Memes and the Evolution of Culture

20 April 2016

我敢打赌,当大多数人听到“表情包”这个词时,他们会想到互联网和像趴街这样的病毒式传播。或者像LOL、江南style或哈林摇这样的新表达。本周的节目可能会涉及这些内容,但这并不是我们想要讨论的内容。我们想讨论一个关于人类文化进化的严肃科学假设——模因之于文化进化,就像基因之于生物进化。

Now genes, I get. They’re self-replicating packets of biological information. All that genes “want,” figuratively speaking, is to replicate themselves. The competitive process of natural selection determines which ones will. The winners -– the most “fit” ones -- proliferate. The losers die off.

Same with memes. Memes are self-replicating too. But what they encode is not instructions for building proteins in our bodies, but instructions for building behaviors, beliefs, and emotions into our brains. Like genes they compete with each other. The memes that win survive. The memes that lose, die off.

But there’s a huge difference between the way genes spread and the way ideas spread. Genes make actual physical copies of themselves. Ideas don’t. We pass actual physical copies of our genes onto our offspring. We don't do that with ideas. My ideas are just my ideas. They’re forever confined to my head.

Or maybe we're being too literal. Think about how culture is passed on to the next generation. It’s no accident that most people grow up, at least initially, believing the religion and speaking the language of their parents. That’s a form of non-genetic inheritance. That’s the kind of thing that memes can help explain.

现在,我们不能否认人们从别人那里获得想法和信仰。我们知道的大部分东西都是从别人那里学来的。但这是否意味着思想真的会在我们的头脑中自我复制呢?假设你对如何做某事有一个想法。也许我喜欢你的想法。也许我甚至决定收养它。或者试图以某种方式改进它。None of that is theidea’sdoing; it’smydoing. It’s not that ideas activelyreplicatethemselves.Iactivelyadoptsome ideas and not others.

On this view, it's theperson, or themind, or theself那是在驾驶座上。你可能会认为这种观点已经过时了——一个人理智地权衡各种观点的利弊,然后自主地决定采用哪些观点,摒弃哪些观点。但这不就是我们在哲学中一直在做的吗?我们在科学领域不也这么做吗?我们有意识地审视自己的想法。我们保留那些通过审查的,拒绝那些没通过的。

But most of the time our ideas aren’t the product of rigorous scientific experimentation or philosophical thinking. If they were, our heads wouldn’t be filled with so many awful, even pernicious ideas (and philosophy and science can act as antidotes to bad thinking). But for most of us, most of the time, acquiring an idea from another person is more like catching a cold. In other words, ideas are like viruses of the mind that spread through a contagion-like process. Wich would make our brains the virally-infected hosts, which self-replicating ideas use to get more of their kind into existence.

Of course, viruses can be quite detrimental to their hosts, and so can memes. Memes don’t replicate forour利益,他们复制是为了自己的利益。就像理查德·道金斯第一次提到自私基因一样,现在我们有了自私的梗。我们的嘉宾Susan Blackmore甚至称我们人类为“表情包机器”。欢迎收听她对文化进化模因理论的更多看法。


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Comments(10)


MJA's picture

MJA

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

I think truth One day truth

我认为真理总有一天,真理会感染每一个人,人类最终会与自然重聚,“最终自由。”=

Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

in the audio i thought i head

in the audio i thought i head someoen state that the self wasnt an element of christianity?? is that correct?? would teh verse so as a man thinketh.....counter that??

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Wednesday, August 28, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

I'm pleased that Sir Richard

I'm pleased that Sir Richard gives a newbie thought and consideration in an area he pioneered. Personally, I have to believe his ideas regarding genes, memes and extended phenotypes remain pretty solid, inasmuch as any such ideas are only as provable as anecdotal evidence allows. Cross-disciplinarily, Michael Murphy's book, FUTURE OF THE BODY, deals with these issues, again, anecdotally. So there we are. Good luck to your guest. It is all connected---somehow, and, it we are ever able to figure out WHAT how, we might just get the picture.

Guest's picture

Guest

Wednesday, August 28, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

I think Ken and John hit the

I think Ken and John hit the nail on the head pretty early on...this "meme" stuff is just contrived way of talking about ideas, intended to force and evolutionary model on it. There is no such thing as a self-replicating idea. To work with Dr. Blackmore's own analogy...if someone makes a picture, and it just lies there and no one ever copies it, what happens? Answer: it just lies there. It is not self-replicating in any way.
This "memetics" stuff is ironic--the atheists who invented it (Richard Dawkins) and promote it (Daniel Dennet, Susan Blackmore) often mock us Christians for seeing God in everything. Memetics is an example of desperately wanting to see evolution in everything. It is no accident that it is promoted by people who are rabidly (even pathetically) anti-religious. And they can't even decide what it is they really believe - on the one hand, we are just helpless blobs of matter being controlled by memes that tell us what to do...on the other, Dr. Blackmore leaps at the idea of us creating memes to change society...we use memes as weapons in some kind of mass thought-control scheme. I don't think one can logically have it both ways.
People have ideas, they share them with each other, sometimes they change them, sometimes they choose not to share them. Slapping a bunch of pseudo-scientific jargon on top of that simple reality does not somehow make it a science - and it certainly does not make it evolution.

Guest's picture

Guest

Monday, September 2, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

Scott, I think the comment

斯科特,我认为他的观点是基督教和犹太教都没有提出灵魂只是像布莱克莫尔博士错误地认为的那样寄居在身体里,就像某种独立的东西。她结结巴巴地说了几句,然后又跳到佛教里,试图证明自己的观点。
模因论本身是纯粹的无稽之谈——完全是那些希望通过假装进化无处不在来促进进化的人捏造出来的伪科学。不存在自我复制的“模因”(看看海报就知道它复制自己的频率),事实上也不存在模因——它是一个编造出来的词,用来假装思想就像基因一样,而我们只是一个无助的宿主。“除了进化论,没有上帝,而达尔文是进化论的先知。”
For that matter, there really is no such thing as a self-replicating gene...in nature, they never exist outside of living things - once outside of them they are dead matter and don't do anything. This should tell us something.

Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, September 3, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

I was struck by the

我被Ken在将表情包(和想法)与基因等同上所遇到的困难所震惊。他一直纠结于一个“事实”:基因是自我复制的实体,而模因不是。当然,基因本身(具有特定组织的DNA片段)不会自我复制——它们需要大量的酶和细胞机制来复制——而且它们不会“努力”变得更常见。相反,如果这些生物比拥有其他基因版本的生物更能生存和繁殖,那么在它们栖息的生物中运作良好的基因(实际上是等位基因)就会变得更常见。基因的增殖不是他们的“努力”…它只会在合适的情况下发生。
I'd call this difficulty a mistaken effort to place agency with a single entity in the process. Ken shouldn't feel too bad, since Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene," but it is mistaken nonetheless. The real lesson of evolution is that complexity and adaptation to environment happens with no specific agency (perhaps you could argue for agency dispersed between genes, organisms, and environment, including other organisms). Dawkins's great contribution was to point out that we should not ascribe agency solely to organisms, although his reaction is often read as putting all the agency in the genes.
The same argument applies for memes; we should not look for sole agency either in our minds or in the memes. Memes proliferate when the circumstances are right - a meme that our minds want to repeat and copy. Are there tantalizing memes that go viral? Absolutely. Can we decide to close the YouTube window? Well, some of us, some of the time, at least...

Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, September 3, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

One question that came up was

其中一个问题是模因能否做出可检验的预测。其一(类似于进化)是模因(或观念)有一段从父母到后代的持续历史。对进化的一个真正有力的预测是,我们应该看到物种多样性的等级排列(这通常在进化树中被称为系统发育),特征分布就好像它们是从过去的共同祖先那里继承来的。这与非进化的观点相反,例如,非进化的观点可能涉及没有共同祖先痕迹的生物同时创造。当然,来自生物和化石的证据更适合用进化论来解释。
If memetics is real, memes (or ideas) should also have a history understandable as they are passed from one person or culture to another. This is so obviously true that it's hard to imagine the alternative - that memes/ideas are independent and spring up randomly, are not picked up from others, and don't spread per se. The fact that we can trace the history of ideas is itself a powerful argument for memetics.
Both of these cases are so intuitive that we forget how tied to an evolutionary mechanism they are. I often ask my students why they don't see squirrels with crab claws. They look confused (not having entertained the possibility) until I explain that evolution from common ancestors would prevent that possibility (i.e. crab claws evolved after crustaceans and vertebrates were separate groups). Perhaps I should also ask why the Incas did not know about Aristotle's elements and qualities while I'm at it!

Guest's picture

Guest

Thursday, September 12, 2013 -- 5:00 PM

Dawkins also wrote a little

道金斯还写了一篇关于所谓的延伸表型的论文,即似乎不受遗传因素影响而代代相传的事物或特征。其他的大师断言,我们的基因知道我们不知道的东西。也许是这样;也许不…但是,我要告诉你:我似乎知道如何做一些我在学校没有学到的事情(即使当我集中注意力的时候)。我把这些宇宙知识大部分归功于我的父母和祖父母。或者,也许我只是知道怎么做?那么,我怎么知道呢?
As the great TV talk vocalist used to say: ain't that interestin'? Sure.
The Doctor.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Thursday, April 21, 2016 -- 5:00 PM

No new comments here yet? OK,

No new comments here yet? OK, I'll start the multi-logue:
?It is instructive, I think, how those who are so certain of their views, vis-a-vis religion and such like, are also doubly certain that some newer concepts of reality are just wrong. They feel this way, seemingly because the ideas are foreign to their own ways (s) of regarding things, or perhaps more specifically, the idea(s) is/are new and were not thought of 2000 years ago. Memes seem to arouse this sort of hostility among those who are pretty set in their ways and beliefs. I like to be open to new ideas and am not bound by views encased in concrete. As to memes and memetics (that word which would signify a study of memes does not sit well with spell check), I am now thinking they are partially interchangeable with Dawkins' notion of the extended phenotype, the difference being (if we are correct) that whereas useless memes may not survive evolutionary tests, extended phenotypes generally do. So they are at least cousins, if not siblings.
好奇是我们义不容辞的责任。有一段时间,我一直在想,为什么我们当中有些人似乎只知道事情是如何运作的。没有多年的正式学习和实践。没有经过专家的指导。从我父亲曾经称之为“公共工作”的工作中退休后的这些年里,我在自己身上发现了这种倾向。它曾经困扰着我,因为在我看来它毫无意义。现在,我只是带着一种持续的好奇,或者正如道金斯自己所写的,一种同样的欲望,接受了这份礼物。
I do not believe God is angry with me for this. But, even if God were angry, It would have to just get over it.
Spell check does not like vis-a-vis either. Well, spell check will just have to get over that. Some things are measurable-some are not. Some will never be. We always should be careful what we wish for.
Your partner in crime,
HGN.

Gary M Washburn's picture

Gary M Washburn

Sunday, April 24, 2016 -- 5:00 PM

Do things come out right in

事情最终会解决吗?或者我们只是创造了一种描述它的叙述?如果是这样,我们该如何摆脱它呢?我们对这个世界的理解是如此的熟悉,以至于我们很难明白,如果不打破对里面的陌生人的信念外壳,我们怎么可能在做哲学。修辞不是一套需要掌握的花招,而是需要被理性推翻的敌人。世界以各种条件包围着我们,承诺我们无需付出任何努力就能了解它。这是对理性的一种抑制。我们可以迷恋它,并试图操纵它为自己谋利,但加深它对他人的诱骗。声称某种客观真实或社会利益是在求问问题。也就是说,它把它的前提作为它的证明。 The evidence belies it. That is, how is it that we can be naturalized to what is supposed to be "in our social genes"? Clearly, the world is not something that creates us, but something we create. But why? To save an extensive explanation I will simply state it: we know we are not sufficient to be the totality of meaning for each other, and so we get out of each other's way and let something called "world" get posited so we can be more complete without pretense to defining each other to each other. It is our fundamental need that others be free that we let a world come between us.