From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 02 Feb 2006 - 14:23:34 GMT
Thoughts on the paper (which I thoroughly enjoyed and would make
for a nice 'proper' Horizon programme).
Some general thoughts:
I think too little consideration is given in the nascent
memetics and especially EP to what is sometimes called
'Life-dinner selection' for one, and neutral theory for another.
The first states that it is not the _fittest_ that survive but
the _fit enough_. This has important implications for selection
and evolution in humans as we are now firmly in the mode of
evolving by selection cropping the least fit rather than
rewarding the fittest, leaving plenty of latitude to acommodate
the needs and whims of our cultural parasites. Neutral theory is
also very relevant in arguing that change that has no practical
effect on fitness can just occur at a constant rate (this
includes 'nearly-neutral' if selection is not too aggressive).
One idea (or component of an idea) swaps in for another, nobody
cares; completely unfettered by selection (and note that these
are not spandrels either, actually that's another one to
consider anyway though, not that I like the idea very much as to
me it smacks of the same argumentation as clinging to the idea
that quantum events _must_ be random cos we don't see the cause).
Mutualism/commensalism versus parasitism; evolution of
symbioses. I'd argue that memes obey the same rule as most other
infectious diseases of changing over time to be less of a
fitness burden on the host. This could be studied; how adapted
is the meme pool to take account of some of the needs of the
human-mind-mosaic environment? Inclusive fitness is an important
one when discounting suicide bombers etc.; maybe we could see
the rise in payments to the family appearing, to mitigate the
obvious downside for the individual making it almost a mutualism?
Tragic the way Hamilton passed away -- I was gonna try for a
postdoc with him once upon a time as he and I got on quite well
at a conference not long before he died).
And specific responses:
Natural versus cultural selection; false dichotomy. Not one
selector, or even two; actually a spectrum of selective
influences applied in many ways and most often impossible to
disentangle one from another. For instance what do we call the
selection of wheat or dogs etc. -- cultural selection of
non-human genes -- memes selecting for a benefit to the host
based on bio criteria of food and so on -- rather complex).
Cultural vs genetic; think of holey landscapes (Gavrilets) --
biology just prevents/prohibits some stuff for humans like
flying, changing colour at will, imagining infinity, some more
serious stuff, while promoting a few odds and ends (like
learning to use your hands, maybe to recognise faces). The rest
is culture off the leash. Overall, cultural determinism, within
constraints, plus a few 'seed' ~memes.
PET/CAT scans etc. Churchland (P) suggested several (seven or
eight iirc?) levels between brain signalling and thought, each
providing the stuff for the next level to organise (counters at
the bottom, then game of life patterns, then ecologies of game
of life patterns [with information processing ability], then
'aware' self-contained ecologies of game of life patterns, then
self-replicating von Neumann style aware self-contained
ecologies of GoL patterns, etc etc)..
Concur that 'meme frequencies' is not a useful concept for any
but the most stereotyped memes, and that even then only the
'phemes' are visible and comparable; internally they would
always be different imho. Better for that purpose to think of a
meme like a parasitic organism that might itself come from a
variable population (although in actuality the variety comes
mostly from how they are perceived and then reconstitutued in
the next head); then think epidemiology or diffusion equations
to get some maths in. This has more in common with the study of
QTLs than 'older-school' genetics.
The trait-individual issue: What about accumulating,
deconstructing and averaging (to get/maturate generic low-level
memes) for storage and recall; and then 'use it or lose it' for
keeping specific generic memes distinct and 'alive')? Offers a
compact way to satisfy the requirements that Lynch cannot with
mnemons according to your analysis (which seems sensible given
that Lynch apparently doesn't go for compression through
averaging?).
On explanatory power:
I have yet to find a behaviour or cultural feature that my
approach falls foul of (for example I would love to hear a more
compact or convincing [to me...] explanation of the propagation
of sexual and physical abuse of children). Although I agree
completely that exactly describing the entities at play in a
mind at the level of activation potentials is very hard so
that's a real issue for everyone. We can't even 'read' the state
of simple neural nets, as the encoding of 'algorithms' in the
weights is too complex -- we have instead to rely on
rationalising the output in terms of the inputs. If this simple
system is beyond us we're really up the creek for now wrt the
physiological correlates of memes (cf. Churchland again). Asimov
amused me by having his robots managed by full-blown
psychologists for robots, as that was the only way to get a
handle on them.
I like SET versus GET. Evolution does actually just mean 'coming
out of' iirc, so the subdivisions are both valid and useful, and
it almost seems more appropriate for the archaeologists (their
narrow version).
Horizontal versus vertical; blue tits and milk tops blah blah.
The influence of trade and exploration should coincide with a
take-off for certain ideas, linked to a drop in overall
diversity (as for any sort of panmixis -- finding fitness peaks,
getting the whole population to them and staying on them are
done very well be a large population, moving off a local peak
and exploring the space not done so well).
From the endnotes:
Liked the hidden hand and the put downs it promotes (not seen
that quote from Big D before). Very funny, and off we go back to
belief yet again (you do not have faith, heretic!)...
LOL. Did Lynch really put sociobiologists and EPers in the same
bag as the 'classic' cheesy sociology lecturer? (sorry for the
completely unfounded generalisation all you wonderful sociology
lecturers) I witnessed someone of this ilk up close -- he was an
ethologist but the same principle applied -- in the end he was
pushed out of the Uni in part after a particularly unsavoury
field trip where he and his postdocs attempted to get off with
large numbers of female undergraduates -- lots of his original
research seemed to indicate [funnily enough] that we should all
shag each other like bonobos).
Shoelaces / gene arrays / lack of numbers / complexity;
parallels to trying to analyse neural nets in some sense. But
can these massively pleiotropic+epistatic complexities that
weave a developed body stretch so far as to program behaviour?
I.e. the genes for a behaviour are actually in the hundreds but
each contributes somewhere between 0.0001 - 5.0% in a way far
too complex to analyse? Kind of like the behaviour of a
government being not only the product of the members, but also
of the effect of the members on each other's contribution. How
many removes from genes to brains, and from brain signalling to
behaviour. Can our genetic complexity really shoot such a
massively-high-dimensional trajectory with such accuracy? (No.)
But they can shape the brain to an extent, and that affects what
can be in that brain. An analogy:
People make cities and cities make people; memes might not
directly make brains per se (although tapping the rapid
processing, disemination and adaptability offered by memes is a
damned good reason to make a meme-friendly brain), but they are
certainly affected by the brains they exist in (on a generic
human-design EP-compatible [to an extent] level).
Maybe alien architects (genes) like seeing people (memes), so
make cities (brains) that suit those people; but the city
affects the inhabitants and therefore the overall 'fitness' of
the city. This means that the genes that make the sorts of
brains that preferentially house adequately friendly (remember
life dinner selection) memes for the genes' purposes tend to
proliferate.
Of course that's in the EAA to borrow a phrase. Now we really
are I think in an age where biological selection really just
trims the tail with the least fit in it.
Now I have a backlog again. I need to look up the word succinct.
Cheers, Chris.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk
http://psidev.sf.net/
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