Re Dave's treatment of the post-inspiring quote from Steven Chapman ("And besides, the notion of a 'meme' is just a metaphor, like the long-defunct notion of 'holographic memory' - and like 'holographic memory,' the explanatory content of the meme 'theory' is zero."): Dave has some very interesting things to say about metaphorical thinking, though he is going off in a different direction from my original query. (Not that I have any objection to that. His stuff is more interesting.) I glommed onto what I considered the meat of that statement - "no explanatory power". I didn't for a minute read Chapman as rejecting the usefulness and power of metaphoric thinking. I assumed he meant "just a metaphor" in the sense that he believes "meme" describes certain phenomena in the same way that "everyday" terms (e.g. "cultural transmission" or "cultural diffusion") describe the same phenomena - that is, as a "mere" metaphor it lacks the precision and explanatory power that proponents of "meme theory" claim for it.
The claim is that memes operate according to the same rules of selection that govern another replicator/vehicle system - genes and bodies. That is, it was my understanding that memes were supposed to operate according to Darwinian selection, but Rand Simberg corrects my misapprehension in his comments. To me, however, this makes "meme" even more untenable (more below).
Be that as it may, the language of genetic evolution - selection, competition, etc. - is itself metaphorical, but it is a different level of metaphorical thinking than the fuzzier terms like "transmission" and "diffusion" used in speaking of cultural change. (Higher level in the sense of much greater explanatory and predictive power.) In the context of his post Dave describes "meme" as a higher level metaphor, but my original challenge was a call for a demonstration that "meme" was not "just a" metaphor but actually worked on the same level as the concept of genetic selection. Dave is raising the same issue -
The real question is, does the meme concept, in mapping from the domain of genetics to the domain of cognitive science, add anything to our understanding of the mind?
- but I started one step back from this and asked if any real mapping to genetics has yet been done. It's easy to throw around terms like "selection", "competition", "vehicles", "replicators", etc., but in genetics those terms refer to defined mechanisms and entities - and they explain things that weren't explained well by other concepts. So I'd have to disagree with what Rand Simberg wrote in the comments section:
It is another word for "idea." The reason that it's a better word in some contexts is that it rhymes (sort of) with gene, and makes us think of it in that context--as something that, if successful, replicates. And the interesting thing about memetic (as opposed to genetic) evolution and natural selection is that it turns out to be Lamarckian. You can pass on traits that you acquire to your children (and other people).
But this explanation begs the question. (Leaving aside the bit of confusion in "successful, replicates".) Following Dave, whether it's "better" to think of ideas that way depends on whether it jibes with what is known about human cognition. And if memetic evolution and natural selection are conceded to be Lamarckian, then "meme theory" has pretty much given up the game, as far as I can see: in what way is memetics an improvement on extant explanations for how humans acquire and pass on information? Put it this way: Mendelian genetics provided the "stuff" (sorry to get technical here) that Darwinian selection could work on. The idea of natural selection also provided a superior explanation for the diversity of life even before the rediscovery of Mendel's work. Memetics purposefully analogizes itself to, and uses the language of, genetic selection, but there doesn't seem to be any "there" there. (No "stuff"!)
Matt McIrvin touches on this point in the comments:
But when I brought this up on Usenet, some biologists immediately pointed out that the concept of "a gene" is pretty nebulous too, and yet it's considered useful in conversation about evolution and genetics.
Whoa, Nelly! "Gene" is a nebulous concept only in a most relative sense. It's a whole hell of lot more than just "useful in conversation about evolution and genetics." You can build a whole powerful explanatory science on this "nebulous concept". You can do important experiments on this "nebulous concept". There is nothing comparable to any of this in "meme". (Though I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.)
Just a few observations on a couple of Matt's points:
Also, I'm not so sure that it *is* simple common sense to speak of ideas evolving through a process like natural selection. People often speak as if every idea has to spring full-blown from a unique creator.
I think you've got an idea chimera here, Matt - at least from the point of view of my original query. (Chimera! Aaagh...I've been infected with the meme meme!) The question isn't whether "meme theory" is simple common sense. It's whether it's useful to speak of the history of ideas in the terms of genetics and natural selection in the first place, whether this has greater explanatory power than other concepts - which may or may not include the speculations of "simple common sense". (And honestly, I've never met anyone who believed, or spoke as if he believed, that "every idea has to spring full-blown from a unique creator".)
And here:
Like biological evolution, it's not perfect, and sometimes you get whole societies accepting monstrous notions. But it at least explains how there could be a working society without a divine authority handing down its laws.
Hmmm. You seem to be applying and defending the theory in the same breath here, Matt! Anyway, this all goes back to my orignal question. Surely you don't think that "memetics" is the first non-theological theory of how societies work and how they evolve.
Bored enough yet? More later, possibly...
Matt's last comment is an implicit illustration of one of the uses of meme theory: a weapon (somewhat blunt, I think, although clubs are certainly effective in some circumstances) in the struggle between mechanists (to adopt Steven Den Beste's excellent term) and supernaturalists. I don't think meme theory explains "how there could be a working society without a divine authority handing down its laws," any better than, say, Marxism--and it even shares some of the characteristics of that (cough) meme.
As for "whole societies accepting monstrous notions," I think a meme explanation of this ends up exsanguinated by Occam: pure human cussedness is a simpler explanation.
Posted by: Dave Trowbridge on July 13, 2002
I should add that I'm not really a giant fan of "memetics"; I stopped using "meme" much after reading Gardner's attack, and it's obvious, as Moira said, that it hasn't spawned a real science in the same sense that genetics is a science. In my previous post I was more thinking out loud than anything else, which is why it wasn't terribly coherent.
The use of the meme idea as a weapon by materialists goes right back to Dawkins; religious ideas were one of his first examples, and, of course, he's a pretty strident mechanist, sometimes tiresomely so.
I have mechanist sympathies myself and so resorted to this club on occasion in past debates in which the opposing view was the popular one that a truly rational atheist must be a nihilist. Probably more sophisticated tactics were called for.
Posted by: Matt McIrvin on July 15, 2002