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
darwinism
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.
The Limits of Computing Lecture 5 notes I found the above notes on Information Theory as applied to the limits of computing in my never ending quixotic and pretentious quest to look for a possible physical law of natural selection. They are from a series of lectures at the University of Florida by Michael Frank, and are of staggering clarity. Its worth reading the whole lot. Amusingly, the most interesting lecture seems to have been the one that students were most reluctant to hear. “When I handed out the student information sheets, I asked you all to point out the particular topics you were most and least interested in. I tallied these ratings, adding 1 for each “most” rating, and subtracting 1 for each “least” rating, with no change if the item was unrated. All of the topics received positive scores, ranging from 5 (for physics-based theoretical models of computation)…
An excellent paper: ev: Evolution of Biological Information
Why would I argue that this is a bad thing when 1. I think that children are better off if they are not fed ideology of any sort in schools and 2. I think that Intelligent Design is clearly religion and therefore ideology? To begin with, we clearly haven’t heard the end of this. One of the main reasons that the US seems to be the only civilized country with a recent pandemic outbreak of religion is that the left DID go too far in making things like prayers in schools unconstitutional. This makes the constitution a reactionary secular ideological doctrine, similar in form but more diluted from Soviet anti-religious doctrine. What makes a constitutional democracy good is that it is not a doctrine but a process of reason. If you believe in science, and therefore in reason, then you do not need to legislate from the bench, if you…
Dorothy: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The Kansas state motto is ‘ad astra per aspera’ – to the stars through adversity. Sometime Kansan, Charles Lindbergh, was the first person to fly Accross the Atlantic. A Kansan, Steve Hawley, was on board the first flight of the space shuttle, Discovery, and that same Kansan was in charge of deploying the Hubble Telescope. Somewhere in a Kansas school is a litlle girl or boy who could have taken us further towards the stars if it hadn’t just been made deliberately more difficult. And all because a few arrogant grown ups banged their heads and are off to see the Wizard. I’d love to write a satire of the Kansas School Board based on the Wizard of Oz. Ad Astra Per Veritas. Pharyngula::Goodbye, Kansas
According to the principal of unintelligent design, the Kansas school board has technically opened the door to schools teaching satanism on a par with science. CNN.com – Kansas school board redefines science – Nov 8, 2005
I normally agree with what Seth Godin has to say, but his rules of viral spread (which have spread virally, interestingly enough) seem provably wrong: Seth says (and note that he does not say anything about virality in his set of criteria for message sending): “No one ‘sends’ an idea unless:” “a. they understand it” Not true. People send things when they think they understand it but don’t and when they don’t understand it but think they should. An example of the former is the Sokal Hoax. In fact the Nietzsche example given is perfect proof to the contrary – Nietzsche does propagate but without understanding. This is important as it explains the mechanism of mutation of an idea into a better propagating one. If people had to understand an idea as the sender intended, the mechanisms of natural selection on ideas would be vastly different. “b. they want it…
Dawkins and Coyne point out the serious side to silly creationism – that even as religion it is bogus, because it is immoral. They say that the seemingly reasonable demand that both sides of an argument should be taught “would be the end of science education in America” One side, Intelligent Design has no supporting evidence other than pointing to a few gaps in another theory, evolution, which has hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating pieces of evidence. The logic of allowing ID to be taught would justify the teaching of Holocaust denial for which there is no supporting evidence other than normal gaps in another version of events, which has hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating pieces of evidence.
In 1996, Physics professor, Alan Sokal tried to see if “a leading journal of cultural studies would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?” It did. Here is a challenge – I think it would be fairly easy for a life-science professor to write a deliberately nonsensical hoax article in defense of Intelligent Design and get it published in the Sunday Times (UK or US!) – then publish a dissection of it elsewhere, in the manner of Sokal. Every time I come back to the UK and pick up the Sunday Times (UK) it gets worse but this week’s Bryan Appleyard piece was an absolute classic. The setup is now common – place Intelligent Design as a balance to Darwinism and assume that by being somewhere in the middle you are being balanced and reasonable, then lecture…
New Scientist Premium- Evolution: Blink and you’ll miss it – Features “commercial fishermen use large-meshed nets to spare smaller fish… working on the principle that by reducing their haul this way, they can keep fish populations vigorous and healthy. But they could be making a terrible mistake. It is becoming increasingly clear that such well-meaning strategies may actually have the opposite effect to what the fishermen intend.”