NP? "The direction of evolution and the future of humanity," or

[Dave Monroe]

>From Edward Rothstein, "The Mysterious Meme, a
Seductive Metaphor," NY Times, Sat., Aug. 3rd, 2002
...

Metaphors are dangerous things. They easily take on a
life of their own, determining how we think, what
questions we ask and what comparisons we make. Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day? Sure, though as
Shakespeare knew, that loving image shouldn't be
pressed too intemperately.

But powerful metaphors are by nature intemperate. They
can seem to take over, manipulating rather than
serving their creators. What else can account for ways
in which Robert Aunger, an otherwise disciplined
biologist and anthropologist at Cambridge University,
weakens his arguments by succumbing to their powers? 

He begins this dense, often provocative book, for
example, with an account of a young girl in Papua New
Guinea who grew ill after consuming parts of her
grandmother's brain in a funerary rite. That leads to
a description of Charles Darwin, who "hungrily
devoured the ideas of a dead man" by reading Malthus
before writing "The Origin of Species." Both
incidents, he explains, involved the transmission and
replication of information — a biological pathogen in
one case, ideas coded in patterned ink in another.

In other words, being taken over by an idea is like
being taken over by a disease. This is no casual
comparison. It is at the heart of a relatively new
discipline that takes this metaphor seriously. It has,
as it might say of itself, been infected by it. It is
a discipline known as memetics and the object of study
is the meme. 

Memes were first conceived of in 1976 by the
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book
"The Selfish Gene." A meme — the word rhymes with
"scheme" and invokes the French word for same (même)
along with words like "memory" — can be, in Mr.
Dawkins's words, "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes
fashions, ways of making pots or building arches."
Memes are like the tunes you can't get out of your
head. They are ideas that seem to have lives of their
own — like "democracy" or "proletariat." They are
evident in the hems of skirts, in the arguments of
scientific papers and in conceptions of the Deity.
They are cultural counterparts to genes.

But in Mr. Dawkins's Darwinism, this has a particular
meaning. He argues that evolution is not just about
the survival of the species or even the survival of
the organism. It is about the survival of the gene. So
the gene is the ghost in the evolutionary machine,
selfishly seeking to replicate itself. 

That is also how Mr. Dawkins sees memes: as cultural
viruses, leaping from brain to brain, seeking to
propagate themselves by infecting as many innocent
hosts as possible. Cultural evolution is about meme
survival and culture is the realm where memes fight
over their human hosts....

[...]

... For Mr. Aunger, memetics is not even at that stage
of ignorance. Memes, he believes, have been so broadly
characterized that they seem to be "everywhere and yet
nowhere because they can be anything and nothing."

"The Electric Meme," though, aims to "cut memes down
to size" by suggesting ways in which a science of
memetics might develop.[...] Mr. Aunger's argument,
which can get quite technical, is that the key to
understanding memes can be found in theories of how
information replicates itself.

The behavior of a meme, he proposes, follows general
principles governing such replication.[...] a meme is
"the state of a node in a neuronal network capable of
generating a copy of itself." These patterns or
"states" can be experienced as sensations or ideas or
feelings. They can also result in actions, some of
which communicate the meme to others. Such
communications — in books and artifacts and
conversations — inspire identical patterns of neuronal
firing in other brains. This is the origin of culture.

I am simplifying and Mr. Aunger acknowledges that he
is speculating. But hasn't he merely exchanged one set
of metaphors (from genetics) for another (from
neuroscience)? What does Mr. Aunger really add to the
understanding of memes by explaining them as neuronal
firings rather than as patterns of ideas or patterns
of cultural behavior? ...

[...]


The meme metaphor, though, really does distort more
than it reveals. Yes, of course, ideas compete; they
affect survival; they shape cultures; ideas can even
"possess" a person. But why do some ideas become
useful and others become irrelevant or even dangerous?
How does culture evolve out of competing ideas and
experiences? And why do some cultures succeed and
others self-destruct? Memes don't have a clue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/03/books/03SHEL.html

--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
wrote:
>
> http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/jes999/
> EVOLUTION'S ARROW
> The direction of evolution and the future of
humanity
> John Stewart

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