Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I love the passage in which you quote Oliver Morton on memes:

        "...the science writer Oliver Morton...replied to the question
        'Why do I keep meeting clever sexy women who believe in memes
        and make me feel a plodding old pedant because I don't?' with
        the following memetic breakthrough: 'Because memes have found
        that sexy women spread them well and have found that the
        adaptation (intellectual vigour) needed to conquer a marginal
        niche (plodding old pedants) is an unreasonable use of their
        resources.  Memes adapted to plodding old pedants become so
        complex and epicyclic that they cannot be passed on, and thus
        die out.'
                "I think that makes Morton the founder of selfish meme
        theory."


I think meme theory fits the life cycle of the bumpersticker fairly well.
  

    
Oh yes. there are some things it fits. But people like Sue Blackmore want
it to be a general theory of all culture; and it won't do for that. She
sees it as a bridge between psychology and anthropology, sociology,
history -- everything else that was in Herodotus -- and I just don't think
they can be reduced like that.
  

    
> What's wrong with "idea"

Nothing at all, but, to my mind, it doesn't substitute, being a superset
category.  (All memes are ideas, but not all ideas are (single) memes.)

Ideas generally have the attribute of being something about which people
can reasonably disagree, whereas I view memes as being such simple
components that there's not really anything to disagree with, aside from
their very existence, and perhaps the effects which precipitate as they
combine wantonly with other memes to form new ideas.

But it's a small point.  "Idea" will do fine.
  

    
Andrew, two small points relating to the UK origin of the book:

        1 -- how can Americans get copies?

        2 -- I think I got all the other references, but what on
        *earth* did Dawkins mean when he wrote that the attack on
        sociobiology by Lewontin et al in *Not in Our Genes* was
        "a sort of scientific Dave Spart trying to get into
        Pseud's Corner."  Who?  Where?  Consarn it, fellers, quit
        blinding me with science!
  

    
#29
(1) Amazon.co.uk will cheerfully ship it round the world. A helpful
and profitable link can be found on my site at 
http://www.darwinwars.com/bookintro.htm



(2) "Dave Spart" is the token leninist ranter in Private Eye, a
satirical magazine. Since 1970 or thereabouts, he has given the parody
Trotskyist view on all questions of the day: turgid, jargon-filled,
self-righteous and self-contradictory.

Pseud's Corner, from the same magazine, is a place where pretentious 
clippings are reprinted. It has been partially superceded by
"Luvvies", which contains choice quotes from actors about the sheer
utter ghaaaaastliness of their chosen crucifixion. I mean profession.

Doesn't seem to be any Spart on their web site, but you can see the
latest Pseuds corner from

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/frames/index.htm
  

    
Re memes, part two. Some of the memeticists list all sorts of very
large ideas as memes. Dennett, for example, gives the theory of natural
selection, and, I think, gothic cathedrals. This is a consequence of
defining them as "anything which can be copied". I've come to the
conclusion that he is right to do so because, if memes are functionally
defined as "the things which are spread by a selection process" then
it seems reasonable to expect that these processes could operate on all
sorts of cultural things at all sorts of levels of complexity. 

The joke is that this Catholic attitude to selection processes: that
there are lots of them going on at all sorts of levels, is, in biology,
the one championed by Eldredge and to some extent Gould. So it gets
anathematised there by the same people who promote it when looking at
cultural evolution.

I think, though, that talking of cultural selection in temrs of
"memes" makes people look for things analogous to genes (which would
demand something analagous to phenotypes as well). You can find some
things like that. Curiously, religions, tabus, or rules of conduct, fit
the bill much better than most other meme-candidates. You could, for
example, have a rule in central Africa that says "God created you for
monogamy" and this would spread through the population today because of
its effects on conduct -- those who followed it would not get Aids --
rather than because it has intrinsic merit. 

But such rules of conduct are unusual precisely becasue they come in
discrete chunks. Most cultural things are much fuzzier. I don't think
ideas can be decomposed into atoms in the way that meme theory
suggests. Of course, meme theory itself is incredibly vague and
general. to talk about it suggests a rigidity and coherence which just
isn't there. 

I wil post and hide a piece I have in the next Journal of
Consciousness Studies commenting on these matters with, I hope, greater
coherence and clarity. 
  

    <hidden>
  

    
Post #32 is about 2000 words from the forthcoming issue of the Journal
of Consciousness Studies about Sue Blackmore's book "The meme
machine".

It is hidden, for obvious reasons.
  

    
That's a great review, Andrew.

I agree with your view.  I would stipulate that bumper-sticker thinking,
where the meme analogy makes more sense, is not as rare as one would like,
even though I agree that this is not the major kind of thinking going on
in human affairs.  So I think it's significant, for example, that "DON'T
KILL BABIES" is a terser, simpler, more appealing message than "A WOMAN
HAS THE RIGHT TO CONTROL HER OWN BODY."
  

    
> Some of the memeticists list all sorts of very large ideas as memes.

Maybe we're in agreement about too much being made of the idea.

You could make an arguement for anything that can be held in the mind
altogether as qualifying as a meme.

You can also make an arguement for chromosomes being the basic unit of
inheritance...

I like my memes simple, and combining.
  

    
FWIW, when I saw Dawkins talk about memes (at Conway Hall, c. 1993?), he
applied them to everything from the craze for hula-hoops to religious ideas
and clothing choices.  What annoyed me was that it seemed an entirely
unnecessarily complicated way of looking at these things; what infuriated me
was his insistence that children are "gullible."  Children vary, in my
experience, and they're as likely to be hard-headed literalists as credulous
and damned few of them are the kind of blank slates he seemed to imagine.  I
know he *has* kids, which made it even more puzzling, although it suggested
to me that I wouldn't like to be *his* kid.

Didn't Dawkins later come out in favor of cloning with the idea that his
child clone could be taught not to make the mistakes he did?  I thought that
was just *unbelievcably* unrealistic and absurd.

Don't know if this makes me a Gouldian, although I am a huge fan of his book
The Mismeasure of Man.

wg
  

    
I can see that Simon Conway Morris is part of this whole multilogue. His
"Crucible of Creation," about the Burgess Shale, opens with a scathing
argument against Dawkins as an extreme, sterile reductionist and Gould as
something of a fraud, perpetrated to insinuate marxist ideas into the larger
culture. I've only finished chapter 1, but the lines of attack are made
clear. Gould argues, he says, that the evolution of humans as we know them
is extraordinarily unlikely and would not recur if we "ran the tape of
evolution again."

"But Gould's aruguments on the quirkines of human intelligence are not only
presented as part of an evolutionary argument, but also I believe to
buttress an ideological viewpoint. In brief, his assessment of Man as an
evolutionary accident is to lead us into a libertarian attitude whereby, by
virtue of a cosmic accident, we, and we alone, have no choice but to take
responsibility for our own destiny and mould it to our desire. At the very
least, the activities of the last century as one of unrestricted ploitical
experimentation should give us pause for thought. The implication of an
evolutionary process transcending the scientific evidence does indeed
provide a metaphysic, albeit one that is etiolated and impoverished, but it
should be decisively rejected. We do indeed have a choice, and we can
exercise our free will. We might be a product of biosphere, but it is one
with which we are charged to exercise stewardship. We might do better to
accept our intelligence as a gift, and it may be a mistake to imagine that
we shall not be called to account.

"As I noted above, we muddy the waters of the debate if we fail to
acknowledge that the processes of evolution have metaphysical implications
for us. This is because uniquely there is inherent in our human situation
the possibility of transcendence."


I would say that he lays the bones of things bare.
  

    
Yes. It was one of the books, and he was one of the people, which I
wished I had had time to read and interview. I believe he is a
Christian. It is certainly true that Dennett, for example, quotes his
attacks on Gould most gleefully without mentioning the ones on Dawkins.
But these disputes are not really about science and religion. they are
about science and metaphysics.
  

    
(cont) and because we don't have a good public language for talking
about metaphysics, especially in england, the science is twisted to do
things it shouldn't. cf Mary Midgley: "few scientists would treat their
cars as badly as they treat their conceptiual schemes." 

It seems to me that Dawkins's belief about the gullibility of children
is itself a kind of bastard cousin of Gould's existentialist/marxist
ideas. Both want to give quite unrealistic powers to the autonomous
adult while all beings with lesser power are vicitms of false
consciousness or gullibility. This is in fact the generally assumed
anthropology of post-xian societies, stretching all the way across to
consumerism and gun-nut libertarianism. What I find odd is that this
implied metaphysics cannot stand up to a biological or sociobiological
view of humanity. I don't see how anyone could absorb Dawkins' biology
and swallow his metaphysics. When there are good evolutionary 

One good reason for believing in memes is that they bring out the
social quality of our inner life. If I had to chose between Sue
Blackmore's belief that the self is an illusion and John Lennon's
belief that art is self-expression, I would plump unhesitatingly for
Sue. But I don't see the choice is forced.
  

    
Sue is an interesting case:  she's all her life had to balance her mystical
leanings with the reality that as a person she is a hard-headed,
uncompromising researcher.  Her first book, Adventures of a
Parapsychologist, detailed her painstaking efforts to find psi, and her
slow, grinding conversion to skepticism because she simply could not find
any evidnece for what she hoped was true.

I am currently reading <sumac>'s and Jeffrey Masson's book on the emotions
of animals, and it, along with Gould's tales of the efforts of white, male
scientists to show that they are the smartest things on the planet, makes an
interesting display of how scientists' presjudices can ruin their science.
I get into a lot of discussions about "belief" in science, but have only
just now in writing this thought of the simple answer:  science is not a
religion but a method.

wg
  

    
Yup. And history is full of good scientists whose success went to their
heads.

So, why is't religion just a method too? Couldn't it be?
  

    
Because it has more potential aims and methods than science?
I can imagine mysticism as a method, teachable and producing repeatable
results. Indeed there are things like Ignatius Loyola's SPiritual
Exexercises which have that kind of effect. The same is true of certain
Buddhist practices. 

But "religion" is such an enomrous and amorphous field. I don't see what
either has to do with bible-bashing xianity, or that with the spiritual
practices of th eearly Puritans, and let's not forget shamanism and all
the sacrificial religions there have ever been.

Essentially, the scientific method is about getting a reliable
third-person description of the world. Religion is interested in
first-person effects too. So I don't see that there could ever be a
complete technology of the sacred -- a technology being the result of an
applicaiton of the method. A Jesuit might disagree. 
  

    
Andrew, would you to care to explain why Social Darwinism is like
Vogon poetry?

And, on a more serious note, is sociobiology more about personalities
(of scientists) than other scientific areas?
  

    
Well, the line about social darwinisim being like vogon poetry is my
paraphrase of SJ Gould's explanation for the rise of Creationism: that the
Darwinists seemed to the economic losers of early 20th century America to
be saying no only that might would prevail, but that it was right was
well; and tha they must learn to see the beauty iin it. "Resistance is
useless. Now you must listen to my poetry." I still think this is a fair
explanation of what happened, as well as a good joke.

As for whether sociobiology is more perosnal than other forms of science:
this brings us back towards religion. Sociobiology is not just about human
beings in the general, or in the abstract (though that may be all it can
reliably describe). It is also about human beings in particular. It is
about my place in the universe, and about your unique story there too.
This is what gives such classic works of Darwinian subversion as Elaine
Morgan's their power. Sociobiolgical explanations, like religious ones,
but unlike most scientific ones, can be tested against personal
experience, especially when they are couched in terms of "selfishness". 

So people arguiong abou them do believe there is an anusual amount at
stake.
  

    
Andrew, you ruthlessly divide sociobiologists -- and everyone interested
in these questions -- into Gouldians and Dawkinsians.  Are you meeting
with resistance to this classification?  Which one are you?  And how can
a person tell which one they are?
  

    
I guess people hate this classification, though Gould and Dawkins are
doubtless a little flattered. It accurately reflects a social division
among the early sociobiologists and their opponents: they felt
themselves to be an embattled avant-garde within the profession, and I
think most of the important figures were friends. But the lines of
ideology and friendship do not often coincide tidily. Maynard Smith
speaks well of Lewontin, a former colleague at Sussex, to give one
example. Nor is there a neat left-right mapping. Huey Newton, the
former Black Panther, was a pupil of Robert Trivers, the discoverer of
reciprocal altruism, for example.

The personalities did have an effect -- for instance in the two camps'
differing attitudes to religion; but that was a battleground largely
irrelevant to the science, and so in some ways eminently suitable for
antler-matching. 

Perhpas the deepest way of looking at the divide is to say that the
Gouldians think that philosophy is more important than science, and the
Dawkinsians reverse this postion. By that criterion, I am firmly a
Gouldian; but to the (small) degree that the disputes between the two
sides are scientific, and understood by me, I find myself a Dawkinsian.


I really did try very hard indeed to render the scientific and
philosophical positions of the two sides accurately and
sympathetically; I think that broadly I succeeded. Matt Ridley and
David Hull both though I got the science broadly right. So did Steven
Rose. It's true that Hull, in his Nature review, caught me in the most
enormous braino about sex and chromosomes. But on balance, I have been
reviewed by a porfessor of biology and a professor of philosophy as
well as one of the best science writers in England, and they have all
thought me reasonably fair. I couldn't hope for better. 

(cont)
  

    
If you want to test yourself on whether you're a Gouldian or a
Dawkinsian there's a long and a short test. The long test (in the book)
requires that you actually read them. At the end, you don't ask which
you agree with. You ask which of them has committed the most misleading
metaphor. Then you know you belong in the opposite camp.

The short test is to ask whether metaphors matter. If you think that
they are merely the fancy clothes on a body of truth, line up there
with Professor Dawkins. If you think that they are flesh on a skeleton
of theory, sign up with Professor Gould. 
  

    
        Okay, are we talking about a living body or a corpse, there?
  

    
living, in both cases. The question is whether it could live without
metaphor.
  

    
I don't think much of your metaphor, so what does that make me?