From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Mon 19 May 2003 - 13:01:11 GMT
In reviewing some online memetics resources, it appears I'm knocking
the door on one side of -
"The Hull-Dawkins Distinction, as it came to be called, gained almost
immediate and bipartisan support across the selectionist debate - both
Eldredge (1989) and Williams (1992) accepting that replicators and
interactors are the active and general entities in Darwinian evolution
(interestingly, both made the now almost obligatory passing comments
about these terms also applying to culture.) Dawkins' "memes" (like
Campbell's mnemones, 1974, 1988) are cultural replicators, which, if
they are to function in cultural evolution analogously to genes, must
be transmitted with fidelity, and must cause some interactive traits
that in turn will cause a differential replication of the memes. This
also helps us with the question whether memes are instructed or
selected; that is, whether they arise in response to environmental
needs (are "learnt") or are generated randomly with respect to the
prevailing social ecology ("random trial and error"). Unexpressed memes
(memes not "visible" to the environment through their products) cannot
be selected, and so the likelihood of them being prescient or
anticipatory is reduced, since we would need to have already selected
some memes as likely candidates for success in order to predict which
ones will work in practice. Before a meme can be assessed as "likely to
succeed", it must already have passed some tests. We therefore get a
regress - any "instruction" of a meme is either a case of transmission
followed by selection, or it is a case of transmission of an already
selectively tested meme. The Central Dogma remains unshaken for memes,
even if some mechanisms of instruction are shown to occur, for even
learning is a selection process (Cziko 1995, chapters 11-12) at some
level."
- where the above is from
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html#11636 and what
follows also would seem to me to be, generally, and from my layman's
perspective, a rather nicely done rationale for the performance model,
including this comment about the need to address the cultural venue-
"If we are to understand how memes diversify into relatively stable
lineages like religious traditions, the structures within which
novelties arise and the selective pressures to which they are exposed
are crucial."
- and, if I may, in this conclusion-
"Memes must be expressed in a cultural ecology in order to be selected,
but it is the class of behaviours rather than the behaviours themselves
that are memes. Memes do not control behaviour (including mental
behaviour) rigidly, but bias and constrain it to a norm of reaction.
Memes are the replicators of cultural evolution and the structures that
bear the cultural properties they express as are the interactors, in
the language of the Hull-Dawkins Distinction. They are, as Hull once
entitled a paper (1987), genealogical actors in ecological roles.
Packages of memetic interactive properties - phemes - constitute the
phemotype of memetic individuals, or memetic profiles, that are not
coextensive with the descriptors of the biological individuals in which
they are instantiated, and cultural evolution is neither identical to
nor derived from biological evolution. Memetic inheritance may be, but
probably isn't, analogous to Lamarckian inheritance, but in any event,
memetic evolution is Darwinian. Memes form ancestor descendent chains
of populations that ramify and reticulate with frequencies differing
from biological phylogeny, but the differences appear to be within the
extremes of the parameters of biology. The models developed for
biological evolution and ecology need to be understood more broadly
than just vertebrate animal evolution and applied as they are suited to
culture, in order to determine the general evolutionary properties of
both domains."
- and so, I find myself on Hull's side, it appears. And it ain't just
because I'm jealous of Romana. I preferred Mary Tamm....
- Wade
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