CELC: Is Memetics Still Dead? Yes, Margaret, it's still dead.

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson) into my critical framework. This entry discusses that discipline.

Back in 2012, I wrote a review of the Susan Blackmore book The Meme Machine, which I entitled: "Memetics as a science is still dead." I adopted in that review the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. Pinker argued that the brain thinks thoughts like the stomach processes food: it is a machine that does things. The theory of memetics supposes that the brain is just fertile top soil in which memes can grow and replicate and compete against each other and undergo natural selection. (Granted, I am simplifying here for the purposes of ridicule.)

The theory of cultural evolution argues that recent human evolution has been strongly driven by a gene-culture coevolution. That raises the question: is cultural evolution simply memetics by another name?

The answer is no, they are not the same. And, to repeat myself, memetics as a science is still dead. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson even wrote an article skillfully rebutting the idea that they were the same. They argue that proponents of memetics labor under five major misunderstandings about cultural evolution.

One major difference between the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of memetics is that cultural evolution posits that individuals actively want to learn and adopt cultural knowledge. It's not that our brains are fertile top soil for the meme that can out-compete other memes. We seek out and imitate prestigious other members of our community, and we adopt the cultural traits of those we esteem.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading essays by Stephen Jay Gould where he criticized religiously-based creationism. What I noticed was that he would use the frontal attack on creationism, an easy target, to make a back-handed attack on sociobiology at the same time. He would criticize creationism, but he would then end with something along the lines of, "and sociobiology is just as bad, but going the other way."

It turns out that the article cited below has a similar double attack. The authors criticize memetics, which is an easy target, but then they criticize some critics of memetics as having a bad model of cultural evolution going the other way. They then try to articulate a superior model for cultural evolution between the two misguided extremes. In this way, the article is quite entertaining and informative. They even score debating points against Steven Pinker, whose criticism of memetics so inspired me decades ago.

In their conclusion, they argue that the misunderstandings of the memetics debate all stem from "a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively" (133-134). We like to place things in simple categories, and the process of cultural evolution is much more complex than can be characterized by a simple category.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, and P. J. Richerson. (2008). "Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution." Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1 For a copy at Harvard, Click Here.