From: Rodrigo da Silva Guerra (rsguerra@eletro.ufrgs.br)
Date: Tue 12 Oct 2004 - 15:57:58 GMT
I recently started getting in touch with memetic related papers so maybe I am
already late in the discussion of topics of some 6 years ago. Nevertheless, I
would appreciate to share some opinions with people more used to the subject.
The main reason I started reading about memetics was my search for missing
aspects on the synthetic approach of developmental robotics towards the
understanding of human intelligence.
One of the first things which happened to draw my attention was Ms. Blackmore
firm persistence on her claim that one should consider "true imitation" (not
emulation) alone as the only memetic process, excluding all other kinds of
social learning. I read some replies of authors from different backgrounds
convictively arguing that any social learning should be accounted for memetics
because of the presence of the basic principles of a selection process
(replication, mutation, selection).
From my point of view it really seems to be the case that those so beautiful
and illustrative examples of the birds pecking bottles, and others may happen
to take some advantage of the memetic evolutionary approach. I realized those
authors who defend these social learning as a selection process argue that the
replication is not in the motor pattern itself but on the specific rising of
new behaviors in different context. For instance, as some argue, one should
not account for the "birds pecking" itself but for the "bird pecking bottles"
as the replicated meme, maybe to be considered as a mutation of standard
"birds pecking trees".
But it also happens for me to agree with most of Ms. Blackmore arguments,
which for some reason lead me to question about one important aspect that
seems to be of crucial importance on the effectiveness of any evolutionary
system: mutation. I am not a biologist but it seems quite obvious for me that
the power of an evolutionary process somehow lies on its capacity of building
increasingly complex structures by the continuous improvement of replicas
evolved through selection. My questions are: Where does it lie the mutation
aspects of, let's say, "birds pecking bottles"? In which sense is it really
possible for such a "meme" to "evolve"?
From my understanding it seems that memetics approach is powerful for
accounting for the population level phenomena of the spread of new behaviors
such as "birds pecking bottles", but these behaviors still seem to be more
close to genetic selection processes than for memetic processes. I'm very new
to the subject of memetics, and I cannot make a sharp division here (if there
is such), but isn't human memes evolution quite a different process?
Regards,
Rodrigo da Silva Guerra
The memetics references I mainly studied up to now were:
@Book{Dawkins:76,
author = "Richard Dawkins",
title = "The Selfish Gene",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
year = "1976",
}
@Article{Gabora:96,
author = "Liane Gabora",
title = "A Day in the Life of a Meme",
journal = "Philosophica",
year = "1996",
number = "57",
pages = "901-938",
}
@Article{Blackmore:98,
author = "Susan Blackmore",
title = "Imitation and the definition of a meme",
journal = "Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission",
year = "1998",
volume = "2",
number = "2",
pages = "159-170",
month = "December",
}
@Article{Reader:99,
author = "Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland",
title = "Do Animals Have Memes?",
journal = "Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission",
year = "1999",
volume = "3",
number = "2",
pages = "100-108",
}
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