Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science [Hardcover]

Unlike most edited volumes based on conferences, which typically read like random collections of papers glued between two covers, Aunger's edited volume displays a remarkable coherence. Against all odds, he enticed a highly diverse group of academics to Cambridge who then constructively debated the status of memetics as a science. Susan Blackmore, after Richard Dawkins probably the most well-known proponent of memetics, and David Hull, a sympathetic critic, open the book with strong arguments for taking memetics seriously. Henry Plotkin and Rosaria Conte then offer critiques of what they perceive as the somewhat faulty psychological assumptions underlying the meme concept. Plotkin argues against making "imitation" the centerpiece of mimetic mechanisms, and Conte argues for a much more sophisticated and complex social cognitive perspective on memetics. She presents a complex model of humans as limited autonomous agents, focusing on their active role in the perpetuation of cultural knowledge.

Kevin Laland and John Odling-Smee are sympathetic to the general notion of memes, but ask for more consideration of the multiple processes involved in evolution. Their own contribution is the concept of niche construction, based on the idea that species have effects on their environments that subsequently constrain future generations. Reprising ideas from their 1985 book, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Boyd and Richerson argue for population level thinking in evolutionary models of cultural change. I should note that the renewed interest in evolutionary thinking stirred up by Blackmore and others has resulted in the University of Chicago Press's re-issuing their book!

The last three chapters of the book are much more negative toward the whole enterprise. Dan Sperber uses creative examples and logical proofs to conclude that Dawkin's conception of memes is misguided. He argues that recent thinking in memetics goes against recent work in developmental and evolutionary psychology. Adam Kuper notes that there already are well-established techniques for the study of cultural diffusion, especially in anthropology. He concludes that the "memetics industry" has yet to deliver on its claims. Finally, another anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, argues that memeticists have merely rediscovered what anthropology has known for decades, and in fact, is making all the same mistakes. He has harsh words for scientists who jump into an area without paying more attention to what has already been done by others working in that area.

Aunger provides excellent introductory and concluding chapters, which constitute valuable contributions in themselves. Chapter 1 beautifully lays out the issues and provides a constructive guide to the issues over which the contributors struggled. Chapter 11 concludes the book with an assessment of the contributors' arguments and a frank admission of his own skepticism.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the concept of memes, cultural and social evolution, and the cultural divide between the natural and the social sciences. You will not only learn something about memes, but you will also see how serious academic debate can be pulled off in a civilized and constructive manner. My hat is off to Robert Aunger!

For those unfamiliar with the notion of "memes," they are, quite simply, the theoretical smallest cultural commodity - an idea - that replicates itself through its symbiotic relationship with its human host. The idea is either entirely absurd or the solution to the mystery of culture that has been the providence of anthropologists for the past century and a half. But, the notion was birth by a scientist (Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene [1977]), and this alone is enough to distance some potentially interested parties from the humanities and social sciences. Darwinizing Culture is at once the reiteration and clarification of the memetic theory (although most of the authors only work to obscure the idea in their work, pulling it in one direction or another - for their very particular use) and a series of arguments against memetic theory as it stands, as well as an argument against those theorists, isolated in the sciences, who so often find the idea attractive, and distanced from previous theories of culture and cultural development.

The collection brings together pieces from Susan Blackmore (author of The Meme Machine [Oxford, 1999]), Henry Plotkin, David Hull, and Dan Sperber, as well as many other younger theorists, all succeeding a rather terse foreword by Daniel Dennet - one of memetic theories greatest proponents. Aunger's introduction and conclusion to the collection are both wonderful contributions, and help to establish the debate, both contemporaneously and historically, for both memes enthusiasts and those new to the field. Blackmore's piece is an afterword to her earlier study, in part working to refute critics who found fault with her prior book-length examination, and as such, while it helps to provide a continuity for the debate, sets the tone of the collection, and that is one of distress. The collection effectively critiques itself by including both sides of the debate, which is admirable, but rather than clearing the slate, as Aunger hopes the collection will, it surely asks the reader to choose a side, and those ideologies are clearly demarcated by academic alignments. But that is not to say that the collection fails to be useful - in fact, quite the contrary: there are a number of essays (and I'm inclined to include them all in this), that help the conceptual understanding of the field on one level or another, but as they are in constant dialogue with one another, this utility is constantly compromised.

But, like every anthology, there is a single essay that stands out from the rest for its sheer insight and applicability, and in this case it is Kevin Laland and John Odling-Smee's innocuously titled "The Evolution of the Meme." Laland and Odling-Smee expand on Richard Dawkins' notion of the "extended phenotype" (from The Extended Phenotype [1982]), positing that the cultural artifacts that are created by civilization influence (and possible cause) both cultural and biological evolution. It sounds deceptively simple, but the premise is that by creating artifacts that alter the environment, simply by their sheer presence, the evolution of that culture is irreparable altered, always needing to incorporate the presence and utility of that artifact. With the explosion of artifacts endemic of consumer capitalism, our cultural evolution has been dramatically influenced, and Laland and Odling-Smee provide an interesting hypothesis to explain this sort of transformation in culture (and consciousness - surely Marshall McLuhan would agree with their suppositions).

If there is a fault with the collection, it is simply that the debate over memetics is a rather closed sphere - the majority of the essays cite the author's previous contribution to the field, or one or another of the other included authors. If nothing else, the contributions by Sperber and Adam Kuper should influence this, and hopefully encourage the steady incorporation of more anthropologically minded sources.

While the collection is at times rather tiresome for a meme enthusiast, and especially so for students of culture, who must deal with various reiterations of basic tenants of anthropology, it would seem to provide a comprehensive introduction to both the idea and the debates surrounding the idea for those new to the field. And for the meme enthusiast, especially for those schooled in the sciences, the arguments of Sperber and Kuper are especially important, bringing in more anthropological basis for this understanding.

This book, and The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think are both world class and should be read along with Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration and Five Minds for the Future. I believe we are at the very beginning of a new era in which we will be able to map linguistics and culture, and devise beneficial bacteria at the same time that we devise beneficial memes. Ideas, not weapons, will be the dominant feature of the 21st Century.

The book grabs we right away with the statement that good ideas can go extinct and bad ideas can infect. See also Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography and Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.

Early on the book provokes me to note that what is relevant is culturally determined. In the attack on Iraq, for example, the only relevant information was that which Dick Cheney wished to act on. Nothing else. See Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency and The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.

This edited work, while a melange of competing opinions, is a very valuable foundation work for an emerging discipline

One note from each contributing author:

Blackmore: into parapsychology, inspired the third book I plan to do in 2009, ABNORMAL INTELLIGENCE: From Bacterial to Extra-Terrestial

Hull: memes can be tracked statistically, e.g. mentions and variants on the web.

Plotkin: Different forms of knowledge and belief (I note: religions and nationality are a form of super-meme).

Conte: 12 different ways for memes to spread

Laland & Odling-Smee: Niche construction alters evolutionary paths

Boyd & Richerson: need to map cultures at memetic level and do population modeling [I note that Information Operations as now emergent in the US Department of Defense is nowhere near this level of sophistication, and that the EarthGame planned by Medard Gabel is precisely what we need now.]

Sperber: notes Chompsky's contributions, linguistics can help, grammar is inferred. I note: Memes plus True Cost at Point of Sale will save us.

Kuper: Ecology of ideas, cultural difusion, ideological change, technical innovtation

Bloch: social & cultural anthropologists shave been wrong to ignore biologists and other natural scientists--memetics must be a multidisciplinary endeavor.

Aunger: cultural change is the next big challenge. Memes CAN improve life, lead to peace and prosperity, but mememetics is not yet documented nor empirically researchable.

The references that each author provides at the end of their respective chapters are a PhD in waiting.

See also:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People