From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 24 Mar 2005 - 03:09:51 GMT
Kate:
I just received your book and I'm finding it really
interesting so far (I'm only around 45 pages into the
paperback). You've gotten me really thinking about
representations in novel ways. Sperber talked of them
in his book, but I'd been posting here about
Durkheim's "collective representations" long before
reading Sperber, so I'm really hoping you set my
individual representations about representations
straight during the course of your book.
Anyway I haven't had any serious eye roll moments yet.
So far you haven't engaged in the obligatory chapter
on Lamarck and how memetics is fundamentally Darwinian
by contrast (is Dr. Wilkins in the house?)
The part where you present evolution as replication,
variation and selection made me cringe a little. I'm
not much of a fan of selectionism and if you're really
going to unpack memetics as an evolutionary account of
culture you need to entertain the possibility of
something analogous to Kimura's neutral theory and
also to genetic drift, cases in evolutionary biology
that call an excessive reliance on selection as an
explanation into question.
I'm at the point in your book where you look at the
"flat earth" meme as a possible case analagous to
recessive alleles in biology. Was this a passing
thought or were you really serious about this one? I'm
really nervous about going too far with meme-gene
analogies and I'm wondering if this is a case of that
kind of excess. If you were serious could you expand
upon the notion of recessive memetic alleles?
You do realize that with genes there's vertical
transmission where we can assess the situation via the
use of Punnett squares or branching diagrams. Taken
too far we might say that parents could be homozygous
or heterozygous for round versus flat earth memetic
alleles. If both parents are heterozygous (ie Ff) is
there a 25% chance that offspring will be homozygous
(ie- ff) for the flat earth allele and express the
flat eartn belief in their phenotype?
But you do imply on p. 45 (pbk) that the problems of
horizontal or oblique transmission would apply to
memes, but I'm still not sure what you mean by
"recessive" in this context. There's a truth value in
the statement that the earth is flat. It has been
demonstrated to be false. Yet truth or falsity of a
statement or corresponding belief would be something
I'm not sure is in any way analogous to dominance or
recessiveness in genetics. Recessiveness could be a
useful thing in evolutionary biological contexts, such
as the case with sickle cell anemia where
heterozygotes have an advantage in malarial
environments.
Taken too literally your example with the flat earth
meme would mean there's a specific locus for the
belief in the shape of the Earth and that one receives
an allele from each parent, so they could have a round
earth phenotype if not homozygous for the flat earth
memetic allele (f) (ie they are FF or Ff). But since
people could have belief states transmitted from non
parents the point is moot, right? Then why risk
creating a conceptual mess with the biologization of
dominance versus recessiveness in memetics?
This is a monor point probably not at all crucal to
the main direction of your book. Maybe I'm looking at
it all wrong. If you can elaborate on dominance versus
recessiveness in a way that lessens my apprehension
I'm willing to listen. Besides your focus on
representations is the important matter for future
discussion...
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