From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue 19 Aug 2003 - 00:24:10 GMT
At 12:33 PM 18/08/03 -0700, Virginia wrote:
snip
>But this leads to something I've been mulling lately. Do you all think
>that memes are *genetically* inheritable? I was wondering just
>yesterday if the general level of introspective intelligence in the
>populace at large would be affected with the seeming lack of huge
>reproduction numbers among the more academic sorts. If more gullible
>memes are genetically inheritable, then we're on a downslide for sure.
>
>Virginia
No, memes are not genetically inheritable, different mechanism.
That said, Aaron Lynch has argued for years that children are largely
infected by parental memes, so that meme sets that encourage large families
(e.g. Mormons) would spread by this way as well as "horizontally."
Aaron makes a strong case.
I am personally convinced that psychological traits such as gullibility
have strong genetic components. For example, descendants of Mormons would
be expected genetically to be more susceptible to cults than others whose
ancestors were not sucked into the major cult of a century and a half
ago. This seems to be born out in that an unexpectedly large number of
(for example) scientologists have Mormon ancestry.
Your point about the larger genetic contribution of non academic types
(read lower IQ) is certainly a subject you can worry about. It used to
bother me a great deal. Roughly a decade ago I finally realized that *any*
measurable trait tends to result in reduced reproductive success at both
ends of the bell curve.
If this were not so, and the trait was due to genes, then the center of the
curve would drift due to differential gene selection until both ends *were*
seeing reduced reproductive success in about the same amounts. You can see
this in that very bright and very stupid people both tend to have fewer
kids. (It would be an interesting curve to plot)
Humans are (in my estimation) less than a generation away from gaining
complete control of their genes. If I felt it was even two generations
away, I would put more effort into encouraging bright people to have more
kids. Being the sort who leads by example, I had 5 (all girls) by two
really bright women.
"Regression to the mean" means that really bright parents will (on average)
have kids that are less bright than they are, but still well above average,
and a few of them will be sharper than their parents.
A major problem is that one kid can outnumber two parents. :-) Kid
raising is a tribal project, always was.
Keith Henson
Keith Henson
===============================================================
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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 19 Aug 2003 - 00:25:14 GMT