Robert Karl Stonjek  wrote:

> Bill Morse:
> No that is not obvious. The concept may be the most salient feature of
> the meme, but calling it "The Pill" is also an important facet of the
> meme. So yes "the Tablet" is a different meme. It is also one of the
> problems with the whole concept - connotations are very significant in
> how we think, but they can change so readily that any given meme can
> rapidly cease to be a discrete unit of culture.Does "WHASSUP!" or
> "Where's the Beef!" really mean anything significant to
anyone anymore?
> Having read "The Meme Machine" I find the concept of the
meme useful and
> interesting, but it would be nice to see a treatment that is more
> balanced (especially in Blackmore's insistence that only humans imitate,
> which is simply untrue).
> 
> RKS:
> If the meme is analogous to the gene then we can expect to observe a
> phenotype, or manifestation of that gene, and a genotype - the essential
> but unmanifested part.
> 
> In the  case of "The Pill" and "The Tablet" it  is
pretty obvious that
> these are two manifestations of the same essential concept ie "self
> induced infertility by medication".  The later is the Memotype (to
> continue from gene to meme ie from Genotype to Memotype) and the former
> two are examples of phenotypes.
> 
> We can consider pairs of genes in the diploid set to be like switches,
> so different combination give different outcomes eg eye, skin or hair
> colour.  We consider only one gene to be responsible.  But there can be
> variations of that gene and there can be different combinations (where
> there are dominant and recessive types, for instance).
> 
> The formulation I have seen from Blackmore and co has been to name
> phenotypes as Memes.  As  there are many more phenotypes than the
> underlying Memotype, this leads to a mish mash of complexity that
> promises to be as  transient and environmentally specific as the
> phenotype of any gene or genome is.
> 
> Following Blackmore and Dawkins lead we would  never arrive at the
> Memome (from Genome) as, by their own admission, memes may come and go
> or even develop anew in our own lifetime.  Is there no underlying
> Memotype?  The underlying structure of the theory as  manifested thus
> far precludes the arrival at any meaningful theoretical structure that
> can be used to further the understanding of human consciousness from the
> genetic perspective.
> 
> They can shoot themselves in the foot if they wish, but my  pinkies are
> not going to be offered up for their short sighted target practice.
> 
There are several issues to take here. First, is it necessary that a
gene will always have an evolutionary fate that ties it in with a
genome? It happens in metazoonas that this is the norm, but viruses and
plasmids do not imply that genes must always have genomes as contexts
even in biology, so why import that requirement into cultural evolution?

Second, as it happens, most "memes" do travel in packets; we call them
traditions. Isolated ideas that can move about cross-tradition tend to
have very different expressions (signification, or symbolic meaning) in
one tradition than in another - think of the Cargo cultists of the
Pacific and what "airplane" means to them that it does not mean to the
US Army.

Third, a phenotype is a biological entity. If by phenotype you mean a
behaviour, then what is a biological phenotype can be a cultural meme.
It does not follow that the entity levels are commensurate between the
two evolutionary domains. For this reason I believe it is positively
misleading to say that cultural evolution is Lamarckian, because the
entity that acquires traits is the biological one. Cultural profiles or
agents *are* constituted developmentally by memes; they happen to be
acquired by biological entities we call phenotypical organisms.

All that said in defense of memes, let me say that I do not think that
they are necessary in cultural evolution - evolution at a minimum, no
matter whether biological or cultural, requires *reproducers* but not
necessarily *replicators*, and memes are the analogue in culture of
replicators that genes are in biology. So a doctrinairre adherence to
memes is counter-productive.

I think we over-generalise evolution from metazooan biological
evolution. Culture, if it evolves, is likely to be more like organisms
of a much different kind. I tend to think that culture is more like
algal or viral or plant evolution, with massive gene sharing,
hybridisation, and commensalism, than it is like animal evolution.

If anyone is interested, I have two essays on my website:

The appearance of Lamarckism in the evolution of culture

and

Darwinian metaphor and analogy: the things that evolve in life and
language

both published in peer-reviewed journals. The URL is
http://users.bigpond.com/thewilkins/darwiniana.html>, and choose
"Published papers".

-- 
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
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