Hi Kenneth, Peter
> [snip] Now, my question is this: is "memetics" a subject which is (at
least
> potentially) one which can be approached 'scientifically'? - regular
readers
> of this list will know what I mean - I don't mean that science is the
only
> allowable perspective, but to avoid undue 'woolly-ness' and wild
speculation
> (a la "X-Files"), it doesn't hurt to give it a quick once-over with
the old
> logic-scanner to see if it's a trojan horse. [snip]
Since I encouraged Kenneth to start this thread, it's time I jumped in.
Let me admit that I never actually read Dawkins. Although I've been a
biologist for many years, memetics was never considered part of the
syllabus. The predominant dogma of biology is that everything, or at
least everything important, is encoded in the genes. I've come to
realise that this view is extremely deficient. I started the "Walking"
thread to make the point that apparently "pure biological" functions are
not necessarily encoded in the genes.
Genetics as a subject starting with the definition of "units of
information" for certain phenotypic features. The features that were
transferred by parent to child inheritance were called "genes". Many
years later, genes were found to be encoded in DNA. The deficiency in
this approach is that genes can never work in isolation. That would be
like having a computer program with no computer. The "computer" in which
genes can operate is called environment. Part of that is external (sun,
rain, wind etc.) but a large part of it is biological - the organism and
other organisms create the environment around them. Furthermore, some of
that environment is composed of the behaviour patterns that are there to
be emulated. As I understand it, memetics is an attempt to define these
behaviour patterns as units of information. Like in genetics, some memes
may be advantageous and thus will be maintained by repeated copying.
Less successful memes tend to die out. Also like genes, memes may
evolve.
As I understand it, many traits (e.g. walking, talking) have both
genetic and memetic elements. I assume that genes and memes for walking
COevolved, i.e. man's ancestor developed the appropriate musculature,
neurology and behaviour together. For language, I expect that most of
the memetic development occurred in just the last few tens of thousand
years against near constant genetic background. However, even in this
case, there may have been significant co-evolution. I assume that the
inability to master language in the modern world is a severe
evolutionary disadvantage, thus human families who lack the genetic
capacity for language tend to die out.
Thus, I conclude that there may be a need for memetics. However, there
is a problem with how to carve behaviour into discreet memes. In
genetics, it has been possible to make some very clear-cut mappings
between functions and specific sequences of DNA. For memetics, it is
going to be very hard to do the same thing in any objective manner. That
is the first challenge.
The second challenge is something I wrote to Kenneth privately. As a
biologist, I can accept the model of Darwinian evolution of genes.
However, behaviour is often conscious - sometime we can aspire to a new
behaviour and then master it. Does that mean that memetic evolution is
Lamarckian?
Jonathan
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