In defense of memes

Massimo Pigliucci is quite right that memetics is in its infancy (SI September/October 2007), much as genetics was in its infancy in Darwin's time. But in pointing this out, he misses the point of memetics, which is not to provide a full explanation of groupthink any more than genetics in Darwin's time could address nucleic acids. Nor is it to provide a second example of Darwinism outside biology: In many places in the sciences in which a seeming order emerges from chaos, e.g., in the emergence of near-circular, co-resonant, and near-co-planar orbits of planetary systems, the statistical core of Darwin's findings are already in use. Rather, the point of memetics is to observe that, like the computers on which self-modifying "computer viruses" spread, we ourselves are fertile hosts for patterns which emerge from "the marketplace of ideas" ready to at least temporarily propagate themselves without regard for our well being, ever successively more optimized to exploit our natures for this purpose.

Memetics provides something difficult to find in other areas of thought: a coherent explanation for why irrational thinking persists. The most intractable forms of irrationalism spread in ways that attack our sense of self, natural ethical impulses, sense of community, and other weak points. Memetics points out that when one person says Zeus commands them to volunteer for the Red Cross and make side trips as a missionary for Zeusism, and another person says Mithra commands them to kill all non-Mithraists, these are different strategies for the spread of Zeusism and the elimination of all competition with Mithraism, i.e., different forms of the same thing.

Matthew H. Fields

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Massimo Pigliucci criticizes memetics because its advocates supposedly "completely lack a functional ecological theory of memes" without which "the whole enterprise is scientifically empty." But Darwin also lacked a functional ecology of genes. In fact, actual genes, of the sort Pigliucci defines ("pieces of nucleic acids ... with known physical-chemical characteristics"), were not discovered until long after he was dead, and after evolution had already been accepted as a valid science for decades. Historians of science point out that Darwin didn't even know the work of Mendel before publishing his theory of evolution, and yet Mendel did not solve the problem of animal genetics either, this being far more complex than the colors of peas. Hence, Darwin did not know what genes were or "what their physical basis is," and yet he demonstrated evolution by natural selection without this information.

In actual fact, we do have a functional ecology of memes. It is described presently in at least two scientific fields--sociology and cultural anthropology and has already been converted into a predictive technology in the fields of marketing, economics, and communications science. Anyone who has read Lakoff knows that we can and do predict, even scientifically, which memes will survive in which environments. Historians of ideas are formulating hypotheses about this all the time (Why was Nazism so popular in Weimar Germany? Why was the Scientific Revolution successful? Why are Western democratic ideals failing to spread in Iraq? Why is the least efficient keyboard layout so popular we can't even replace it?).

Consider the scientific work done lately on urban legends, which has defined story units and mutations and analyzed the reasons why some legends flourish and change in one way rather than another, and why other legends are stillborn or become timeless. Even when you know in everyday life who will believe a story and who won't, who will resist an argument and who will be persuaded by it, you are making predictions based on the ecology of memes.

There is no doubt that memes reproduce, mutate, and undergo selection. This has mathematically inevitable consequences regarding their propagation over time, as their selection is not random (though, unlike genes, neither is their mutation). Instead, memes experience an ecological environment of favorability and unfavorability that affects their survival, as anyone can see who notices that some brilliant ideas don't catch on while many stupid ones become popular. And we do know their physical basis: language and neuron organization, hence the scientists that study both are studying memes ....

Not knowing the exact underlying details of how intelligence is genetically realized and evolved is not seen as a scandal by Pigliucci. So why should he see such a scandal in memetics? Compared to the state of genetics in 1870, memetics is way ahead of the game.

Richard C. Carrier

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com

Massimo Pigliucci responds:

I think both writers have missed the point of my criticism of memeties.. I never said that it fails because it cannot account for the physical basis of memes (although this is not a minor problem). Rather, memetics fails because it does not provide an explanation of anything, unless one counts restating the already known facts as an explanation.