Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA20351 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:47:04 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745EF6@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Homosexuality taboo-gene interaction hypothesis, etc. Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:26:43 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Filter-Info: UoS MailScan 0.1 [D 1] Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi Aaron,
Long time no see. It might be nice if you sometimes joined in outwith of
stuff related to comments about your book.
Interesting consideration of pre-cursors to Dawkins, though.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Aaron Lynch
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 5:53 pm
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Homosexuality taboo-gene interaction hypothesis, etc.
>
> I was recently asked to comment on a paper that appears to address one of
> the many hypotheses I advanced in my 1996 book Thought Contagion: How
> Belief Spreads Through Society (Basic Books). This was the hypothesis
> about propagating homosexuality taboos causing increases in
> homosexuality-inclining genotype frequencies, and of the increasing gene
> frequencies subsequently favoring the spread of ideas that reverse the
> taboos.
>
> My present communication will not comment on the paper for which I was
> asked to comment, nor make a new attempt at discourse with its author.
> Rather, I will point out just a few basic facts about my hypothesis.
>
> 1. The hypothesis was advanced in the 1996 book Thought Contagion, and was
> only lightly summarised in my contribution to Journal of Artifical
> Societies and Social Simulation, volume 2.
>
> 2. There is no discussion in any of my work about these taboos having an
> inverse proportionality to frequencies of homosexuality. Nor did I intend
> any implicit suggestion to that effect. (To the contrary, if tendencies
> toward homosexuality were uniformly zero in 100% of the population, I
> would not even expect the taboos to evolve in the first place.)
>
>
>
> None of this is to say that the 1996 book was offered as the ultimate or
> perfect work in evolutionary cultural replicator theory. In particular,
> the book misattributes the theoretical paradigm of evolutionary cultural
> replicator theory to Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene (Oxford
> University Press). The Selfish Gene actually cites the work of F.T. Cloak
> modest 1975 paper "Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?," [Human Ecology 3(3):
> p. 161-181], but that paper in turn cites Cloak's much more elaborated
> 1973 paper "Elementary self-replicating instructions and their works:
> Toward a radical reconstruction of general anthropology through a general
> theory of natural selection" presented at the Ninth International Congress
> of Anthropological and Ethnological Studies. I have had a copy of that
> paper since 1979, but had forgotten its publication preceded the
> publication of Dawkins's 1976 book by 3 years. A scanned copy of the paper
> is now online at http://www.thoughtcontagion.com/cloak1973.htm. Cloak had
> also done extensive empirical work on cultural evolution, such as the
> field work that led to his 1966 dissertation "A Natural Order of Cultural
> Adoption and Loss in Trinidad," done at the University of Wisconsin at
> Madison. As evolutionists, we often ask people to accept that complex life
> forms are descended from simpler ones, and that complex cultures are
> descended from simpler ones, rather than being divinely created or
> intentionally handed down to earth from the heavens. In the case of
> evolutionary cultural replicator theory itself, it turns out that the
> theoretical paradigm had what some would consider "humble" origins, as
> distinct from being handed down from the heights of the academic prestige
> system. In any case, the 1973 Cloak paper receives proper credit in a
> recent book contribution, "Evolutionary Contagion in Mental Software" in
> Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman (eds.) The Evolution of
> Intelligence (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), due out this month. Some
> further comments on the early history of Cloak's work and the word "meme"
> are in the first two sections and first two footnotes of "Units, Events,
> and Dynamics in the Evolutionary Epidemiology of Ideas" at
> http://www.thoughtcontagion.com/UED.htm.
>
>
> --Aaron Lynch
>
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