Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA13351 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 2 Jun 2000 16:36:48 +0100 Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000602094735.022ed340@popmail.mcs.net> X-Sender: aaron@popmail.mcs.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 10:33:38 -0500 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Aaron Lynch <aaron@mcs.net> Subject: Re: Cui Bono Chuck? In-Reply-To: <393645DD.A03FEEF0@mediaone.net> References: <20000601075926.69884.qmail@hotmail.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=====================_75141500==_.ALT" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
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At 12:15 PM 6/1/00 +0100, Chuck wrote:
>Paul marsden wrote:
>
> > There are many ways to assess the goodness of a model, but objective
> > ontological truth is not one of them
>
>I barely understand what "objective ontological truth" could be. I have
>already
>agreed with you that any theory must have a subjective side. But that doesn't
>mean that anything will do. Scientists use the term plausibility all time
>- it's
>a big word that includes lots of standards about what the subjective side of
>theory should answer to.
>
> > A good practical example of the potential power of memetics is If Price’s
> > book Shifting the Patterns that takes a meme’s eye view of
> > organisations; although I had problems with the precise operationalisation
> > of the meme concept the book provides an insightful memetic stance into
> > corporate life.
> >
> > Another good example is Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind, which
> provides a
> > meme-eye level reworking of the social influence literature providing new
> > insight into an old subject
> >
> > And Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion provides a sweeping tour of the
> > potential power of memetics although he and I may disagree (sometimes
> > quite publicly) on the details of how a memetic stance might be
> > operationalised and memetics made progressive, Aaron demonstrates the power
> > of memetics to generate interesting research hypotheses not intuitively
> > available when culture is viewed exclusively from group/individual levels.
> >
>
>I began reading Aaron's Thought Contagion, so I think it's a useful place to
>start my response. I stopped after reading the following:
>
>"Any idea influencing its hosts to have more children than they
>would otherwise have exhibits quantity parental transmission.
>Because of children's special receptivity to parental ideas,
>increasing the number of children increases the projected
>number of host offspring. So the Amish farming taboo has a
>quantity parental advantage."
>
>Here's why I stopped. The central focus of the field of population studies is
>birth rates - which any student of human behavior should know. It is well
>known
>-- and thoroughly supported -- why agricultural peoples have more
>children. If a
>scholar wants to overturn a theory, he should at least demonstrate
>knowledge of
>that theory and why another one is superior. Yet he does not even mention it.
>When I asked him to explain further the advantages of his, I never received a
>reply.
<snip>
Unfortunately, you stopped on page 3 of a book that is not intended to be
very useful if read to just 3 pages. Most of my discussion of natural
selection and birth rates happens in later chapters. Chapter 1 is only
intended to give the briefest overview of the concept of memetic selection
and several of its modes of action.
The reason you did not receive a reply until now is that you emailed me on
May 18, the first of 2 days I was talking about "Human Destiny and the
Evolutionary Epidemiology of Ideas" at the Center for Human Evolution. (See
my posting regarding the "Intelligent Design" lobby in Congress.) Right
after that conference, I caught a bad cold, and fell further behind on
correspondence. But now I am recovering, so let's look at the question as
you sent it to me:
At 08:02 PM 5/18/00 +0100, Chuck Palson wrote:
<snip>
>I have investigated in detail the Amish as well as the Puritans in the
>1630-1700
>period (I thought that the Amish were sort of living fossils of an earlier
>period
>and could therefore get some more clues on how the Puritans lived - I was
>wrong in
>a crucial aspect, their strong status leveling tendency). I have been a
>student of
>population growth for twenty years because variations in family size gives
>a lot of
>clues about a society's ecology and social structure. I am totally
>mystified as to
>why you treat sudden and large population increases as contagion and
>memic. I think
>that population studies deals with this subject in much more rich and
>reasonable
>ways. In this case, the habit of having large families is not contagion at all
>except in the sense that everyone does it. It is a rational response to a
>particular ecology. If there was just one Puritan family that had succeeded in
>landing, they would have done exactly the same thing. I would appreciate your
>thoughts on why you think a contagion/meme type of explanation sheds more
>light on
>the phenemon than does a population studies approach.
One can say that the reason the Amish have so many children is that they
have not crossed the demographic transition, to put it in population
studies terms. I do not discuss this because it is not really essential to
the argument. The argument, rephrased in population studies terms, is that
the Amish have belief systems that cause them not to cross the demographic
transition. That is, they ideologically impose their "peculiar ecology"
upon themselves, and only then respond with the "rational" or at least
understandable pattern of having large families. Given that they happen to
be situated amid a larger population that has made the demographic
transition, natural selection acts to gradually raise the proportion of the
total US population that is Amish. Right now, they number only about
150,000. Yet they are doubling about 4 times per century. If that
continues, then they will double 12 times in 3 centuries. At 12 doublings,
they will number 600 million. Now, although exponentials are non-linear as
algebraic functions, they are classified as solutions to linear
differential equations such as N'(t) = aN(t) where a is a constant. Their
population increase is considered gradual and steady rather than "sudden
and large" as you suggest. There are, of course, many nonlinear
complications that can stop the Amish from reaching 600 million--such as
soaring land prices, etc. However, their current growth is used in my book
to illustrate a principle.
Ancient Roman society also underwent a transition to smaller family sizes,
however, natural selection reversed it. What was once a small group called
Christians had larger families than most of the mainstream Pagan
population. As Rodney Stark demonstrates in The Rise of Christianity
(Princeton University Press, 1996), a gradual process of steady exponential
growth brought the Christian population from obscurity to predominance over
the course of a few centuries, and larger than average family sizes played
an important role. That is evolution: often too gradual for people to
perceive on a day to day or year to year basis, but relentless and forceful.
Hopefully, this will clarify at least some of what I wrote in Thought
Contagion, although I still do not have time to re-phrase the whole book in
terms of population studies. Also, an extensive comparison of the
selectionist approach I take to the numerous other lines of social science
work would require expanding the book to something like an encyclopedia in
length. Too big a project, and too long a read for most readers. My book,
however, is not billed as some kind of ultimate source for memetics, but
rather, one of the early works in a field that I expect to fill many
volumes to come.
vociferously yours,
--Aaron Lynch
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