From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@frontiernet.net)
Date: Tue 21 Jun 2005 - 12:37:01 GMT
As I mentioned in the first part of this review, the central focuses of
"The Selfish Meme" is "meta-representations" and their
transmission. "Meta-representations" are abstractions, observations about
objects in the real world removed from specific objects and broadly
applicable. Being able to recognize something like "color" as a separate
property of an object and being able to recognize it in many objects would
be an example of a meta-representation. "Representation systems" such as
language and mathematics, allow humans to replicate "meta-representations".
This is all well and good, but I think that author Kate Distin goes too far
when she claims that humans are the only ones capable of
meta-representations. By way of example, I offer Alex the grey parrot,
studied for over twenty years by Irene Maxine Pepperberg and summarized by
her in "The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey
Parrots", a 400 page work published in 1999. Pepperberg's experiments have
been very thorough, and it is clear from them that Alex understands the
concepts of "color", "number", "shape". "material" and "different". So for
example given a tray with two different colored objects on it, Alex will
identify that the difference between them is "color", as opposed to "shape"
or "material". Given a tray with a number of objects on it and asked
questions, Alex will report how many of each shape and each color, and will
total all of the objects. Similar studies were conducted with chimpanzees,
dolphins, and pigeons. Animals such as these live in complex environments
where the tasks of daily living demand complex thinking. Being able to
recognize different colored objects and draw conclusions from experiences
with those objects is likely an important skill for a parrot.
Another problem I have is Distin's instance that memes cannot be
transmitted through artifacts. According to Distin, when a person "reverse
engineers" an object or artifact, they haven't acquired a meme, they've
recreated it. Under such circumstances, says Distin, the person has
applied outside knowledge to re-discover anew the memes that created the
product. Distin does, however, view memes as actually passing through
symbolic artifacts. So under this viewpoint, a blueprint which describes
something, or a written work or musical score, would all be methods by
which memes actually reproduce. These items, like memes themselves under
her scheme, are representations and meta-representations that stand for
something other than themselves. This leaves us with a memetics that would
say that if Distin learned to play "The Moonlight Sonata" from a written
score, a meme would have passed to her. If on the other hand, she learned
by listening to a recording of it, she would have "re-created"
it. Somehow, I doubt Beethoven would agree. In fact, under Distin's
model, imitation could not pass memes, because the things being copied are
not meta-representations, but the acts themselves.
I think that Distin is guilty of some over-analogizing to genetics
here. In biology we have the sequence and the expression of the sequence:
two distinct things - nucleic acid and protein. Nucleic acids reproduce by
making direct copies of themselves: one strand serving as the immediate
template for another strand. DNA cannot copy the sequence of a protein to
make another DNA. In cultural evolution elements pass through multiple
forms: the representation in the head, the music played on a CD, or the
musical score written on paper. So long as the information is translated
from one form to the other, reproduction can be said to have
occurred. Distin claims that copying the manifestation is different from
copying the score because it requires outside information, but I can hardly
see how recognizing notes played on an instrument would requiring any more
outside information than recognizing them on a musical score. An element
in the chain can serve as both expression and carrier. Evolution does not
require a distinction between the two. RNA substitutes for DNA in some
primative organisms and experiments have shown that RNA can perform many of
the same functions as a protein. Those same properties that give it more
chemical reactivity also make it less stable though, and so evolution has
probably selected for DNA over RNA as an information carrier because of
that greater stability.
(probably more in part III)
Ray Recchia
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