Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id EAA08183 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 20 Sep 2000 04:45:18 +0100 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 20:42:07 -0700 From: "Scott Chase" <hemidactylus@my-Deja.com> Message-ID: <OJHIAJJFBIELEAAA@my-deja.com> X-Sent-Mail: off X-Mailer: MailCity Service Subject: Re: empirical "memetics" X-Sender-Ip: 209.240.200.135 Organization: My Deja Email (http://www.my-deja.com:80) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Language: en Content-Length: 5313 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
--On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:52:32 John Wilkins wrote: >On Tue, 19 Sep 2000 13:55:16 -0400 wade_smith@harvard.edu (Wade T.Smith) >wrote: > >>On 09/19/00 13:41, William Benzon said this- >> >>>While Martindale nowhere uses the term or concept of "meme" he more >>than >>>makes up for that "deficiency" by providing a great deal of data on >>the >>>evolution of art, mainly poetry and music, but also painting. >> >>Which brings up my very basic, oft-wondered, never answered, query- >> >>Just because something cultural (in this case artistic) changes >>(changes >>from what to what, I wonder internally as subset), can we really say it >>is 'evolving'? Again, compared to what? (in the eternal plea of Eddie >>Harris and Les McCann....) >> >>Granting the wheel, is the automobile an 'evolution' of the horse >>carriage? >> >>Where is the analog of speciation within culture? >> >>And I ask this because, dammit, I don't see it. Improvements and >>alterations are not necessarily evolutions, IMHO. > >This is the reason why I am doing my PhD on species concepts rather than >on cultural concepts - and my answer is that culture speciates when >traditions split. When the making of automobiles is no longer taught as >part of horse carriage making, then automotive engineering has become a >separate tradition and thus must be classified as a distinct lineage. > >As Hull has argued, the fundamental ontological category in evolution is >the lineage. Lineages can change in one of two ways: they can change >their states (in adaptive, anagenetic or stochastic change of the >profile of the group that instantiates the lineage at a series of >times); or they can split (phylogenetic or cladogenetic change). Both >get called "evolution" but both are quite distinct. Selection does not >cause all splits, and often can cause the lack of a split, in a lineage. >Likewise, splitting does not mean that selection has occurred, as most >speciation occurs through allopatric isolation and subsequent drift. > Can the concept of drift be applied fruitfully within the sphere of cultural evolution? > >There is another distinction that must be made firmly in this matter if >memetics is not to repeat the confusions of taxonomy for the past 250 >years: the difference between *why* something is a separate lineage, and >whether we can *tell* that it is. This is the difference known as the >history-character split in taxonomy. For example, sibling or cryptic >species may be indistinguishable to a human taxonomist, but yet be >evolutionarily distinct. > >So, if we can tell the difference, then there may be one; if we cannot, >there may still be one. > On the other hand, aren't there instances where the differences noticed by the layperson or even the investigator are greater than the degree of evolutionary distinction? Perhaps two populations within a species or even individuals within a population are different enough to make someone assume they are members of distinct groups. At a present loss for good examples, I'd just offer the case of morphological variation within domestic dogs versus the relative lack of cladogenetic distinction. For the most part the various breeds of dogs can interbreed, with some exceptions due to size. Also dogs can interbreed with wolves (coyotes too?)
There may be examples of species or populations which are polymorphic and having individuals apparently quite distinct from each other, yet having only minor genetic differences.
So, perhaps, if we can tell the difference, what we see might not correspond to a significant difference as far as evolutionary separation goes (ie- the large visible or surface difference is negligible or minimal within a certain deeper context). > >In biology, adaptive evolution results in the shifting of the >frequencies of alleles in populations. > So does non-adaptive drift, which can fix alleles or remove alleles from a population. > >In this way, by analogy, carriage >making may shift to car making but remain within the same population of >professionals. But when car making becomes an isolated tradition, then >it becomes a distinct cultural species. IOW, the critical thing for >speciation is lineage splitting, not adaptation. >> >>Had Martindale shown that the _reason_ man creates art has evolved over >>the eons? > >I would have thought that was irrelevant to the evolution of culture. In >the same way, it is irrelevant to speciation that the sun continues to >shine and be the source of energy input into ecology, or that graviation >and tectonic plate movement continue to be the background to biological >evolution. Human "nature" (ie, biology) is the background to cultural >evolution. > > And "human nature" *may* channel cultural evolution along biased directions, though the depths of the various "canals" may vary and some sorts of cultural phenomena may not have a deep correpondence to discrete epigenetic biasings. These balls may roll quite freely. Maybe an analogy with a magnet in a pinball machine would suffice (off the top off my head).
Scott "still hasn't gotten around to hunting down Waddington's _Strategy of the Genes_, tsk, tsk" Chase
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