Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA04604 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 19 Jun 2001 15:16:48 +0100 Message-ID: <3B2F5E10.759C5BF7@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 15:13:36 +0100 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: sexual selection and memes References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745F1B@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> What about the notion that a lot of cultural behaviours that don't
> make much sense in terms of survival utility (hence something else must be
> going on hence memes) may be explainable in terms of sexual selection? I
> assume you don't buy that either?
I think the framing of all these questions as being about the
fitness/survival of the human host is the problem. For starters (and I
know it's the 'good old' one) what about martyrs - certainly no sex for
them as a result of their status, but people still become martyrs (and
much more easily now they can blow themselves to kingdom come). Very
little of culture makes sense in Darwinian terms if individual humans
are seen as the units of selection; I didn't mention evolutionary
psychology in the last full reply to you because I was aware I was being
a little strident and didn't want to come across as just having a go,
but this does reek of EP - genes driving behaviour and so on.
EP tries to rationalise all this stuff with individuals (and groups) as
the units of selection, but it will never work because the meme(plex) is
the unit of selection. Like a good disease it doesn't kill the host
unless it is to it's ultimate benefit (for example, maybe the equivalent
of some made-up fungus that has to kill its host to fruit or something)
or doesn't matter (because it spreads faster than the penalty, or even
because the penalty itself is a positive factor [honourable death =
salvation]), hence our martyrs. This can result in a fitness gain for
the host if host fitness does equate with meme fitness, but there should
be no doubt about who is in charge in this relationship. Whenever
something appears to be selected for in a host for no reason, do not
look for a reason applying to the host, but to the hosted. Behaviours
are selected for or against because of their interaction with resident
memes, not the likelihood of host reproduction.
Probably.
Memes fundamentally need hosts, but I see no advantage to a meme in
getting anyone *in particular* to reproduce, mostly because the main
mode of transmission of these things is horizontal, not vertical (with
some notable exceptions, for example there is quite a lot of paranoia in
Northern Ireland about Catholics trying to 'outbreed' Protestants).
On some of the other points you raised:
I agree that big memeplexes are hard to transmit, but as you say, they
do change over time, so that seems to reinforce the choice of a memetic
route of transmission (and the rate of change is far too quick to be
genetic anyway). Also we should consider HIV here - this virus is
absolutely bloody awful at making good copies of itself, which as we
know is part of it's power and therefore a good thing for it; but also
we should consider the idea of a master (='average') sequence (which may
not actually exist in the population) - this 'centre of gravity' of the
quasispecies moves much less quickly than the fringes of the population,
in a sense, errors in different direction cancel out. This is perhaps
easier to conceive of with memes actually - if ten people misreport a
saying, I'll bet you could find all the bits of the original there,
because they'll have made different mistakes, so the 'true centre' still
gets transmitted on average. Sorry that was a bit muddled but hey.
Fundamentally, large chunks of culture do get lost, bent, horribly
misinterpreted and so on - this to me though reinforces the
applicability of the memetic model over the genetic altenative -
genetics would produce faithfull staid boring repetition - imagine if
our cultures were only as diverse as our bodies.
As for the birdsong one, that seems uncontroversial to me - songbirds
often learn their songs from local older birds, so population divergence
wouldn't be too hard even if it was purely by chance (some Hawaiian
crickets speciate purely[...] because of chance song divergence, for
example); and the other thing to consider is that rarely does anyone
have all the facts in these scenarios; I'd want to know about brood and
adult parasites, and *their* response to altitude and temperature; about
food sources at different heights, and the strategies for
obtaining/utilising them; about predators, energy budgets, habitat; any
of these could drive population divergence through local adaptation,
which would lead to low fitness 'inter-racial' offspring, fuelling the
development of premating isolation mechanisms such as song divergence.
Btw I'd be interested to hear Miller's arguments concerning the cultural
vs. biological timescales, and especially those about genetic drift
(primarily because that is my 'nuclear' argument for the EP people).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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