From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu 17 Oct 2002 - 11:51:19 GMT
------ Forwarded Message
> From: Herbert Gintis <hgintis@attbi.com>
> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 16:59:29 -0400
> To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [evol-psych] Critique of Memetics
>
> I just finished reading Robert Aunger's new book, The Electric Meme. I
> thought is was a great read, and I recommend it. However, I think it is
> basically wrong. I thought I would share my reactions with members of this
> list, in the hopes that they will correct my errors, and point out other
> problems that I may have overlooked.
>
> The Electric Meme
> Robert Aunger
> Robert Aunger <bob@robertaunger.net>
>
>
> Genes are little strings of DNA that reside in your body. Genes are always
> out for themselves, hopping from host to host in a struggle to replicate.
> Genes do not care about, or promote, the interests of their hosts, except
> insofar as this increases their replication rate. Replace the word "gene" by
> "meme" and "little strings of DNA that reside in your body" by "little pieces
> of thought that reside in your brain," extend the meaning of traditional
> genetic terms (e.g., phenotype, vehicle, inheritance, mutation, adaptation),
> and you have Aunger's theory of memetics.
>
> Just as we do not choose our genes, so we do not choose our memes. The fact
> that our memes choose us renders memetics a shocking, counterintuitive theory.
> "Do we have thoughts, or do they have us?" asks Aunger. "...we are zombies
> controlled by memes," he says. "That startling idea---that thoughts can think
> themselves---is the brainstorm behind a new theory called memetics."
>
> Aunger does not provide much evidence for this theory. He notes that
> societies often embrace ideas that are individually and socially
> destructive, such as eating the brains of dead relatives and slaughtering
> one's animals while awaiting the coming of a godly savior. Moreover, there
> are obvious lots of thoughts that make the rounds, like silly jingles and
> urban legends, that serve no real human purpose but find a welcome home in
> the human brain.
>
> But both evolutionary theory and a wealth of empirical data speak against
> memetics. The human brain is extremely costly to maintain, requiring a goodly
> fraction of our caloric intake, and its size required a reorganization of the
> human birth canal and an extended infancy. The brain must have served some
> important evolutionary purpose, and could not simply be the repository for
> memes. And it did. The size and complexity of the human brain permitted the
> emergence of cumulative culture, and hence cumulative technological change in
> tool-making and social organization. Moreover, while there are some "sick
> societies" in which key cultural practices are severely fitness-reducing (see
> Robert B. Edgerton's 1992 book by that name) by and large dominant cultural
> forms contribute strongly to individual fitness and social efficiency. The
> fact that cultural mutations can be fitness-reducing is no more telling than
> the fact that a genetic mutation can be (indeed usually is) fitness-reducing.
>
> Memes are for the most part chosen by people because they believe such memes
> further their interests and enhance their well-being. Of course, people can
> be wrong. But those societies whose memes enhance individual fitness and
> social efficiency are likely to survive, while societies with
> fitness-reducing memes are not. In short, the idea of SELECTION must be added
> to a theory of memes if it is to explain the array of cultural forms in
> societies today and in the past. Tellingly, the term "selection," which is
> key to Darwinian evolutionary theory, does not even appear in the index of
> this book.
>
> If we add a concept of "selection" to memetic theory, it will ineluctably
> lead us to gene-culture coevolutionary theory (to which I subscribe) and to
> which Aunger considers memetics an alternative. The capacity of a meme to
> replicate depends in large part on the fitness advantage it confers on its
> human carriers. But this fitness advantage can only be understood on the
> phenotypic level, as expressed in the behavior of the individuals who express
> it. This fitness advantage can only be analyzed in terms of how people
> cooperate and compete in staying alive, producing offspring, and obtaining
> their daily subsistence and security. This requires a full-scale
> modeling of family and social organization, and their transformation across
> time. It also requires modeling the transformation of the human brain,
> including the emotional system. The key emotional prerequisites to social
> cooperation---empathy, shame, the predisposition to cooperate and share, the
> urge to punish noncooperators---simply cannot be analyzed using the
> impoverished tools of memetics.
>
> Herbert Gintis
> Herbert Gintis
> Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of
> Massachusetts
> External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM
> 15 Forbes Avenue, Northampton, MA 01060 413-586-7756
> Recent papers are posted on my <http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gintis>web
> site.
> Get Game Theory Evolving (Princeton, 2000) at
> <http://www.isbn.nu/0691009430/amazon>Amazon.com.
> The world of social science is divided into self-sufficient
> "ethnies" like anthropology and economics...The
> inhabitants of this world regard other disciplines with a
> mixture of fear and contempt, and take little interest in
> what they have to say about questions of mutual interest.
> Clearly this is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
> Boyd and Richerson
>
>
>
> Top Books - Behavioral Sciences
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=darwinanddarwini&path=tg/browse
> /-/226685
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
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