Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id IAA28897 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 10 Jan 2001 08:51:49 GMT Message-ID: <A4400389479FD3118C9400508B0FF230010D19FF@DELTA.newhouse.akzonobel.nl> From: "Gatherer, D. (Derek)" <D.Gatherer@organon.nhe.akzonobel.nl> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia? Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 09:47:06 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Mark:
I ..... think we would be better off with the substrate
based Lynch-meme. As it stands, the substrate-free definition makes it
very hard to collect empirical data. Empirical data is minimum
requirement for starting a scientific study.
What empirical advantage can you describe for the substrate-free meme?
Derek:
The opposite of what you say is true. How can you possible collect data
about neural memes? You can't identify them. You can't count them. You
don't even know for sure if they exist at all.
On the contrary I can identify cultural artefacts and behaviour. I can
count them. I can do empirical work. I do do empirical work.
For instance, recently we were arguing about monotheism. The best the
neural meme brigade can do on this subject is to make some unsubstantiated
arguments about monotheism spreading faster than polytheism because it is
'easier to remember'. Let me show you how a non-neural approach works much
better for this.
Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas of 1956 contains data on several hundred
societies from all continents. Each society has numerous fields of
quantitative data on everything ranging from food sources to house building
to sexual behaviour.
I took the data relating to food sources, which are arranged in vectors of
length 5, each of the 5 values in the vector corresponding to foraging,
hunting, fishing, herding and farming respectively. Each value is from 0 to
9, where a single point represents about 10% of calorific sustenance from
that activity.
Eg. Dogon 13150 indicates that the Dogons of West Africa get 10-20% of their
food from foraging, 30-40% from hunting, 10-20% from fishing, 50-60% from
cattle herding, and less than 10% from crop agriculture.
I ran all these vectors through a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) using
various sizes and conformations of map. Then I examined the resulting
clustered and topographically arranged data to see if there was anything
striking in them. There was. Agricultural societies tend to be more
monotheistic than societies relying on other food production methods. This
is true across all continents. The correlation between percentage
dependence on agriculture and monotheism is about 0.65. The average
dependence on agriculture in a polytheistic society is under 40%. In
monotheistic societies it's over 70%. This difference is statistically
significant at p < 0.001
Now I don't pretend to know why this is the case. I leave easy just-so
stories to the neural brigade. But the facts remain: agriculture and
monotheism are both cultural phenomena, and they are associated. That's
empirical memetics, and there isn't a neural meme in sight.
Now I ask you, what is the best way to do memetics, to sit and dream up
untestable neural-meme explanations for culture, or to roll up our sleeves
and engage with the raw empirical data.
If _you_ can do empirical work, please tell me what it is. If any neural
meme person can do anything empirical, please tell me what it is.
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