Memes Shmemes Continued

...following up on the discussion in MemesShmemes...

I have type-A blood. If my wife also has type-A blood, then all of our biological children - barring the very rare mutant - will be either type A or type O. There are clear statistics about how blood type is transmitted (and how it's not transmitted) from ancestors to descendants, and the theory of genetics provides a model to explain these statistics, for blood type and a bunch of other traits. Karl Popper would say that genetics qualifies as a "scientific theory" because it predicts that certain distributions will not happen (er, will be extremely infrequent).

So I have genes for type-A blood, and a pile of other things. Now, what do I have memes for?

Well, let's see ... how about religion? My wife and I are both Orthodox Jews; if we encourage our children to be Orthodox Jews, what are our chances of success?

There are psychologists and sociologists who specialize in religious issues. In the early part of this century, a number of such scholars looked at the trends in religious observance, and came up with the "secularization hypothesis". Basically, they said that as society gets more technologically advanced, people abandon traditional religious faiths; they predicted that adherents of these faiths would continue to dwindle. Today, scholars are re-examining this hypothesis, since "right-wing" varieties of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam seem to be doing quite well. So, in the traditional world of sociology, people made a model of religious transmission which led to a testable hypothesis, and the hypothesis seems to be false. That's science.

Some people have also observed patterns of circumstances where people are more likely than otherwise to convert from one religion or another, or be persuaded to take their nominal religion more seriously. I'm not sure if these rules of thumb qualify as science, but at least they're based in experience, and maybe further observation will lead to a more rigorous scientific theory.

Now, among the memeticists, what do we have? "People believe in God because they have a meme that says 'if you don't believe in God, you are doomed to eternal suffering'." This model fails to explain a lot of data:

Religious "cults", such as the Moonies and the Boston Church of Christ, do not simply rely on a "believe or you'll burn in hell" ideology; they usually have a charismatic leader, and their social structures usually demand confession, isolation from people outside the "true faith", blind obedience to superiors in the church hierarchy, etc. Even with all these controls, only a small proportion of the people approached by a religious cult ever join, and those who join, on average, drop out after five years.
The religious doctrines of Judaism and Islam do not assert that non-believers are damned, but they still pick up converts (and not just people who convert for the sake of marriage).
When the Industrial Revolution hit, the moral influence of religious leaders over public policy declined, and the influence of scientists rose. Even now, doctrines like "scientific creationism" pay a left-handed tribute to Science, appealing to its authority in order to advance a religious agenda.
As noted above, traditional religious institutions - the kind that were most forthright about saying that non-believers are toast - have lost a lot of membership over the past century and a half.

Now, a memeticist and a traditional social scientist could both advance explanations for all of these phenomena. The memeticist's explanation would use the word "meme", but how does that word lead to a deeper understanding of what's going on. After all, both parties agree that human beings transmit ideas to one another. By calling these ideas "memes", what is gained?

-- SethGordon (sorry I forgot to sign this yesterday)

One thing that is gained by using the word "meme" is that it provides a basis for debate. It is a word that encapsulates a concept. If you like to say "theory of cultural transmission of ideas where ..." all the time, then you're free to do so. A single word is more concise.

A concept does not have to have immediate predictive power to be useful. Take chemistry. The concepts of chemicals and elements existed centuries before Mendeleev created the periodic table. It was the classification of elements (and the ability to say whether a chemical is an element) that provides the predictive power.

There is not currently a taxonomy of memes (if I'm wrong, then I'm sure someone will provide a reference). This does not imply that such a taxonomy is not possible. There is not currently any formal way to say what the effect of a meme will be in a population. Any such formalism would probably be statistical in nature, and quite "fuzzy". I wouldn't be surprised to find some game theory in there somewhere.

The danger of the wide use of a loosely defined term is that it will be discredited. Then, many of the loosely allied concepts may also be discredited. This could stunt future research. It is far too easy to shoot someone down by contrasting their ideas to a single word.

-- DaveWhipp

As far as I can tell, the "theory of memetics" states that information transmitted between people can be broken down into abstractions, which we can call "memes", and that these memes are subject to Darwinian-like rules of natural selection. But this ignores one simple distinction between organisms and ideas: ideas have a much faster "mutation rate" than organisms.

On the contrary, Dawkins invented the idea of memes to discuss how learned behaviors act as a kind of high speed alternative to evolution. Instead of taking generations to grow thicker fur to cope with climate change or new territory, organisms can spead the clothes making and clothes wearing memes.

Dawkins pointed out, in one of his recent books, that cells are extremely good at detecting and fixing errors in DNA replication. Furthermore, he said, natural selection favors this kind of error-correcting process, because every "selfish gene" has a "vested interest" in being copied accurately. If memes act like genes, then we should expect a similar evolutionary pressure for accurate communication.

But we all know from experience that the reverse is true. Most people cannot read a short article or story and repeat it back verbatim; if five people are asked to summarize the same piece of text, they will give five different answers. Even couples who have been married for years can have occasional trouble communicating. Teachers know that if they want their students to understand a concept, they have to do more than explain it once. And all of these examples involve serious errors that appear in a single "replication".

You'll see accuracy when it matters. Consider the Coca-Cola making meme. Each generation of Coca-Cola makers follows the steps as closely as possible. In the 1980s they tried to modify it with disasterous results.

By contrast, most people have values and goals that remain stable over time - not as immutable as genes, but a heck of a lot more stable than memes. Memeticists want to treat these values and goals as properties of memes acting in concert, rather than properties of the "host". But if memes are so good at directing people, why are they so bad at getting themselves transmitted accurately?

Memes can be incredibly good at ensuring accurate transmission. Some memes, like fish catching and fire using, go back for hundreds of thousands of years.

-- SethGordon

Some memes are sloppy, that's all. Catchy sayings often manage to get themselves transmitted accurately, and it's not atypical to find rituals that have to be performed perfectly. -- JoshuaGrosse

In string theory, there is no background to strings even though all calculations are made with a background. The reason is that if you change the background incrementally, then this is indistinguishable from adding a string with the appropriate vibration pattern. So in string theory, the background is a bunch of strings acting in concert. A second criterion (this time for string theory being a /single/ theory) is that all the possible backgrounds must be topologically connected.

So if the meme theory of mind is psychology independent (has no psychology background) then it follows that you can change any human psyche into another, incrementally different, human psyche by adding an appropriate meme to it. Of course, this is not true; you can't change a value, feeling or preference by the addition of a meme. Further, for the meme theory of mind to be a single theory, it would have to be possible to change every human psyche into any other psyche by a series of continuous transformations. And of course, this is also not true.

What follows then is that if memes exist, they must always be considered in relation to the background human psyche in which they exist. And further that there are many entirely different human psyches. In contrast with memetics, psychology has quite a few things to say about the human psyche. IOW, psychology is necessary to understand the human mind, but memetics is unnecessary. Those people who learn memetics at the expense of psychology are wasting their time. -- RichardKulisz

A little topic separation is needed I think. Possibly: is the meme<->gene relation a useful analogy? is the theory of memes an accurate model of cultural evolution? and do memes meet the criteria for scientific theory?

are memes a useful analogy? From reading this page and its predecessor the answer seems to be for some people it is. In this light I see no difference between utilising the 'meme' concept to explain the progress of culture and RichardDawkins using the 'Selfish' concept to explain the action of genes. Whether or not memes exist or genes are selfish is almost irrelevant to the central argument. The point is that genes act as if they were selfish, does a similar result apply for memes?

are memes an accurate model of cultural evolution? The only way to answer this would be to assess the predictive power of the meme model in determining cultural trends. While in my opinion (admittedly pro-meme) memes have been shown to be consistant with historical trends, they have not, to my knowledge, produced any predictions of note. Thus, at best, memes are at this stage a hypothesis.

are memes a scientific theory? The answer to this relies on verifiability and repeatability. Admittedly, memes cannot be measured directly at the present moment, but it is foreseeable that in the future they could be quantified. Thus I would say that a memetic theory is falsifiable. In any case the definition of gene (going by RichardDawkins in 'the Selfish Gene') is sufficiently flexible that even a genetic theory may fail the verifiability criteria.

As for repeatability, any predictions delivered by a memetic theory will be necessarily statistical rather than deterministic. Again, this is the same as genetic evolution. Why should we expect memes to adhere to a higher standard than genes?

My reply to all these questions is that memes aren't a tool to model the 'real world' but a consequence of a more general law of evolution which transcends the boundaries of biology. This law would say something along the lines of ''all entities capable of replication must exhibit similar behaviour''. Thus if memes are capable of replication then they must exhibit the same selfish drives that genes are subject to. As an analogy, consider the theory that things on the planet Pluto fall towards the ground. This theory doesn't actually have to do anything in order to be regarded as as scientific, it's just a consequence of a more general law of gravitation (which comes about from our study of things falling here on Earth).

Then, the only matter for debate is whether memes can be considered 'replicators'. If you treat them as abstract thoughts then you would probably answer 'no', after all my head isn't being completely overrun by one particularly effective idea. If you extend the concept of memes to include abstract pieces of information that have been thought of then I think memes are perfectly capable of replicating themselves. And, as replicators, they behave in a gene-like manner. -- RichardCordova

Dawkins defined them as replicators. They are units of human culture that are transmitted by imitation. Abstract thoughts are part of that set, but a defining characteristic of memes is that they spread by replication.

Some pertinent information on ideas, thought, how the thinking process interacts with body, mind, spirit and culture, and other topics contained in this page and MemesShmemes can be found in ThoughtAsaSystem.

If the Meme of Memes is able to reproduce itself (and it apparently has, so we're able to have this conversation), then would that indicate that its theory of cultural transmission is valid?