darwinism

Memetics evangelist, Susan Blackmore has a piece in New Scientist which suggests that replicated information in computers is distinct from memes, and therefore something new altogether.
“Evolution’s third replicator: Genes, meme, and now what?”
Biologist Larry Moran calls this pseudoscience.
Forget about the fact that I was talking about something similar to Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’ in the post below (it was under the tag ‘half baked ideas’, a non-scientific ramble), one of the problems with the idea of memes is that it imagines that memes are somehow different from genes. This opens up the inevitable possibility of a zoo of gene-like things as Blackmore suggests and Moran takes issue with.
At an abstract level, genes contain information, so do memes and Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’. One of the defining features of information is that it can be stored in different languages or media.
A better way to look at memes might be that genes are a particular flavor of meme instead of the current notion that memes are a by product of intelligent gene-based organisms

I never quite understood the beef between Dawkins and Gould over punctuated equilibrium, however the notion that just because species flourish at different rates does not mean that DNA mutation does. (I need to double check to see if that was Dawkin’s point. )
To illustrate this consider a sand pile and the mini-avalanches that happen as sand is poured on the top at a constant rate. The rate of the pouring of sand may be constant but the avalanches will be varied – some big, some small, following a power law distribution.
In evolution, a constant rate of change to genotype may create periods of rapid change and periods of little change in phenotype – punctuated equilibrium. The gradualist evolutionary mechanism of neo-Darwinism is not challenged by this.

(update – am checking the Gould vs Darwin debate – the literature is not very succinct, surely I don’t need to read an entire book to see what the exact difference of opinion was?
It seems to be this: Dawkins figures that all complexity at the level of species, how they interact appear and disappear within a changing environment can be explained by natural selection operating at the level of genes. There doesn’t seem to be a simple explanation of what Gould thought (perhaps that’s why there are no 3 line explanations). My instinct is that Dawkins is right and analogies abound in terms of simple processes producing complex interactions – like the 3 planet motion).

People talk about ‘carrying’ the name forward, when there is a single male in the family to preserve the pedigree of a family name. This is largely bogus, because the name line is merely one strand in the exponentially increasing number of routes that extend backwards as a family tree fans out, and it has ever diluted bearing on genetic ancestry.

Partly because of male pedigree beliefs and the one child per family rule, millions of Chinese girls are suspiciously missing. 119 baby boys are born for every 100 girls, something that doesn’t happen naturally or can yet be produced scientifically, at conception. Some girls were abandoned, some aborted and presumably some murdered.

There now aren’t enough prospective brides to go round. There are predicted to be 30 million unmarried young men in China by 2020 and these people are referred to as bare branches. Bare branches, because their genes will never be passed on.

By wanting to preserve the family name, the chances of your genetic lineage dying out increases, if everyone else behaves the same way.

Ironically, to have preserved your lineage in China, the best strategy would have been to have had a girl.

Culture, like religion, is something that people respect, irrationally, and because of this, the Selfish Meme (Family Lineage) has outwitted the Selfish Gene (Genetic Lineage). This is empirical proof, in some small part, that the effects of ideas, memes, can indeed behave like viruses and be damaging to our (genetic) survival.

People have a tendency, possibly through cultural respect, to look for examples of why religion may be a beneficial development for individuals (that reduces stress and makes us live longer, for example). But here we have a very simple concrete example of a cultural idea that is clearly not beneficial to the propagation of the individual’s DNA, being akin to a mind virus.

Since the distinction between culture and religion is not mutually exclusive, we have the possibility that religion too could be an idea that is damaging to an individual’s survival. Perhaps resistance to this notion is itself due to a cultural virus.