From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 15:47:11 GMT
Wow. It's as if he changed his mind halfway through writing the paper! His
conclusions don't seem to be at all in alignment with his abstract.
He doesn't like the word "replicator", although his description of memes is
closely in alignment with mine and Dennett's. He answers his own objection
to the use of the word "replicator" when he makes the point that even though
a whole story may never be copied from mind to mind with 100% fidelity, the
skeleton of the story is. He doesn't mention that there are many memes that
are copied with 100% fidelity frequently: people's names, for instance. Of
course, there are also frequent small copying errors in people's names and I
wager you could follow them toward a path of simplification that benefits
the meme. This would be an excellent memetics research project.
His criticism of Blackmore's ridiculous insistence that imitation is the
only way to pass on memes is, of course, right on.
His point about context v. content bias is not an argument against the
genetic analogy since genes have the same feature.
I didn't see any argument against memes being selfish, although that's the
bottom line of his abstract.
Richard Brodie
-----Original Message-----
From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
Of William Benzon
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:26 AM
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: reply to Benzon
Richard,
You should also take a look at:
Francisco J. Gil-White , Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes): The
promise and the limits of the genetic analogy to cultural transmission
processes
Abstract: ŒMemetics¹ suffers from conceptual confusion and not enough
empirical work. This paper attempts to attenuate the former problem by
resolving the conceptual controversies, which requires that we not speculate
about cultural transmission without being informed about the cognitive
mechanisms responsible for social learning. I criticize the overly literal
insistence‹by both critics and advocates‹on the genetic analogy, which asks
us to think about memes as bona-fide replicators in the manner of genes, and
to see all cultural transmission processes as ultimately for the
reproductive benefit of memes, rather than their human vehicles. A Darwinian
approach to cultural transmission, I argue, requires neither. It is possible
to have Darwinian processes without genes, or even close analogues of them.
The insistence on a close genetic analogy is in fact based on a poor
understanding of genes and evolutionary genetics, and of the kinds of
simplifications that are legitimate in evolutionary models. Some authors
have insisted that the only admissible definition for a Œmeme¹ is Œselfish
replicator.¹ However, since the only agreement as to the definition of
Œmeme¹ is that it is what gets passed on through non-genetic means, only
conceptual confusion can result from trying to make a hypothesis into a
definition. This paper will argue that, although memes are not, in fact,
Œselfish replicators,¹ they can and should be analyzed with Darwinian
models. It will argue further that the Œselfish meme¹ theoretical calque
imported from genetics does much more to distort than enlighten our
understanding of cultural processes.
You should be able to download it here: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/
BB
PS, on the players, Peter Richerson works closely with Robert Boyd;
Gil-White is a student of Boyd's.
on 5/27/03 9:41 PM, Richard Brodie at richard@brodietech.com wrote:
> Bill,
>
> It only took me two tries to find a paper that seemed to resonate with
your
> point of view: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/CambMeme.PDF
>
> He claims memes aren't replicators because it is likely that the same
> phenotypic characteristic can be transmitted with a completely different
> mental rule in the recipient from the one used by the originator. I call
> that mutation. Clearly something is being transmitted, and it is likely
that
> in several generations of transmission the set of internal rules (he uses
> the example of how to position the mouth to make the "pf" sound in the
> German word "apfel") will settle down to a small set.
>
> Richard Brodie
> www.memecentral.com
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===============================================================
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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