On 25 Jul 2002 at 11:11, Walpurgis wrote:
> On 25 Jul 2002 at 3:54, joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> > Postmodernism Disrobed
> > by Richard Dawkins
> > Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say,
>
> Hmmm.... sounds like Richard Dawkins! *L*
>
Kilroy was Here
by Martin Gardner (2000)
The word "meme" was introduced in an offhand way by Oxford
University biologist Richard Dawkins at the end of his book "The
Selfish Gene." Reviewers of Dawkins' book liked to quote Samuel
Butler's remark that a chicken is an egg's way of making another
egg. Dawkins' theme was similar. An organism is a gene's way of
making other genes. The genes are "selfish in the sense that they
care not a fig about the welfare of the organisms that preserve and
keep them going."
A meme (it rhymes with "dream") is short for mimetics, a word
denoting mimicry. Dawkins wanted to identify a self-replicating
unit
of culture that would play a role in cultural evolution similar in
some
ways to the role played by self-replicating genes in the evolution
of
bodies. He chose the word "meme" because it had one syllable,
like gene, and because it sounded like gene.
A meme is anything humans do or say that is not genetically
determined and is passed from person to person by imitation or
copying, such as the wish to "have a nice day." The term has
already entered the Oxford English Dictionary, in which it is
defined
as "an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed
on by nongenetic means, esp. imitation." Memes are invisible self-
replicators that live in human brains the way genes live in cells.
They become tangible when they jump from one brain to another.
Relativity theory, for example, slumbered in Einstein's brain as a
meme before it went public in a technical paper.
After memes were tossed into the English language by
Dawkins, memetics quickly caught fire, especially on the Internet,
where it has a cult-like following. Daniel Dennett, Tufts
University's
energetic and wide-ranging philosopher, has become the top
fugleman of memetics. He vigorously defends the meme concept
at
length in "Consciousness Explained" and at even greater length in
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea." But, as I will argue here, a meme is so
broadly defined by its proponents as to be a useless concept,
creating more confusion than light, and I predict that the concept
will soon be forgotten as a curious linguistic quirk of little value.
Every idea or form of behavior that you learned from someone
else, not on your own, is a meme. The list is endless: gestures,
tunes, catch phrases like "Kilroy was here," fashions in clothes
such as the current droopy trousers worn by young boys, ways to
make anything (pots, chairs, cars, planes, skyscrapers), marriage
customs, diet fads, art, novels, poems, plays, operas, tools,
games, inventions, ideas in science, philosophy and religion--all
are memes. What sociologists call mores and folkways are
memes. From a "meme's-eye view"--a favorite phrase of
memeticists--all your beliefs about anything are clusters of
memes.
If you are a skeptic, your skepticism is made of memes. Was
Jesus the son of God? If you think yes, that's a meme. If you think
no, that's also a meme.
There are three ways in which memes leap from person to
person. They jump vertically from parents to offspring. They jump
horizontally from person to person in ways resembling the spread
of a virus. Third, memes can move obliquely from someone to a
near relative or friend. All words are memes. Spoken and written
languages are clusters of memes.
Along with Dennett, two authors in 1996 also promoted the
meme craze: Richard Brodie in "Viruses of the Mind: The New
Science of the Meme" and Aaron Lynch in "Thought Contagion:
How Belief Spreads Through Society." Last year came a third
spirited defense of memetics, "The Meme Machine" by Susan J.
Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of
England
in Bristol. Born in London in 1951, she is best known today
among
parapsychologists and skeptics for her disenchantment with
psychic research. Blackmore goes far beyond her predecessors in
her enthusiasm for memetics. In his foreword to "The Meme
Machine" Dawkins recognizes that Blackmore's vision of the
future
of memetics far exceeds his own. She has "greater courage and
intellectual chutzpah," he writes, "than I have ever aspired to. . . ."
Indeed, Blackmore speaks of her book as actually laying the
foundation for a new science.
* * *
Blackmore believes that certain big questions can be answered
fully only by invoking memes; for example, why do we have such
large brains? The conventional answer is that complex thinking
has
enormous survival value in the ability of a species to control its
environment and keep itself from extinction. Blackmore puts it
differently. Our brains are meme machines that have evolved to
store and transmit memes. We are back to a version of Butler's
topsy-turvy aphorism. Instead of brains creating memes, such as
Huckleberry Finn and quantum mechanics, it is the other way
around. "The enormous human brain," she writes, "has been
created by the memes."
Many pages of "The Meme Machine" concern ways in which
memes influence sexual behavior. All cultures have memes about
what makes a person sexually attractive. Two such popular
memes
are that women should marry men taller and older than
themselves.
Such memes obviously influence mating choices, but Blackmore
argues that we should override such trivial rules and mate with
those who are the most skillful in "copying, using, and spreading
memes."
More drastic than her view of gender relations, Blackmore's
thesis attacks Western civilization's understanding of the self. In
the book's final chapter, Blackmore follows Dennett in seeing
consciousness and free will (two names for essentially the same
thing) as illusions. They are "explained" by simply denying that
they are real. For Blackmore and Dennett, the notion of a "self"
living inside our brain--an entity that makes decisions--is what
Blackmore calls an "insidious and pervasive" notion created by
the
millions of memes that shuffle about inside our skull. There is, to
put it bluntly, no such thing as a self:
"If I genuinely believe that there is no 'I' inside, with free will and
conscious deliberate choice, then how do I decide what to do? The
answer is to have faith in the memetic view; to accept that the
selection of genes and memes will determine the action and there
is no need for an extra 'me' to get involved. To live honestly, I
must
just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves.
"On this view, all human actions, whether conscious or not,
become complex interactions between memes, genes and all their
products, in complicated environments. The self is not the
initiator
of actions, it does not 'have' consciousness and it does not 'do' the
deliberating. There is no truth in the idea of an inner self inside
my
body that controls the body and is conscious. Because this is
false, so is the idea of my conscious self having free will."
And here is how Blackmore describes the illusions of the self in
"The Meme Machine's" final paragraph:
"Memetics thus brings us to a new vision of how we might live
our lives. We can carry on our lives as most people do, under the
illusion that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is in
charge, who is responsible for my actions and who makes me me.
Or we can live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living
out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and
environment,
in the knowledge that that is all there is. Then we are no longer
victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free--
not
because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators
but because we know that there is no one to rebel."
Observe how this denial of a self meshes with the statement
Butler made in jest. Instead of humans thinking about the world
and their lives, exchanging information, inventing things,
interacting
with one another, experiencing pleasures and pains, the memetic
language reverses everything. It's like bending over and looking at
the world between your legs. You see the same things as before
but from a different perspective. What is really going on is that
billions of selfish memes are manipulating us. They have taken
over
our brains. They shape all our thoughts and actions. The memes
are not our creations. We are theirs. We are just a meme's way of
making other memes.
Because Blackmore shares Dennett's belief that all our
decisions are determined by genes and memes--what we are wired
to do by heredity and experience--she joins the ranks of thinkers
known as determinists. One wonders what she would make of
such famous arguments for free will as those found in William
James' essay "The Dilemma of Determinism" or the attacks on
determinists by later philosophers.
Note the word "selfplex" in the last paragraph of Blackmore's
book. It is her term for the cluster of genes and memes that gives
rise to the illusion of a self. This brings us to the most serious
objection that critics have hurled at memeticists: The notion of a
meme is too fuzzy, too ill-defined.
A meme is supposed to be an element of imitation that can
serve as a significant cultural unit. There have been a few earlier
efforts to define such units. Blackmore cites two: "corpuscles of
culture," proposed by anthropologist F.T. Cloak in 1975, and
"culturgens," an equally ugly term suggested by physicist Charles
Lumsden and biologist Edward O. Wilson in 1981. Neither has
caught on. The question arises: Given that there are cultural
elements called memes, how do we distinguish a single meme,
such as the "V for victory" gesture, from a vast bundle of memes,
such as those that constitute a religion?
To answer this question, memeticists have invented the word
"memeplex" to denote a cluster of memes. Hilarious debates have
raged over how to draw lines separating memes from
memeplexes.
For example, the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
(da-
da-da-dum), as Blackmore records them, clearly are a meme
because millions of people can hum those four notes without
being
able to hum the entire symphony. The symphony is, of course,
also a meme, but best described as a memeplex because it
consists of smaller memes.
The question of where to mark the boundaries along meme
spectrums is not easy. "Laugh and the world laughs with you;
weep and you weep alone." This clearly is a meme because so
many people can repeat it without knowing they are reciting the
opening lines of "Solitude," a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. All
poems and novels are memeplexes. They often contain
memorable
lines that jump from person to person because they are so easily
remembered. "Call me Ishmael," the first line of "Moby Dick," is
a
meme. The first chapter of the novel is a memeplex, and the entire
novel is a larger memeplex.
All of science is a memeplex, but it is hopeless to decide when
a scientific assertion becomes small enough to be called an
individual meme. Is the fact of evolution a meme or a memeplex?
Roman Catholicism is a monstrous memeplex. What aspects of it
deserve to be called memes? The doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception? Or is this a memeplex made up of such memes as
original sin and the Virgin Birth? Should an entire mass be called
a
meme or a memeplex? The gesture of crossing the heart is surely
a meme, but we encounter great difficulty sorting out the memes
that make up a doctrine as complicated as, say, the Atonement.
The point is that the notion of a meme is much too broad to be
useful in explaining human thinking and behavior. A meme is
little
more than a peculiar terminology for saying the obvious. Who can
deny that cultures change in ways independent of genetics, ways
involving information that is spread throughout society mainly by
spoken and written words?
As Blackmore makes clear, memes have a physical basis of
some sort inside brains, where they are stored in one's memory in
ways nobody understands. This is important in helping us
understand how memes and genes differ. Genes have become
visible. They are spots along the DNA double helix that have been
isolated and observed. They are as real as atoms. How memes live
in brains is a mystery.
When memes jump from brain to brain, they often are
transported by what memeticists call meme vehicles. Obvious
examples of such carriers are newspapers, periodicals, books and
recordings. Libraries, museums and art galleries are huge vehicles
for storing and passing along memes. "A scholar," writes Dennett,
paraphrasing Butler, "is just a library's way of making another
library."
For Dennett and Blackmore, memes offer profound new
insights into human nature and even lead to theories which may
soon be testable. They see memetics as a science in its infancy.
To critics, who at the moment far outnumber true believers,
memetics is no more than a cumbersome terminology for saying
what everybody knows and that can be more usefully said in the
dull terminology of information transfer.
Stephen Jay Gould, in a 1996 debate with Blackmore, called
memes "meaningless metaphors." Blackmore cites a letter in the
New Scientist in which British philosopher Mary Midgley calls
memes "mythical entities" that are a "useless and essentially
superstitious notion." H. Allen Ore, a University of Rochester
geneticist, was quoted in Time as dismissing memetics as "an
utterly silly idea. It's just a cocktail party science."
Let's try a linguistic thought experiment. In all human cultures,
even in chimp society, objects not connected to the body are
shifted from place to place. Call every such move a "tran," short
for
translocate or transfer. Moving our shoes when we walk, run or
dance is not trans because the objects are attached to our body.
Nor are the movements of things in cars, trains, ships, planes and
elevators examples of trans because the propelling forces are
independent of us even though we may direct such movements.
Examples of genuine trans abound. The motions of pitched and
batted baseballs are obvious trans, as are the movements of
objects in dozens of other sports: football, basketball, bowling,
tennis, golf, hockey, pool and so on. When a chess player pushes
a pawn, it's a tran. Dealing playing cards is a tran. Raking leaves
and moving vacuum cleaners and using dust busters are trans.
Serving food and washing dishes are trans. Hammering a nail and
sawing wood are trans. Eating is a tran because food is moved
from
plate to mouth, though swallowing it is not because the food
becomes joined to the body. Punching typewriter and computer
keys are trans. Moving piano keys, trumpet valves and drumsticks
are trans. Digging ditches and cutting down trees are trans.
Serving
beer is a tran. There are tens of thousands of other examples.
A vexing question arises: How should we distinguish trans from
transplexes? The flight of a pitched baseball is a tran, but if the
ball
is hit, caught and tossed to first base, is that familiar sequence a
tran or a transplex? Shall we call an entire inning a tran or a
transplex? Should transplex be reserved for a complete game,
with
its hundreds of trans?
What is gained by introducing the concept of a tran? Nothing.
Trans are no more than a bizarre terminology for saying what is
better said in ordinary language. We don't need a new science of
tranetics to tell us that in every culture, persons move things.
Are memes here to stay or will they prove to be as irrelevant as
trans? Will memetics turn out to be a new science or a harmless
humbug destined to evaporate like Kurt Lewin's topological
psychology, which befuddled Gestalt psychologists in the 1930s,
or catastrophe theory, which two decades ago agitated a small
group of overzealous mathematicians? Is memetics a misguided
attempt on the part of behavioral scientists to imitate genetics
with
its gene units and physics with its elementary particles? In a few
years we may know.
> Has anyone noticed that academics think memes are are stupid
> idea? Has Dawkins?
>
> Walpurgis
>
>
> PS
> When list members post articles, could you please add the original
> source, preferably as a non-HTML link? Thanks.
>
>
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