Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA00697 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 17 May 2000 15:09:38 +0100 Message-ID: <39214903.8226F81A@mediaone.net> Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 14:11:31 +0100 From: Chuck Palson <cpalson@mediaone.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Why are human brains bigger? References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D31CEB199@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Vincent Campbell wrote:
> Well yes, I can't really comment on brain size issues, but I think that this
> line of argument in memetics misses the point of what memetics is about.
>
> Yes, there are other big brained animals, and yes they tend to be social
> animals, but do other social animals have cultures?
Of course they do. There is a blurry line between society and culture (I was
originally trained as an anthropologist) but the standard different is that
society is a set of stable behaviors between individuals, and a culture is the
perceptions that inform those behaviors.
Do animals have cultures? From a generic point of view, yes; they, like us, need
to have perceptions as part of behavior. But beyond that, we know that certain
groups of primates have distinctive ways of doing the same thing. The ways vary
by geography. Hauser (Harvard) points out that when birds learn their songs (not
all do), there are different "dialects" of songs.
>
>
> How do we distinguish culture from society? Well we have to ask questions
> about what humans do that other social animals do not. To give a few
> examples, we have rituals (I believe the oldest known is burying the dead),
some primates have distinctive behavior around death. I seem to remember that
elephants do also.
>
> we have art,
Art is distinctive to us - I think.
> Memetics asks questions, in one sense, about what happened next- what was
> the impact of all these developments on human society? One impact, if you
> like, was the emergence of culture, and whilst the fundamentals of human
> culture may be products of natural selection, culture itself is not
> necessarily, or even at all, transmitted through the genes, but is
> transmitted predominantly through communication of various kinds. What we
> want to ask questions about are, therefore, the processes that have led to
> humans having culture, how cultures evolve, and what are the criteria
> through which cultural artefacts are preserved or disappear?
>
> I think this is a crucial distinction to make, because memetics is not a
> theory of everything, but merely a theory of culture and cultural change.
As I have said several times here, I think that is a tremendous weakness of
memes. It leaves room for all kinds of speculation. The point is, context is
very broad and is everything. This principle is particularly obvious with the
memes that most people talk about in memetics.
>
> At least that's the view I take on it, and I have no problem with seeing
> other aspects of human behaviour as products of natural selection. If some
> of you have a problem with seperating culture from other human behaviour,
> and therefore memetics from evolutionary psychology or whatever, remember
> that the jury is still out on group selection within natural selection,
Which jury? I'd like to know about this viewpoint. I keep hearing about it, but
I haven't seen it yet.
> and
> what is culture if not something that is conducted at the level of the
> group?
>
> Vincent
>
> > ----------
> > From: Chuck Palson
> > Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> > Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2000 9:11 pm
> > To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> > Subject: Why are human brains bigger?
> >
> > Blackmore in Meme Machine claims that the only reason she can think of
> > why human brains are so big is because they accomodate so many memes.
> > That may very well be true and not at all in contradiction to what other
> > sciences have been thinking about for quite a while. After all, it is
> > known that we have a huge lexicon - 80,000 words by the time the average
> > "illiterate" kid graduates from an American high school! And then that
> > same kid has to keep learning all kinds of things constantly through his
> > life that are, believe it or not, _useful_ for making a living. The
> > point is there is no reason to suppose that memes are like genes that
> > have an independent life of their own as Blackmore claims.
> >
> > But the number of memes that have to be crammed into our heads goes
> > beyond just simple knowledge of those sorts of objective things we need
> > to know to make a living. There is a lot of stuff we have to know also
> > just to live with other peoplel. The problem is that people tend to
> > cheat - they want something for nothing. But in order to cheat and lie,
> > they have to remember who they lied to, what lie works with each person
> > they have to deal with, and what they have to cover up from other people
> > to make sure they are credible to everyone. It's an enormous amount of
> > social information and computational power just to keep it all straight.
> >
> > There is some interesting cross species information that tends to
> > confirm this explanation for why the human brain is so large: In many
> > kinds of animals, the largest brain and smartest behaving species are
> > social -- like bees, parents, Dolphins, etc. social animals send and
> > receive signals to coordinate attacks, and defense, gathering, in
> > collective sexual access. They exchange favors, repay and enforce
> > debts, punish cheers, enjoying coalitions. In other words, the social
> > animals have societies just like we do also have larger brains.
> >
> >
> > ===============================================================
> > This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> > Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> > For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> > see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
> >
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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