathematical population genetics, the theory underlying the Modern Synthesis.

    > was Darwin so insistent that “the ultimate source of novelty in evolution — are random with respect to fitness outcomes”? <

    No, and in fact he did flirt with Lamarckism for a while. But that one is a fundamental criterion of the Modern Synthesis, which is the currently accepted version of Darwinism in evolutionary biology.

    brainoil,

    > Certainly I've seen no attempt by an evolutionary psychologist to explain why Samsung is gaining on Apple's smartphone market share. <

    No, that would be silly, wouldn’t it? But a lot of the explanatory efforts of evopsych are just as silly, though they tend to stay on the general side of things.

    > evolutionary psychology predicts how the male and female of a low MPI species behave. You'd expect the male to try to get it on with anything that moves and the female to be more selective. <

    First of all, that’s not evopsych, it’s standard sexual selection theory. Second, it has been seriously questioned by a number of people, most recently and forcefully Joan Roughgarden.

    > Even within humans, the theory is tested several times because each culture is a sample. <

    But these samples are not at all independent, biologically and often culturally.

    > I find it ludicrous that we can explain the reason for human intelligence in Darwinian terms, but not the fact that the majority of child molesters in any culture is male. <

    Actually, we don’t have a good explanation of human intelligence. At all. (Many hypotheses, none that has actually been adequately tested, they are all, ahem, just-so stories....)

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    1. Massimo, As to what Jablonka actually said to you on person, I wasn't there and will have to take your word for it. But I've read her books and papers, and a summary of her and Lamb's views via Lamarck (from Kaleidoscope 1.1 (2007), Hannon, Book Review, Revolutions in Evolution, Elizabeth Hannon) goes as follows:

      "Their “neo-Lamarckian” argument is then explored, as they offer examples of how genetic mutations happen more in certain environmental conditions, and happen in certain positions along the DNA sequence rather than others in a way that suggests the process is not blind. They also suggest that this should not be a surprise. The evolution of an adaptation that could control the mutation process, at least in some situations, would be advantageous. This implies that it is not just the genes that affect the body, the body can also affect the genes."

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    2. //First of all, that’s not evopsych, it’s standard sexual selection theory.//

      Your understanding of evopsych seems to be radically different from what the rest of us understand as evopsych. Here's from Wikipedia:

      Parental investment (PI), in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc.) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness (Clutton-Brock 1991: 9; Trivers 1972).

      The guy who perhaps invented the concept was Robert Trivers, based on the work of E.O. Wilson. Both are among pioneers of evopsych. Evopsych is pretty much built on the concept of parental investment.

      And of course it is sexual selection. Here's from Wikipedia article on evopsych:

      It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection.

      It's not as if evopsych is built on nothing.

      //Second, it has been seriously questioned by a number of people,most recently and forcefully Joan Roughgarden.//

      Sure, and your point is?

      ***
      //Actually, we don’t have a good explanation of human intelligence. At all.//

      That's true, but that's not important. The point is, no one doubts that the reason for the superior intelligence of humans is evolutionary.
      ***
      //But these samples are not at all independent, biologically and often culturally.//

      This is a valid criticism. But apparently until recently as the beginning of the 20th century, there were societies that existed so independently of other cultures that they didn't even understand how babies were born. So even though cultures are not perfectly independent, we can find situations where one culture is is almost perfectly independent from another culture. And yet we find common features.



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  19. Massimo:

    >I think you, Evan and me at least agree that not all (likely not even the major part) of cultural evolution is the result of Darwinian processes. Further works needs to be done to separate Darwinian from Lamarckian processes when it comes to cultural selection.<

    I'm certainly on board with that. I'm not arguing that Darwinian processes dominate, or are even particularly important, but it sounds like you agree with me that there may be more than one force at work?

    >That does seem to me a bit too broad. By that standard, populations of a given species of birds with different songs have different cultures. Maybe, but it’s nothing like the human case, and my focus is on the latter.<

    It seems that Will has a point, that it may be worth clarifying what we mean by culture.

    I do not find your example to be absurd. I'm not sure that it's "nothing like the human case" - I think it's a matter of degree, from simple to sophisticated culture. I also think there are aspects of human culture that are perhaps directly analogous to birdsong, for example regional accents.

    Nobody set out to change accents deliberately, nor is there any particular adaptive reason for them to vary. The variation is presumably largely random in origin (particularly within a population of people speaking the same language). I would count this variation as cultural, and on the face of it I see no qualitative difference between it and variation in birdsong (except perhaps the effects of sexual selection?).

    Would you care to propose a definition or conceptual clarification instead?

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  20. My reply is too big for this margin. It's on my memetics blog, in a post titled: "Massimo on cultural evolution".

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  21. Baron,

    your last comment was a complete non sequitur. First, we were discussing what Eva said, and you quoted someone’s review of the Jablonka & Lamb book. Second, I most certainly disagree with their suggestion that we have good evidence of directed mutations, but that wasn’t the topic: we were talking about what Lamarck did or did not emphasize in his original writings.

    brainoil,

    > Your understanding of evopsych seems to be radically different from what the rest of us understand as evopsych. Here's from Wikipedia <

    Right, and you are citing an anonymous Wiki entry to someone who is actually an evolutionary biologist and has read the primary literature?

    > Sure, and your point is? <

    My point is that the alleged foundation of evopsych - parental investment theory - has run into serious theoretical and empirical trouble. Relevant, no?

    > no one doubts that the reason for the superior intelligence of humans is evolutionary. <

    My time to say: and your point is? Perhaps you misunderstood my position: I never said that I don’t think (some) human behavior did not evolve (in part) by natural selection. I simply said that it is inordinately difficult to test a number of specific hypotheses advanced by evopsych researchers. The evolution of intelligence is a case in point: you’d think that that’s a big enough target to have attracted a lot of effort by a lot of people. And yet, even there we’ve got close to nothing definitive.

    > apparently until recently as the beginning of the 20th century, there were societies that existed so independently of other cultures that they didn't even understand how babies were born. <

    I’m not sure about that, but my point is that even when culturally isolated, different societies are certainly not biologically independent or quasi-independent data points, since they evolved from common ancestors very very recently.

    Disagreeable,

    > it sounds like you agree with me that there may be more than one force at work? <

    Yes, it’s very possible. This blog post was just a way to get some of my ideas on “paper” so that Leonard (blog contributor, my graduate student) and I can begin discussion of a full fledged paper. It’s very possible that we’ll come out more pluralist than I started.

    > I'm not sure that it's "nothing like the human case" - I think it's a matter of degree, from simple to sophisticated culture. <

    Certainly, but in my mind sometimes degrees of separation are so huge that they amount to a qualitatively new phenomenon.

    > Would you care to propose a definition or conceptual clarification instead? <

    Of culture? I’d rather not, because I’m suspicious of precise definitions of complex concepts. But it should be clear what we are interested in here: the sort of non-genetic passing of information that has characterized much of recent human history and that manifests itself in a variety of practices and artifacts, from religions to science at the big end to our taste in wine and jokes at the smaller end.

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    Replies
    1. //Right, and you are citing an anonymous Wiki entry to someone who is actually an evolutionary biologist and has read the primary literature?//

      Yes, especially when the said evolutionary biologist is denying that the core of evolutionary psychology, is not a part of evolutionary psychology at all. I chose Wikipedia deliberately because this is not a technical matter as to what parental investment theory actually is, but rather a matter about whether there is consensus that PI is part of evopsych, and as such, something like Wikipedia matters more than the opinion of any one person.

      It's ludicrous to say parental investment is not evolutionary psychology when people who found it, Trivers, Hamilton and Wilson, are widely credited as the founders of evolutionary psychology because of their work in the 60s and 70s. What exactly did they do in the 60s and 70s? They worked on parental investment theory.

      If anonymity is your problem, here's a guy called Dr. C.A.P. Kenyon from the Department of Psychology of the University of Plymouth talking about parental investment in the middle of a criticism about evolutionary psychology. Isn't it rather odd? This is just one example.
      ***

      //My point is that the alleged foundation of evopsych - parental investment theory - has run into serious theoretical and empirical trouble.//

      Suppose I say "It [natural selection] has been seriously questioned by a number of people,most recently and forcefully by Deepak Chopra". Now have I made my point that the alleged foundation of evolution has run into serious theoretical and empirical trouble?

      Now of course I'm not saying Roughgarden is like Chopra. But still, have you made your point?

      Still, I would trust your knowledge as a biologist when you say Roughgarden has seriously challenged parental investment theory. But is this challenge the kind of challenge you made? Your point was evopsych has exactly only one sample. Is Roughgarden making the same point? I don't think so.
      ***

      I didn't misunderstood you. I don't think that you don't think that some human behavior did not evolve by natural selection. That's not something anyone would say. But this means you are misunderstanding me. What I'm saying is that some aspects of human culture can in principle be sufficiently explained by biological evolution. Note that I'm not limiting myself to natural selection. Also note the word "sufficiently". If we know about the biology of an organism, if we know how it is going to respond to changes in the environment, then we know how certain aspects of their culture work too. That's what evopsych is trying to do.

      Now suppose we knew everything there is to know about the biology of an organism (which is unlikely). Then we know exactly how they are going to respond to each change in the environment. That means we know exactly how their culture works too.

      Perhaps one of the reasons you don't believe this is because you believe in strong emergence and that the laws of the universe are stratified.

      Taking intelligence as an example was a bad idea. How about the fact that in any culture, it would seem that the males are more violent and aggressive than the females. Don't you think that this aspect of human cultures can sufficiently be explained in evolutionary terms? Evopsych just goes on to explain other things like rape, cheating and monogamy too.
      ***

      //even when culturally isolated, different societies are certainly not biologically independent or quasi-independent data points//

      If they were biologically independent, evolutionary psychology won't work at all. If they were biologically independent, and yet somehow had same features, that would be magic. The point evpsych is making is exactly that every culture is dependent on biology, and that all cultures share the same biology. The question evopsych asks is when cultures are sufficiently isolated, why do they still share some common features? The answer is biology; the evolutionary past.


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    2. @Massimo, "First, we were discussing what Eva said, and you quoted someone’s review of the Jablonka & Lamb book."
      Yes, the point was to wonder how or why she said one thing about Lamarck to you and somewhat the opposite about him in her book. I felt there was "sequitor" relationship, but you felt "non".

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  22. As for the definition of biology vs. culture the following. Physics and chemistry are about structures WITHOUT function, biology is about structures WITH a function. The philosopher John Searle further distinguishes culture from biology by the mode of function assignment. In the case of biology, function assignment is non-agentive, for instance by natural selection. In the case of culture, the function assignment is agentive, i.e., the result of willful human acts. A nice example of the latter is the use of an arbitrary stone as a paperweight.

    As their is no intrinsic relation between form and function, a memory record is necessary to preserve form-function couplings. In biology, DNA has this role, among other things. In the case of culture, collectively maintained memories rest in brains and, increasingly throughout history, in external media. See Merlin Donald (2010): http://psycserver.psyc.queensu.ca/donaldm/Exographic.Rev.2010.pdf

    The currently most sophisticated vision of biology and culture is, in my opinion, found in the work of Stanislas Dehaene on the number sense and on reading. Of particular interest is his concept of 'recycling', which is the cultural --agentive-- counterpart of the biological concept of exaptation. See: http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/figures.htm

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    1. I'm not sure I buy this distinction of culture from biology.

      There not aspects of culture which are either non-functional or non-agentive. For example, regional accent variations are non-functional and non-agentive, I would argue.

      If we assume for a moment that religion is functional only as a force for social cohesion (which function would promote its spreading), then that would be an example of a cultural phenomenon being assigned a non-agentive function by natural selection.

      Though religion emerged as a result of the actions of agents, this particular function was not necessarily one of the reasons the agents had in mind at the time.

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    2. Of course, I did not say that all elements of culture are functional or without "unintended" side-effects. The same is true about biological structures: spandrels, pleiotropic effects, you name it. There is no consensus among linguists about the functionality of dialects. Accents, regional or not, are properties of words and words are certainly agentive creations.

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    3. Right, but if I understand how you described John Searle's position, then we distinguish culture from biology through the criterion of non-agentive function assignment.

      If some elements of culture do not meet this criterion (e.g. religion in the example above) then it's not terribly useful as a discriminator.

      I may have misunderstood your point, in which case I apologise.

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    4. I see your (interesting) point, but it is quite normal for actions to have effects beyond their original intentions. I would still call that (indirect) agentive causation, which also extends responsibility. Thus, you'd better not shoot an archduke, because, before you know, you have started a world war!

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    5. If you're calling accent variation indirect agentive causation, I could also say that culture has indirect non-agentive causes, namely the evolved biology of the agents in question.

      Also, you're leaving out the concept of function if you're only looking at what caused the features, so you can possibly leave it out altogether. We could instead simply distinguish biology from culture by saying that culture is that which is affected by intelligent agents and biology is that which is affected by natural selection.

      Except that it seems that selection effects may also influence the evolution of culture.

      All in all, it's an interesting idea and it certainly sounds good. I'm just not sure that it bears up to much analysis. It might serve as more of a heuristic than a clear definition.

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  23. brainoil,

    > especially when the said evolutionary biologist is denying that the core of evolutionary psychology, is not a part of evolutionary psychology at all. <

    Re-read what I wrote, it doesn’t come even close to that.

    > It's ludicrous to say parental investment is not evolutionary psychology when people who found it, Trivers, Hamilton and Wilson, are widely credited as the founders of evolutionary psychology <

    One more time: I did *not* say any such thing. I said that PIT is in trouble, both on theoretical and on empirical grounds. I also said that it is not evopsych per se, it is a general theory within evolutionary biology, as demonstrated by the fact that it was developed looking at non-human models and it keeps been applied to everything, from plants to mammals, not just humans.

    > Now of course I'm not saying Roughgarden is like Chopra. <

    I think you are, which shows you have no idea who Joan is or on what she bases her arguments.

    > Your point was evopsych has exactly only one sample. Is Roughgarden making the same point? <

    No, they are two separate points, which I made in two different comments.

    > What I'm saying is that some aspects of human culture can in principle be sufficiently explained by biological evolution. <

    Nobody would disagree with that statement. The devil is in the details, as they say.

    > How about the fact that in any culture, it would seem that the males are more violent and aggressive than the females. Don't you think that this aspect of human cultures can sufficiently be explained in evolutionary terms? <

    Maybe, but since my claim was never that there is no evolutionary explanation of any human behavior, I hardly see the point. This sort of claim can be substantiated via inter-species comparisons, the problem with evopsych is when it goes for human-specific explanations, where the sample size, again, is just 1.

    > If they were biologically independent, and yet somehow had same features, that would be magic. <

    No, it would be convergent evolution.

    > The question evopsych asks is when cultures are sufficiently isolated, why do they still share some common features? The answer is biology; the evolutionary past. <

    Or they developed them independently (cultural convergent evolution). Or they influenced each other (via horizontal cultural transmission). Or something else, who knows.

    > the point was to wonder how or why she said one thing about Lamarck to you and somewhat the opposite about him in her book. <

    She didn’t. Did you actually read the book? You are comparing a statement about what Lamarck said with a modern statement about the possibility of directed mutations. Still looks like a non sequitur to me...

    Dsagreeable,

    > If we assume for a moment that religion is functional only as a force for social cohesion (which function would promote its spreading), then that would be an example of a cultural phenomenon being assigned a non-agentive function by natural selection. <

    Selection on what? What’s the target? What fitness function? What inheritance system? Just asking.

    > It is my contention (contra Massimo's original post) that some cultural elements are functional but that this function was not assigned by agents. Rather, some cultural elements may have functions that arise because of natural selection. <

    Can we work through an example, just to fix our ideas here?

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    1. @Massimo, "She didn’t. Did you actually read the book? You are comparing a statement about what Lamarck said with a modern statement about the possibility of directed mutations."
      Yes, I read the book, and Lamarck, and later Jablonka and Lamb, were talking about self directed evolution; which, if that's not the possibility of directed mutations, what was it? And I've also read Lamarcks' writings, although you say you haven't. And self directed evolutionary changes were also talked about by Samuel Butler and others before Darwin published his papers.

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    2. First,that last part about Lamarck should not be addressed to me. I haven't talked about Lamarck here. So it's no wonder it looks like a non sequitur to you.

      //Re-read what I wrote, it doesn't come even close to that.//

      You earlier said and I quote "First of all, that’s not evopsych, it’s standard sexual selection theory." So not only it comes close to that. It is that. You are also saying now that " it is not evopsych per se, it is a general theory within evolutionary biology, as demonstrated by the fact that it was developed looking at non-human models and it keeps been applied to everything." What you are doing here is that you are taking the major work of some of the major evolutionary psychologists, and denying that it's part of evolutionary psychology because they don't fit your definition of evolutionary psychology. Good strategy.

      //I think you are, which shows you have no idea who Joan is or on what she bases her arguments.//

      I don't know who she is. But you think that I think someone who can get a scholarly article published is the same as a charlatan like Chopra? That's rich. Replace Chopra with Dawkins and my point is still made. You can't drop a name, say that she forcefully criticize something, and count that as an argument.

      I asked whether Roughgarden's objection to parental investment is the one sample objection you have against evopsych, and you answered no. My point is, not all of evolutionary psychology can be attacked with the one sample argument you are making. You are attacking the entirety of evopsych after defining it in such a way that it doesn't include parental investment and such pioneering concepts of major evolutionary psychologists out there.

      ***
      //No, it would be convergent evolution.//

      I thought when you said biological independence, you meant it literally. In the case of convergent evolution, the species involved may be distantly related, but nonetheless they are related. What I had in mind was the sort of situation where an alien species find the breasts of human females sexy. That would be magic.

      In any case, what evolutionary psychology claims is that when cultures show common attributes even when they are sufficiently independent from each other, that must be because the evolutionary past of the human species; their biology.

      And yes, of course it could be cultural convergent evolution. But exactly why they evolved that way must have been determined by the human biology.
      ***

      I don't want to get involved in a long debate. To summarize, I don't think what you are doing is fair to people like Trivers, Hamilton and Wilson who did and do some really fascinating science - work that is usually considered as core theories of evolutionary psychology. I know that lot of pseudoscience goes under the term evolutionary psychology. But that's not a good reason dismiss the entire thing as pseudoscience.


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  24. >Can we work through an example, just to fix our ideas here?<

    Sure, but but I must apologise in advance for using the language of memetics.

    I have sympathy with some of your views (as I understand them), that memetics is probably a dead-end research program and that it seems to lack rigour, however that doesn't necessarily mean that it's entirely worthless. Even if it's a bit vague, it may yet shed light on how Darwinian effects could apply by sketching out some illustrative just-so stories.

    So a just-so story is all I can offer. Let's limit the scope to religions, although I think you could broaden it to entire civilisations.

    Consider a population of proto-religions in pre-history. Each religion changes over time due to the whims of various prophets and tribal leaders. Sometimes these changes are damaging to the religion/society and sometimes beneficial.

    In an extreme bad case, let's suppose that some religions become suicide cults. Those religions (and societies) tend not to outlive this mutation for very long and quickly become extinct.

    Let's suppose other religions develop the notion that they are the One True Faith and that only their adherents will be "saved". We might therefore expect these religions to spread more rapidly than others. In particular we might expect them to gain converts from other religions which make no such claims (for reasons similar to Pascal's wager).

    Over time, we should expect religions to change in such a way as to promote their own growth and defend themselves from threats such as apostasy, rival religions and "asking too many impertinent questions". We should not expect to see many (big) religions which encourage apostasy, open-mindedness, pursuing other religions, etc.

    So we can come to view certain aspects of religion as adaptive because they promote the growth of that religion or society. These features may have arisen through the deliberate actions of prophets, but we can also view the prophets as simply the mechanism producing new variation (mutations) which are then selected for by differential rates of growth and spreading of the affected religions. The mutations may not be random with respect to fitness, but neither are they guaranteed to be beneficial. Crucially, selection effects apply regardless.

    This might not ever be a rigorously defensible science, and yet there are certain questions where this view is worth bearing in mind.

    "Why do so many of the big religions encourage proselytisation?"

    One answer might be in terms of the historical context of the origins of the doctrines concerned.

    Another type of answer might simply explain that those religions which did proselytise (Christianity) would be the ones we would expect to survive and grow to a large size while those that did not would become extinct, or as in the case of Zoroastrianism remain local and relatively insignificant.

    Both types of answer are valid. The value of memetics lies not so much in theoretical rigour as in reminding us that the latter kind of explanation might be significant.

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  25. >Selection on what? What’s the target? What fitness function? What inheritance system? <

    Selection on what = ability to promote the growth or spreading of memes/meme complexes
    Target = memes/meme complexes (analogous to genes/organisms)
    Fitness function = rate of growth/spreading
    What inheritance system = transmission from person to person at small scales, international cultural influences at large scales

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  26. Baron,

    > Yes, I read the book, and Lamarck, and later Jablonka and Lamb, were talking about self directed evolution; which, if that's not the possibility of directed mutations, what was it? <

    You actually read Lamarck? I’m impressed. But you are confusing a mechanism with a process. Lamarck couldn’t possibly be talking about a mechanism for his suggested process. And don’t forget that Lamarck was wrong about the process, when it comes to biological evolution.

    Disagreeable,

    > Selection on what = ability to promote the growth or spreading of memes/meme complexes <

    Well, you lost me right there. I think the concept of meme is incoherent.

    > So a just-so story is all I can offer. <

    As usual with memetics. Thanks for the attempt, but not good enough, I think (not your fault, I don’t think it can be done).

    brainoil,

    > First,that last part about Lamarck should not be addressed to me. I haven't talked about Lamarck here. <

    I know, that was in response to Baron, I thought it was clear, but sorry for the confusion.

    > You earlier said and I quote "First of all, that’s not evopsych, it’s standard sexual selection theory." <

    That sentence in no way implies that the concept is not *also* part of evopsych. Evopsych, after all, is a subset of evolutionary theory. Indeed, it has *nothing* new conceptually to offer outside of standard evolutionary theory. It is simply an application of the latter to the problems of human evolution.

    > What you are doing here is that you are taking the major work of some of the major evolutionary psychologists, and denying that it's part of evolutionary psychology because they don't fit your definition of evolutionary psychology. <

    Not at all. Most of the work (and people) you are referring to was done before there was such a field as evolutionary psychology, for instance that of Travis and of Hamilton. It was later used by evopsych researchers. Trivers became one of them (though only to a point), Hamilton never did, as far as I know.

    > I don't know who she is. But you think that I think someone who can get a scholarly article published is the same as a charlatan like Chopra? <

    You made the comparison, not I. And Joan is one of the most respected evolutionary biologists alive, with plenty of publications in the field we are discussing. So the fact that she has very good theoretical and empirical reasons to question Trivers & co. should bother you, at least a bit.

    > You can't drop a name, say that she forcefully criticize something, and count that as an argument. <

    I already made my arguments, but this is a blog. If you want more, read her books or papers.

    > not all of evolutionary psychology can be attacked with the one sample argument you are making. <

    That’s right. I have devoted an entire chapter of Making Sense of Evolution to a more in-depth attack. You can read that too, or am I not allowed to reference my own work?

    > In the case of convergent evolution, the species involved may be distantly related, but nonetheless they are related. <

    That is correct, but it doesn’t present the sort of statistical sampling problems of the case of human populations, where the phylogenetic relation is very recent (and where continuous admixing of populations precludes the formation of clades).

    > What I had in mind was the sort of situation where an alien species find the breasts of human females sexy. That would be magic. <

    Indeed, that’s why I didn’t like the movie Avatar...

    > what evolutionary psychology claims is that when cultures show common attributes even when they are sufficiently independent from each other, that must be because the evolutionary past of the human species; their biology. <

    And what I’m saying is that their famous “universality” test implies no such thing. That’s one possible explanation, but far from the only one, and even further from having being established.

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    1. @Massimo, "And don’t forget that Lamarck was wrong about the process, when it comes to biological evolution."
      Thats the point that's in dispute here. Lamarck now appears to many to nave been much more right about the process than he's been given credit for, which is why Jablonka has called herself a neo-Lamarckian. And biological evolution IS as it turns out, both a cultural and an individual process, which Darwin didn't quite appreciate as well.
      The self adaptive process, that Jablonka believes in and you don't, requires that all species have a cultural system that they not only learn from but teach each other from. Niche construction is a culturally determined tactic. Memetics is no more than a misunderstanding of the cultural learning process.
      And evo psych is little more than an evolving form of psychology. But I've digressed.

      Delete
  27. >I think the concept of meme is incoherent.<
    I don't think it's incoherent, I think it's vague.

    In my view, the vagueness of the concept of meme is in no way a fatal blow for the idea that culture is subject to Darwinian forces.

    It's no more incoherent than words like "idea" or "concept". It may not be rigid enough to build a science on, but even so it may be used to construct just-so stories.

    And just-so stories are not valueless, in my opinion. While they cannot tell you precisely what is happening, they do indicate plausible accounts of the kinds of things that might be.

    Just like evopsych. You don't like evopsych because it doesn't make verifiable claims, yet you have no doubt that the kinds of explanations proposed in evopsych are similar to the kinds of forces that are actually at work in human evolution. Our psychology is certainly a product of evolution after all.

    So why not make the same distinction for memetics? Recognise that epistemologically we can't really work with it because it's too vague and unverifiable, but ontologically there may be something to it.

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  28. Massimo:

    A quick example of the difference between coherency and vagueness, epistemology and ontology as applied to memes.

    I propose that you have been influenced by both Plato and Aristotle, perhaps more so the latter? Can you quantify the degree to which they have influenced you? Does it make sense to say that Aristotle's influence is 2.34 times greater than Plato's?

    Perhaps not. That doesn't mean that they didn't influence you to some extent, or that the concept of influence itself is incoherent. It's just vague. There is something to the ontology of influence, even if epistemologically it's hard to nail down precisely what's going on with precise definitions and numbers.

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  29. This is the first time I've read Coyne's objection to memetics, and I'm surprised by it. It seems directly analogous to the creationist "tautology" objection to natural selection, and similarly misguided.

    Schloss's objection is misguided too. His objections to talk of memes could also largely be directed towards talk of beliefs and desires. Does he think that talk of those entities is also no better than medieval demonology? Both sorts of objections (be they from Schloss or eliminative materialists respectively) misunderstand the nature of language. We use language to model reality at various levels of abstraction. Meme-talk is more abstract than gene-talk, but that doesn't make it wrong. Similarly, mind-talk is more abstract than brain-talk. The reason our talk of beliefs and desires feels so true is that it's very useful for modelling human behaviour. Memes are just mental entities, like beliefs, ideas, etc. You can't deny the existence of memes without denying the existence of those familiar mental entities. The correct question to ask about memes is not whether they exist but how useful meme-talk is.

    This is not to say that I'm a big defender of memetics. I have my reservations about the usefulness of meme-talk. The meme's eye view is an interesting perspective, but I'm doubtful it will be useful enough for there to be anything worth calling a "science of memetics". Entities like beliefs, desires and memes exist at such a level of abstraction that it's hard to say precise enough things about them to warrant the term "science".


    @Disagreeable Me

    Sorry, but I'm going to have to agree with you. ;)

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    1. And I with you!

      I'd stand by everything you wrote.

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  30. Baron,

    > Lamarck now appears to many to nave been much more right about the process than he's been given credit for <

    No, Eva is wrong on that one. And she is in a very small minority on that point.

    > The self adaptive process, that Jablonka believes in and you don't, requires that all species have a cultural system that they not only learn from but teach each other from. <

    I don’t think Eva would subscribe to what you just wrote.

    Disagreeable,

    > The self adaptive process, that Jablonka believes in and you don't, requires that all species have a cultural system that they not only learn from but teach each other from. <

    Maybe not, but I made different arguments for why culture is not (or largely not) a Darwinian process.

    > It's no more incoherent than words like "idea" or "concept". <

    No, it’s much worse than that, given that memes are ascribed agentive powers.

    > It may not be rigid enough to build a science on, but even so it may be used to construct just-so stories. <

    And what’s the point of that? I thought we were talking about science.

    > While they cannot tell you precisely what is happening, they do indicate plausible accounts of the kinds of things that might be. <

    In other words, now we are talking logical space, i.e. philosophy. I’m fine with that, but I doubt “memeticists” would.

    > You don't like evopsych because it doesn't make verifiable claims, yet you have no doubt that the kinds of explanations proposed in evopsych are similar to the kinds of forces that are actually at work in human evolution. <

    Correct, but notice that I consider evopsych a borderline science. And it’s still better off than memetics, considering that at least we have reasons to think that human beings do exist and do evolve...

    > That doesn't mean that they didn't influence you to some extent, or that the concept of influence itself is incoherent. It's just vague. <

    True, but I think that the concept of meme is *both* vague *and* incoherent. I do distinguish between the two. It’s vague because, for instance, it’s hard to even figure out what counts or doesn’t count as a meme. It’s incoherent because it ascribes agency to an entity that is not, in fact, an entity.

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    1. @Massimo
      "> Lamarck now appears to many to nave been much more right about the process than he's been given credit for <
      No, Eva is wrong on that one. And she is in a very small minority on that point."
      That's a growing minority and in any case that wouldn't make her any more wrong than you, considering her qualifications in the field.

      "> The self adaptive process, that Jablonka believes in and you don't, requires that all species have a cultural system that they not only learn from but teach each other from. <
      I don’t think Eva would subscribe to what you just wrote."

      I think she would, based on this excerpt about her work from Wikipedia: "An example of her work in this area is the book Animal Traditions (2000), co-authored with Eytan Avital, in which they extend models of human cultural transmission to the non-human animal world, to show that cultural evolution has played an important role in the evolution of other animals."

      Delete
  31. Richard,

    > It seems directly analogous to the creationist "tautology" objection to natural selection, and similarly misguided. <

    No, there is a huge difference: what saves the theory of natural selection from being tautological is the existence of a functional ecology of living organisms: we can predict which characteristics of an organism, given a certain environment, are more or less likely to be selected. No such thing is available for memetics. In the latter case all there is to it truly is: the fittest memes survive. Which memes survive? The fittest ones!

    > Schloss's objection is misguided too. His objections to talk of memes could also largely be directed towards talk of beliefs and desires. <

    No, beliefs and desires are not “entities” in any sense of the term.

    > The reason our talk of beliefs and desires feels so true is that it's very useful for modelling human behaviour. <

    No, what makes them real (I don’t know about “true”) is that we actually have and experience them.

    > You can't deny the existence of memes without denying the existence of those familiar mental entities. <

    I just did (see above).

    > The correct question to ask about memes is not whether they exist but how useful meme-talk is. <

    That’s anti-realist talk in philosophy of science, I’m not an anti-realist. For instance, I think electrons are real particles (or however physicists want to describe them), they are not just useful constructs that we make up to describe electrical phenomena.

    > I'm doubtful it will be useful enough for there to be anything worth calling a "science of memetics". <

    On that we agree. I don’t think it’s by chance that the only professional journal dedicated to memetics closed years ago for luck of progress in the field.

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  32. Massimo:

    >Maybe not, but I made different arguments for why culture is not (or largely not) a Darwinian process.<

    I'm not sure what this is in reference to. You seem to have quoted some text from Baron twice instead of quoting me.

    >No, it’s much worse than that, given that memes are ascribed agentive powers.<

    I beg to differ, although I'm not sure what you mean by this. Memes are not supposed to be agents, and they don't directly have any physical effects in themselves. Memes are abstractions of the patterns found in the minds and brains of agents, just as genes are abstractions of chemical patterns found in chromosomes.

    Neither are tangible "entities". You can't point to a gene any more than you can point to a meme - all you can show me is atoms in a certain pattern that in the context of an organism is imbued with meaning. The only difference in my mind is that genes can be precisely defined and detected whereas memes are much more vague.

    >And what’s the point of that? I thought we were talking about science.<

    No we're not, at least I'm not. I did after all say that I agreed with most of your post. I'm trying to make a point about ontology: whether it's true or not that Darwinian forces affect cultural evolution. I make no claims whatsoever as to the usefulness (much less rigour) of memetics as a science.

    >In other words, now we are talking logical space, i.e. philosophy. I’m fine with that, but I doubt “memeticists” would.<

    As I'm not much of a memeticist, I'm fine with that!

    >It’s incoherent because it ascribes agency to an entity that is not, in fact, an entity.<

    Again, I'm really not clear on what you mean here. I don't know what you mean by entity. Are genes entities? Entropy? Equations? I don't know, but they seem to be in approximately the same existential category as memes to me, and all are useful in modelling what happens in the world, so it's not clear to me why memes are incoherent.

    Neither do I see why you characterise memetics as ascribing agency to memes any more than physics ascribes agency to protons.

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  33. Hmm.. Interesting discussion.

    What is it that is common to evolution and cultural development. It seems to me that informational dynamics at different levels of abstraction could possibly play a unifying role. Bridging the divides between the science, logic, and philosophy will be problematic but I hope possible. I think the role of emergence (of the levels of abstraction) with respect to dynamic opposition (of and between the information) is more hopeful than trying to fit memes into the genetic evolution model.

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  34. All,

    a new post has come out with my byline, so I will be moving on... (no, this doesn’t mean this thread is “dead,” just that I have limited time to respond to comments!).

    Baron,

    > That's a growing minority and in any case that wouldn't make her any more wrong than you, considering her qualifications in the field. <

    I don’t think you have any evidence to claim that it is a growing minority, that’s certainly not my perception. And at any rate, at any particular moment during a scientific controversy your best bet is to cautiously side with the current consensus, which is definitely that there is no such thing as directed mutations.

    > I think she would, based on this excerpt about her work from Wikipedia <

    It would be better to cite Eva, instead of Wikipedia. But even your excerpt doesn’t make your point: it is uncontroversial among biologists that human cultural transmission has analogs in *some* animal species. The key word there is *some*.

    > Memes are not supposed to be agents, and they don't directly have any physical effects in themselves. <

    If they are not agentive how can they evolve by natural selection? If they don’t cause physical effects how can they be selected to inhabit a very physical thing, like a brain? You see the disanalogy with genes, which are physical causal agents subject to selection?

    > Memes are abstractions of the patterns found in the minds and brains of agents, just as genes are abstractions of chemical patterns found in chromosomes. <

    That is a bad analogy, popular as it is in memetics. Genes reproduce, when was the last time you saw a brain pattern doing the same? By which mechanisms? What *is* a brain pattern, anyway?

    > You can't point to a gene any more than you can point to a meme - all you can show me is atoms in a certain pattern that in the context of an organism is imbued with meaning. <

    That’s a semantic game. The *concept* of gene is a scientific abstraction. Genes qua specific, relatively well defined sequences of chemicals of a particular type, characterized by specific and well understood properties are *not* abstractions. Memes are *entirely* abstractions.

    > Neither do I see why you characterise memetics as ascribing agency to memes any more than physics ascribes agency to protons. <

    Protons do not replicate and evolve, do they? That’s the crucial difference here.

    Seth,

    > What is it that is common to evolution and cultural development. It seems to me that informational dynamics at different levels of abstraction could possibly play a unifying role. <

    Good question. I don’t know whether informational dynamics will do the trick, possibly. But it seems to me that before we look for an umbrella theory covering both biological and cultural evolution we need to have a decent theory of the latter, which I don’t think is on offer just yet.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. @Massimo, "your best bet is to cautiously side with the current consensus, which is definitely that there is no such thing as directed mutations."

      Even when my wits tell me that Eva, not to mention others such as Shapiro, make so much more scientific sense?

      "it is uncontroversial among biologists that human cultural transmission has analogs in *some* animal species. The key word there is *some*."

      The key word would be "none" if culture had no directional role to play in their evolution.

      Delete
  35. Hi Massimo,

    I was enjoying the conversation, so it's a pity you're moving on, but understandable. I'll try to answer your points anyway.

    >If they are not agentive how can they evolve by natural selection?<

    It appears we had different interpretations of 'agent'. I took it to mean something that acts in response to its environment, as in an AI agent, but you seem to mean merely something that causes a change, as in a chemical agent. In that case I retract my objection to referring to memes as agents.

    >If they don’t cause physical effects how can they be selected to inhabit a very physical thing, like a brain? <

    Well, they do cause physical effects, in a way, but this doesn't mean they themselves are necessarily physical. They are descriptions of high-level emergent phenomena, much like many of the things we normally consider to be real but not physical, such as market forces. As with market forces, the physical effects they cause can be explained by reduction to ground-level physics. The reductionist view is not terribly helpful in understanding what's actually going on though.

    >What *is* a brain pattern, anyway?<

    As a physicalist, I believe that all mental phenomena ultimately derive from physical brain states. Mental representations of concepts are such phenomena, and as such they correspond to some particular physical pattern within a brain. Memes are simply communicable mental representations. The communication of a meme involves the physical representation of this meme in one brain being translated to an analogous representation in another brain. This can be viewed as a reproduction of the brain pattern.

    The difference with genes, of course, is that it is doubtful that any two brains share the same representation, and I expect this is where you would criticise the memetic explanation.

    However it's easy to see how non-physical abstracta can evolve independently of physical representation when we consider the evolution of genetic algorithms. The patterns that evolve here are quite separate from any specific physical representation as the same software could be run on multiple different computers with different architectures (and so physical representations) and this would cause no problem for the evolution of the abstracta being selected for.

    >Genes qua specific, relatively well defined sequences of chemicals of a particular type, characterized by specific and well understood properties are *not* abstractions.<

    I'm not sure I agree with you here. Genes are not as clearly ontologically real as fundamental particles. Even when viewed as aggregations of fundamental particles they don't really make sense without the context of the larger genome. I'll grant you that they are specific and well-defined in comparison to memes, but I'm really not convinced that they are less abstract. If I asked you to send me a bucket full of genes I'm not sure what that would mean.

    Furthermore, it's not clear if genes are actually the chemicals that make them up or the information represented by those chemicals. It may be more appropriate to send me a zip-file of genes rather than a bucket.

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  36. I have a new idea for an approach to the problem.

    The vagueness of memes is contingent. Consider a possible world where people have evolved to have physically identical digital brains. Beliefs are stored in something akin to a database. As we learn and develop, we gain the ability to inspect this database directly and figure out how data is represented.

    Now, when a concept is explained by person A to person B, we can see that the specific digital representation of that concept in the brain of person A is now found in the brain of person B. We therefore have found a specific, well defined sequence of ones and zeros that having well-understood properties that has been transmitted from one person to another.

    It seems that this scenario is more amenable to direct comparison to biological evolution.

    The real world is much more complex, but perhaps if we had this level of understanding of our own brains we could then also make a legitimate comparison to biology.

    Because we don't have this level of understanding in the real world, and because physical representations vary, memes are perhaps more related to phenotype than genotype.

    But Darwin didn't know of genes, and yet he was able to form his theory working on phenotypes alone. It seems to me that we are in much the same position with respect to cultural evolution as Darwin was in when he formed his theory. If Darwin was justified in coming to his conclusions then, when "traits" were just as vague as memes, I don't see why there should be any objection to making similar statements about the possible effects of natural selection on culture.

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  37. Disagreeable,
    Brains are not computers. Just as I think it is a mistake to try and fit memes into a model of evolution by natural selection, similarly I think it is a mistake to try to model the brain as a computer. I also don't think 'brain states' is a particularly useful concept. The brain functions as a dynamic process and it's static state at a snapshot in time seems to me to only be meaningful in the context of process.

    By your example I am wondering how you propose non-physical market forces to interact with the physical brain to effect a physical state change. To account for this it seems we need a model that accounts for both actual state and the potential effect of the market force (afforded by consciousness). I think the oppositional relationship between the 'actual' and the 'potential' are inseparable at that level of abstraction.

    This is why I like the approach J.E Brenner is attempting.

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    1. >Brains are not computers<
      I disagree, in that I support Strong AI and the computational theory of mind. However that's another discussion, and it's beside the point because I was describing a counter-factual possible world in which the parallels between memes and genes might be clearer.

      >I also don't think 'brain states' is a particularly useful concept. The brain functions as a dynamic process and it's static state at a snapshot in time seems to me to only be meaningful in the context of process.<

      Sure. But I didn't say that it had to be viewed statically. Even dynamic processes have states, e.g. a moving car has a velocity and an acceleration and even a rate-of-change-of-acceleration.

      Anyway, it's beside the point because this is a counter-factual scenario. I'm imagining that we can directly see and understand what's going on in brains, something we can't do in our world.

      > I am wondering how you propose non-physical market forces to interact with the physical brain to effect a physical state change.<

      Well, are market forces physical are not? They can clearly affect physical state changes. A downturn in the economy can even lead to suicides.

      I would say they are usually not thought of as physical. However, they are physical in another sense, in that they are built upon layers of abstractions that ultimately boil down to interactions between fundamental particles. Market forces are descriptions of very high level emergent properties of complex systems that are built on physical foundations, but they are so removed from those foundations that they are not usually thought of as physical.

      This is partly because they are substrate-agnostic. Market forces would exist whether we were humans, sentient squid or computer programs, as long as we shared some certain behavioural characteristics. Because market forces have no dependency on their physical substrate, it is reasonable to view them as non-physical.

      Memes are like this. If we believe in thoughts, concepts, beliefs, and if we believe that these can have physical effects, then I don't see we should not believe the same of memes. "Meme" is really just a category that encompasses these same entities in the context of communication from mind to mind.

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  38. Disagreeable,

    I agree that beliefs, memes, market forces can affect physical state changes. I don't see however how you can hold that position while calling yourself a physicalist and at the same time conceding beliefs, memes, market forces as non-physical.

    If market forces are high level emergent properties that cause physical effects at lower levels that is downward causation. How? There is a fundamental inconsistency that I do not can be explained with a traditional propositional logic of the excluded middle. I don't think there is anyway to maneuver around these types of obstacles unless an approach that allows contradictions such as physical/non-physical, actual/potential, etc.... is adopted.

    This obviously relates to your claim of strong AI being substrate independent which I think faces the same problems.

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    1. I think that any problems that arises in these discussion are semantic only.

      Are market forces physical? I don't know. I have a position on that, but it's a purely definitional one. If you give me a precise definition of physical I'll give you my answer. I think that minds and market forces ultimately arise from physical interactions so I regard myself as a physicalist. However I also regard myself as a mathematical Platonist, so in that sense I'm not a physicalist. I think this apparent contradiction arises only out of ambiguity with regard to the meaning of terms such as "existence".

      "If market forces are high level emergent properties that cause physical effects at lower levels that is downward causation."

      Not really, because what's going on in lower levels can always in principle be explained by causes at those lower levels.

      If we forget about quantum uncertainty for a moment, then in principle you don't need to know anything about market forces, suffering, etc to predict that the atoms that compose John Doe will end up falling off of the atoms that compose the Golden Gate Bridge. You only need to know the positions and velocities of all the particles in some subset of the universe, and then possess the ability to calculate what's going to happen.

      Concepts such as "market forces", "John Doe", "suicide", "Golden Gate Bridge" etc are high-level abstractions that assist us in making sense of the world but they disappear when you look at the lowest levels of physics.

      We regard the Golden Gate Bridge as physical because it is not substrate-independent, whereas we are more conflicted about the physicality of people because many imagine they might exist in substrates other than their current physical forms, whether as disembodied souls, uploaded to a computer, or as themselves twenty years from now.

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    2. It seems to me that these 'semantic' problems or inconsistencies are in the fact the hard problems that need to be addressed, and not 'forgotten'. They show up at every level from the quantum level to the problem of consciousness.

      That doesn't mean we can't take advantage of the benefits that reduction affords in specialized areas by temporarily 'forgetting' about these fundamental problems for specific purposes (as long as we remember why we allowed ourselves to forget). If we hope to unify what appears to be fundamentally separate however I believe we need to question the type of (in principle) assumptions you make.

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    3. Can you give me an example of an assumption I'm making which you doubt?

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    4. ex #1

      'what's going on in lower levels can always in principle be explained by causes at those lower levels'

      Here you assume 'what's going on in lower levels' to include its higher cause (already conceded), but only need the lower level to 'explain it'? Your lower level explanation must include that higher level cause (somewhere hidden), must it not?

      #2 - Strong AI is independent of it's physical substrate. If by strong AI you mean something like human intelligence this seems like a big assumption to me as well.

      # 3- The Human brain as a computer assumption.

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    5. 'We regard the Golden Gate Bridge as physical because it is not substrate-independent, whereas we are more conflicted about the physicality of people because many imagine they might exist in substrates other than their current physical forms, whether as disembodied souls, uploaded to a computer, or as themselves twenty years from now.'

      I have no illusions of being a 'disembodied soul' or ever being 'uploaded to computer'. My self-concept on reflection does not include any part that is inseparable from the world I seem to exist in. Yet there seems to be a non-physical aspect through which humans can interact with their environments that bridges do not possess (such as reacting consciously and unconsciously to beliefs, market forces, etc.....).

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    6. 'If we forget about quantum uncertainty for a moment, then in principle you don't need to know anything about market forces, suffering, etc to predict that the atoms that compose John Doe will end up falling off of the atoms that compose the Golden Gate Bridge. You only need to know the positions and velocities of all the particles in some subset of the universe, and then possess the ability to calculate what's going to happen.'

      What subset of the universe would you like to select and then assume that it has no relation to the unselected portion with regard to how that initial selection will move forward? In addition to quantum uncertainty are we also forgetting about quantum entaglement ,butterfly effects, the history of prior 'non-physical' causes in the atoms of John Dough etc...? etc....

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    7. ex #1
      >Here you assume 'what's going on in lower levels' to include its higher cause (already conceded), but only need the lower level to 'explain it'? Your lower level explanation must include that higher level cause (somewhere hidden), must it not?<

      I'm not sure we're on the same wavelength here. High-level explanations and low-level explanations are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. I'm not sure what it means to say that what's going on in lower levels 'includes' its higher cause.

      If you read a bit about ideal gases and entropy and so on, you could explain the diffusion of two gases as they mix together with two types of explanations. You could use the positions and velocities of all the particles and calculate their future positions and velocities and explain their mixing that way. Alternatively you could simply use the second law of thermodynamics to explain that entropy increases. Both explanations are correct. One of them is easier to work with. There is no high level force affecting low level state that could not in principle be deduced from the low level state alone. Concepts such as entropy can be understood as tools to help us make predictions about complex systems without having to simulate everything exhaustively. Whether entropy exists depends on how you define existence.

      ex #2 and ex #3 is admittedly controversial, but it's probably not that relevant to this discussion. I'll admit that there are arguments against them, however I don't think any of them work. If you want to discuss this, I invite you to read and comment on my blog posts on the topic: http://disagreeableme.blogspot.com/search/label/strong%20ai

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    8. >Yet there seems to be a non-physical aspect through which humans can interact with their environments that bridges do not possess (such as reacting consciously and unconsciously to beliefs, market forces, etc.....).<

      So you believe that there are non-physical forces at work in the universe? That may be defensible, but it seems to be more of an assumption that there are not. I've got some blog posts on topics related to this also. http://disagreeableme.blogspot.ie/2012/06/super-naturalism.html

      >What subset of the universe would you like to select and then assume that it has no relation to the unselected portion with regard to how that initial selection will move forward?<

      If you were conservative, you'd have include all the particles within the light cone of the event you want to predict. In effect, that would be everything within a sphere with a radius of the distance a beam of light would travel in the span of time you are trying to predict. If Mr. Doe is going to commit suicide in a week, you'd need data for all the particles within a light-week of the Golden Gate Bridge.

      If you were less conservative and more knowledgeable, you might be able to work with a much smaller set of particles by weeding out particles that are unlikely to affect the outcomes, for example particles the trajectory of which will not take them anywhere near earth in the time period concerned.

      >In addition to quantum uncertainty are we also forgetting about quantum entaglement ,butterfly effects, the history of prior 'non-physical' causes in the atoms of John Dough etc...? etc....<

      I don't recognise the validity of the concept of prior non-physical causes in the atoms of John Doe. If you understand me to mean otherwise then there has been a miscommunication.

      If I can't get you to agree with me in a deterministic universe there's no point in bringing non-determinism into it. This is not because non-determinism is a fundamental problem for my worldview but because it needlessly complicates things.

      So we're forgetting about anything that causes the calculation to be non-deterministic. Butterfly effects in particular are not a problem, because if you know the positions and velocities of the particles to a sufficient precision then chaotic non-determinism will not come into effect for a long time (potentially long after Doe has jumped).

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    9. Thanks for the discussion - This will be be my last post on this thread but I will try to give my answers to each of your points - Mostly from there I think it will be differences in ideologies.

      ex 1
      My understanding of statistical dynamics in as they relate to thermodyamics is that they are approximations that incorporate properties (like temperature and pressure) from the macro level to make the approximations (calculations). You can correct me here, but I believe this was one of Massimos arguments. Could be my error I am no expert.

      I actually agree that once a higher level has emerged it's is not useful to think of bottom-up or top down causality. At that point I think causality is in the dynamic process, but I don't think either the lower or higher level can be ignored. It is in the interaction (antagonistic support) that I think leads to the emergence of the novel macro properties.

      So yes if a market force is non-physical I believe it is part of the causal picture, but is also inseparable from it's physical effect. I recognize the inconsistency here which is why it calls for a new (para-consistent) logic approach (in my view). I don't think this is magic. A deterministic ontology that includes both what is actual and potential, physical and non-physical would allow for this and is a valid interpretation of quantum mechanics.

      From my vantage point you are making my case with the Laplacian demon John Doe though experiment. First you have to know initial conditions, then you have to extend the selection to a vast amount of space, then you have to limit the time over which can predict what will happen.

      So sure under those constraints you can predict bottom-up. That fits my 'forgetting for specialized purposes' and is consistent with my initial statements. It is not at all helpful in unifying the hard problems and I don't think it satisfies the 'in principle assumptions' that are commonly asserted.

      Thanks again for the discourse

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    10. Apologies, in my earlier comment when I said "So you believe that there are non-physical forces at work in the universe?" I meant to refer to "forces which have no ultimate physical explanation", as opposed to emergent non-physical forces which do reduce to physical interactions.

      Ack! The imprecision of language is a constant foe!

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  39. Just a few points

    1. Gene-culture coevolution is still a very active research program. If anything, it is much more active than in the 1970's in 1980's. Papers come out at a much faster clip than I can keep up with.

    2. I haven't seen a paper mentioning memetics in a top biology journal lately. Maybe it is still popular in philosophy. The Journal of Memetics closed shop some time ago.

    3. Darwin didn't have an understanding of genetic inheritance and much of his actual writing (especially in the Descent) can be read as a story about cultural inheritance. It is somewhat semantic, but lumping in ideas specific to Mendelian inheritance with "Darwinism" seems odd when Darwin was long dead before they were integrated. Here are relevant papers:

    http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/Speed_PhilLife.pdf

    https://sites.google.com/site/amesoudi2/mesoudi_whiten_laland_2004.pdf

    4. Darwinism is about selective retention of existing variation. He never specified that the sources of variation had to be random. It is not even clear that he thought that the sources of variation *were* random. This came about with the new synthesis when Darwinian process was married to Mendelian inheritance.

    As Peter Turchin writes: "Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, while genetic evolution is Mendelian (but both are Darwinian)."

    http://socialevolutionforum.com/2012/04/24/whats-cultural-genotype/

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    1. > Gene-culture coevolution is still a very active research program. If anything, it is much more active than in the 1970's in 1980's. Papers come out at a much faster clip than I can keep up with. <

      Like what? I have looked, and haven't seen any. Could you list a couple, so that we know we are talking about the same thing?

      > It is somewhat semantic, but lumping in ideas specific to Mendelian inheritance with "Darwinism" seems odd when Darwin was long dead before they were integrated. <

      Not sure who has done that, but it wasn't me. I explained in the main post that talk of "Darwinism" is incorrect, people should refer to the Modern Synthesis, which certainly does include Mendelism.

      > Darwinism is about selective retention of existing variation. He never specified that the sources of variation had to be random. <

      Again, see comment above.

      > As Peter Turchin writes: "Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, while genetic evolution is Mendelian (but both are Darwinian)." <

      With all due respect for Peter, he seems to be confusing theories of inheritance with theories of evolution here. The problem is that Lamarckism was both, though his emphasis - according to Eva Jablonka at least - was on the theory of evolution, not on inheritance.

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    2. Massimo:

      >I explained in the main post that talk of "Darwinism" is incorrect<

      However, the paper you criticise in the original post was not talking about the modern synthesis. By attacking it on the grounds of the differences it bears from the modern synthesis, I believe you to be unintentionally attacking a straw man.

      I imagine the author was arguing that some of Darwin's ideas could also be used to explain cultural evolution. This also fits with Matt Zimmerman's point here.

      Crucially, given Darwin's ignorance of genes and the vagueness of the traits he was discussing, the concept of Darwinian cultural evolution is arguably just as defensible now as Darwin's original ideas were at that time.

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    3. Disagreeable,

      > the paper you criticise in the original post was not talking about the modern synthesis. By attacking it on the grounds of the differences it bears from the modern synthesis, I believe you to be unintentionally attacking a straw man. <

      I don't think so. It is the author that is either using sloppy language or the wrong reference. It makes just as little sense to talk of "Darwinism" in modern science as it does to talk about Mendelism or Newtonianism. The current theory of biological evolution is the Modern Synthesis, and if one wants to make the point that cultural evolution works in the same way, one needs to take on board the most refined version available of the theory, not its earliest draft.

      Incidentally, I think that's why we should avoid talk of Lamarckism as well as Darwinism altogether: they refer to murky (in the first instance) or outdated (in the second) ways of thinking about biology, and it doesn't help to resurrect them as if the last two centuries of science hadn't happened.

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    4. What if the author does not intend to make the point that cultural evolution works in precisely the same way as biological evolution? What if he's just comparing the two with respect to the broad concepts first introduced by Darwin? Would Darwinism not be an appropriate label for this?

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    5. Yes, a completely outdated one. Which should make you question the point of the author's analysis.

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    6. Darwinism is outdated only in that we now have many of the specific details Darwin was lacking. Darwin's argument was still broadly correct.

      We still don't have the specific details about cultural evolution (and likely won't - which is why memetics is dubious as a research programme). However, if Darwin's argument could work for biological evolution without those details then why do you rule out applying it to cultural evolution?

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    7. "We still don't have the specific details about cultural evolution (and likely won't - which is why memetics is dubious as a research programme)."
      Memetics is dubious because it has nothing at all to do with how our cultures actually evolve, and Darwin did not argue that cultures and their learning processes were in any way responsible for natural selection.

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    8. Gene-culture coevolution:

      Boyd and Richerson's relatively recent (2005) paper collection "The Origin and Evolution of Cultures" is a decent place to start. Most of the papers are post-1980's. Also publications on the authors' websites.

      Also http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/

      Also https://sites.google.com/site/amesoudi2/publications

      Also: http://www.unil.ch/Jahia/site/dee/cache/offonce/pid/84973;jsessionid=BCBC184D151AD77C885E7B8239B69CD5.jvm1

      Also: Also: http://xcelab.net/rm/?page_id=12

      Also: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/Published.html

      Laland and Brown discuss recent work in the latest edition of "Sense and Nonsense" (they also dropped the chapters on memetics and human sociobiology if I recall correctly).

      Last month or so in my email (maybe some duplicates):

      http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519313000234

      http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2812%2900087-6/abstract

      http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-013-0257-5

      http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-013-0091-5

      http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1758/20123073.abstract

      http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2812%2900087-6/abstract

      http://xcelab.net/rmpubs/PNAS-2013-Schroeder-3955-60.pdf

      http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/PerreaultMoyaBoydEHB12Proofs.pdf

      http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/BoydRichersonHenrichPNAS11CulturalNichePubished.pdf

      http://pps.sagepub.com/content/8/1/56.short

      http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/13-01-003.pdf

      http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12040/full

      http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12066/abstract

      http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/01/28/beheco.ars222.full (This is mostly about Human Behavioral Ecology, but has some words about how the dynamics are assumed to be gene-culture evolution.)

      http://my.unil.ch/serval/document/BIB_DBE6CFE06F99.pdf

      Ok. I'm getting pretty tired of going through my recent references, but you get the idea.




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    9. I am beginning to understand that this is a semantic debate about what one wants to call "Darwinism."

      I want to call a process Darwinian when there is selective retention of heritable variation. This is Darwin's key insight and the process is substrate neutral - in the sense that Darwin had little idea (and was actually quite wrong) about the properties of the substrate. It is a fairly general sort of process. Cultural evolution is Darwinian in this sense - there is selective retention of inherited variation.

      Some want to call a Darwinian process something that works exactly like genetic inheritance - at least as it is currently understood - and will be understood in the future. Obviously, cultural inheritance is not exactly like genetic inheritance. So using this definition, culture is obviously not Darwinian.

      I guess I am not too interested in the semantic debate.

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    10. Oh, also. Since cultural evolution is biological (http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/CultureIsBiology.pdf), the above chart would be more clear if it said "Genetic Evolution" on the left.

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    11. Re: It makes just as little sense to talk of "Darwinism" in modern science as it does to talk about Mendelism or Newtonianism. The current theory of biological evolution is the Modern Synthesis, and if one wants to make the point that cultural evolution works in the same way, one needs to take on board the most refined version available of the theory, not its earliest draft.

      ...but the modern synthesis is toast. Building on an outdated, vague and incorrect theory of evolution makes little sense. Calling that "Darwinism denigrates Darwin's insights. Also, this is not what anyone else in the field is talking about - and most make that abundantly clear.

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  40. Matt,

    thanks for the links, I was aware of some of those papers, while others look interesting. However, you are expanding your concept of “gene-culture co-evolution” to the point were of course the field is viable. The links (several of which are redundant), lead to anything from actual c-e studies to philosophical analyses of cultural evolution, to straight psychology or anthropology papers (perhaps informed by an evolutionary perspective), to speculative models. Not exactly what I had in mind. Still, I will likely return to this topic soon, my reading list has a few entries on cultural evolution that I may want to comment on the blog.

    > I guess I am not too interested in the semantic debate. <

    See my comment above about “just semantics.” So, regardless of what term you prefer, you don’t think there are major differences between biological and cultural evolution, given the different substrate, mode of generating novelty, and mode of inheritance? If so, isn’t it worth it to use a different label? And why is it, exactly, that people are so bent on using “Darwinism” for all sorts of things, stretching the concept almost beyond recognition?

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    1. Massimo,

      Yes, this is my point. Gene-culture coevolution informs a wide variety of disciplines and studies. It is no longer just people sitting in smoke-filled rooms writing down equations. Just as the study of genetic evolution is no longer bearded men going on extended voyages. Healthy research programs expand.

      It is interesting, to me, that you are willing to expand a term "Darwinism" to include ideas and concepts that were not understood to well after the man's death, but you limit "gene-culture coevolution" to the methods people used 40 years ago.

      Of course the are differences. See what I wrote above. Why even bother with all this expensive culture business if we could just use genes. I suspect that many people, like me, use the term "Darwinism" to refer to ideas that belonged to Darwin. This seems reasonable, again to me, based on the word's root - which is "Darwin."

      Darwin's key insight was the selective retention of heritable variation - which is about as short as you can say it in somewhat normal words. I find the terms "Darwinism" and "Darwinian" as useful shortcuts for that idea. Thus I can write a "Darwinian process" instead of "A process which involves selective retention of heritable variation." This is a fairly common way to use the word.

      Things that were not part of Darwin's ideas: "gene-like entities that actually do replicate, with something like a definable inheritance system." These are also not required to have selective retention of heritable variation.

      I find the term "Darwinism" and "Darwinian" less usefull if they are taken to mean "exactly like genes" or "almost exactly like genes." I have useful words for those already. I can write "Mendelian inheritence" or "genetic transmission" for example.

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    2. Exactly my feeling, Matt.

      Even Massimo's own example of "Newtonianism" is commonly used in the form "Newtonian" to refer to physics as understood by Newton, which is incorrect through often a useful approximation to everyday life. I don't see any problem with this usage nor why there should be any confusion or difficulty in applying the term "Darwinian" to the kinds of ideas Darwin discovered (as understood by Darwin).

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    3. Re: "And why is it, exactly, that people are so bent on using “Darwinism” for all sorts of things, stretching the concept almost beyond recognition?"

      Why is it, exactly, that people want to keep Darwin's beautiful and general principles of selection and copying-with variation confined to biology, and out of social sciences, psychology, and physics - thereby crippling Darwin's intellectual legacy, and stunting our understanding of phenomena in these fields?

      Note that Darwin himself applied natural selection to culture. Cultural evolution was Darwin's idea. I think that he deserves credit for doing so.

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  41. Disagreeable,

    > Whether we call XPhi philosophy seems to me to be of this nature. <

    Well, then I failed to get my points across. Oh well. After all my explanations about what philosophy does and does not, and what XPhi does and does not, it is hard for me to imagine that you have come to the conclusion that we are talking about the same thing by different words. But I guess my imagination is limited... (Besides, let’s not continue this discussion here, it does belong to a separate thread.)

    > It seems to be the position of Massimo that selection effects have no (or negligible) effects on cultural evolution, and that we can only explain the features of culture in terms of biological evolution and the intelligent decisions of human beings. <

    Not, that isn’t my position at all. I am arguing that for a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution to work one has to have gene-like entities that actually do replicate, with something like a definable inheritance system. And that the selection that occurs is not guided by (at least partially) conscious choices. None of this seems to clearly occur in the case of cultural evolution. If it did, then memetics would actually be a serious field of study, instead of the flop that it has become.

    Even more broadly, my point is that even *if* we can talk of cultural evolution in something vaguely analogous to its biological counterpart, it doesn’t help to call everything “Darwinian” and ignore the huge differences between the two phenomena, vis-a-vis substrate, modes of transmission, source of variation, and mode of selection.

    > cultural features which are detrimental to their own propagation <

    That talk to me is memetic in type, and therefore incoherent. Whose propagation? What defines such entities, ontologically?

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    1. Hi Massimo,

      >Not, that isn’t my position at all.<

      Ok, sorry for misrepresenting you. I'm a little unclear however on how my representation of your position disagrees with your actual position. I'm trying to draw a clear distinction between your position and mine which does not depend only on semantic matters such as whether the word "Darwinism" is appropriate.

      Your clarification here centres on the reasons why you reject "Darwinism" (whatever that is) as a framework for understanding cultural evolution. Does this rejection also entail a rejection of selection effects as significant shapers of culture or does it not? If it does, then that's the distinction I'm trying to draw. If not, then I have misunderstood you.

      >That talk to me is memetic in type, and therefore incoherent. Whose propagation? What defines such entities, ontologically?<

      I still don't think memetics is incoherent. Do you actually have an interest in debating this further or do you think we have exhausted that line of conversation? I suppose if we were to continue I would like to discuss the angles of "memes as phenotypes" and whether Darwin's original argument was justified given his ignorance of genes etc.

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    2. "I am arguing that for a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution to work one has to have gene-like entities that actually do replicate, with something like a definable inheritance system. And that the selection that occurs is not guided by (at least partially) conscious choices."

      Three for five! (at least to my reading.)

      http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/HenrichBoydRichersonHuman%20Nature%202008.pdf

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    3. Memes are "gene-like" - at least in so far that they carry small sections of inherited information down the generations. Darwinian theories of cultural evolution since the 1970s have all featured memes - or some closely-synonymous concept. That includes the theories of those who eschew the "meme" terminology.

      Darwinism doesn't forbid "conscious choices", though. If it did, much sexual selection would go out of the window too.

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  42. Hi Massimo,

    I really would like to better understand why you think memes are incoherent rather than merely vague.

    Let me again acknowledge that "memetics" is not a promising research program - in my view this is because memes are a vague concept.

    Let us also keep in mind that since memetic evolution is so different from biological evolution (for the reasons in your post), it is not useful to consider memetics in comparison to the modern synthesis. As put by Matt Zimmerman above, Darwin suggested that "selective retention of heritable variation" (let's call this "Darwinian evolution") was the engine that drove biological evolution. Distilled to this simple essence, it is the contention of memeticists that Darwinian evolution affects the development of memes and so culture as a whole.

    Let me also suggest that it is unfortunate that memes are so often compared directly to genes. Genes are in many ways quite unlike memes. They are rather precisely defined and understood. They are often passed on without ever being expressed. Genetic reproduction can be precisely measured and described.

    The original idea of the "meme" was not really to be so directly analogous to genes but to be a different type of replicator with different characteristics to which Darwinian evolution (as defined above) might also apply. A typical meme, perhaps even the most basic, is a complex collection of associations between different concepts, so it is not really that helpful to model them as indivisible units. If we need a biological analogy, I prefer viruses.

    To extend this, we could model "meme complexes" (bundles of associated memes that are often transmitted together and reinforce each other) as symbiotic viruses (they may not exist in nature but at least the concept seems sound). You could model cultures as the set of viruses in a given ecosystem. As with viruses, memes can recombine and split in ways quite different to the reproduction of complex organisms.

    I'm sure there are other descriptions of memes which may fall prey to one or other of your usual criticisms. I am interested to know whether you find memes as represented in this comment to be incoherent.

    You might help me out by answering a few questions.

    If we consider ideas to be examples of memes, and memetic reproduction to be the communication of an idea from mind to mind, then:

    1) Is an idea an entity that exists?
    2) If I share an idea with you, do you now have a copy of that idea in your mind? If so, is this not reproduction of that idea?
    2a) If you answered no to (2) because the idea in your mind is the same idea (identical) as I have in my mind (and so no reproduction has occurred), would you allow that you at least have a different reference to that idea? If so, perhaps memetic reproduction is the reproduction of idea-references.
    2b) If you answered no to (2) because you now have a different idea that only resembles my idea superficially, then why do you not consider this to be analogous to reproduction with mutation?

    Memes are vague because the concept of an "idea" is vague and because it is impossible to quantify how precisely an idea has been communicated.

    It seems clear to me, however, that memes, defined as ideas which reproduce by communication from mind to mind, are no more incoherent than the concepts of "idea", "reproduction", "communication" and "mind".

    The analogy to viruses also seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I'd love to hear why you would reject it.

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    1. Can you precise, what do you mean by: genes are precisely defined and understood? I think that definition is much better than before 40 years, but still. We dont have correct definition of this kind of entity.

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  43. Hi,

    I would like to disagree with your claim, that „cultural evolution is so much more dynamic (it happens much faster)“. What do you mean by word faster? How can we measure that? We know that within biological evolution, there are many of speeds of evolution change - virus genotype changes are generally much higher per unit of time, than changes in human genotype (as so in culture - internet news mutate much more than Dostoyevsky´s novels), so there is no main speed of single evolution.

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    1. It happens faster than it would without it. Except that without it, it probably never would have happened at all.

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    2. I´m not telling, that culture-e can´t be faster than human-e, but you can´t say, that it is in general faster than biological evolution itself (because it have many „speeds“).

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    3. It now appears that all living creatures communicate, and all meaningful communication occurs in a cultural learning context. Life form have not evolved without communicating. Cultural communication is not supplementary to what you've presented as alternate evolutionary processes, if in fact these other processes have required it. And if that's at all true, then you're asking the wrong question to begin with. The real thing is always faster than the unreal.

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