My Introduction to Memes
I’m a meme skeptic. I’ve never read anything that directly contained arguments for or against memes, but I’ve seen/heard them come up occasionally during interviews and discussions. My quite-uninformed opinion was that they were just a misguided attempt to quantize the humanities that lacks any evidence whatsoever. Dennett didn’t sway me, but he at least prevented me from dismissing them out-of-hand in the future.
The easiest critique of memes is that there is no hard evidence for them. Dennett summarized this skepticism as show me a meme, and that’s glib but accurate. His simple response was that words are memes: they are a quantized unit of culture, they spread from person-to-person, they evolve, they experience natural selection, and they even go extinct. There is apparently a linguistic counter to this argument, as Dennett felt the need to warn against over-Chomsky-ing words and making them all about syntax; in particular, he mentioned labels and passwords as examples of words/memes that are 100% syntax-free. I have nothing to add about this, because I know jack-all about linguistics. (I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky, who is alive, will probably go down as one of the more important thinkers in history, yet I know literally nothing about his work.)
Another counter to my own show me a meme argument occurred to me after the presentation. (There’s a chance Dennett mentioned this and I just forgot about this; if so, my bad on the semi-plagiarism.) Genes have a clear physical analogy: stretches of DNA. Well, when Darwin first put out his ideas about evolution, there was no physical evidence for genes. Hell, we didn’t know about genes period. Mendel was working with his peas around the same time as Darwin, but his work wasn’t rediscovered for fifty years after the Origin’s publication. It was another fifty years until DNA was really sorted out. So, the theory of evolution did its thing for practically a century before absolute slam-dunk evidence for genes hit the stage.
I realize I haven’t rigorously defined what a meme is. It’s basically the cultural equivalent to a gene. Just as genes are little bits of hereditary information that evolution works via and upon, memes are little chunks of culture that can spread and mutate and be selected for or against. Wait … since when does culture evolve?
Mitochondria vs. Michelangelo
… which brings us to Dennett’s next big comparison. At some point in the extraordinarily distant past, an amazing thing happened. A single-celled life form joined forces with another distinct single cell. They didn’t merely become friends or form a symbiotic tag team; they literally fused into one discrete creature. This isn’t science fiction or a tentative hypothesis (a la the lightening-struck primordial soup starting life); this is the birth of eukaryotes. Every single cell in your body contains mitochondria, and every single mitochondrion has its own DNA sequence distinct from your regular cellular DNA. Your mitochondria ultimately descend from this engulfed critter.
Eukaryotes have gone berserk since this alliance, evolving extreme complexity and diversity. Everything from humans to palm trees to mushrooms is a eukaryote. Meanwhile, your mitochondria’s distant cousins that didn’t find a friend (or enemy, for that matter) to ally with are still largely relegated to being comparatively-simple prokaryotes (like bacteria). So, why did eukaryotes take over the world? What gave this conglomerate critter its edge?
The likely explanation is that evolution had a new vector to act upon. With two distinct genomes to pass on, evolution was granted that many more potential cranes to work with. Eukaryotes have an entirely distinct route of evolutionary action that prokaryotes simply lack. This gave eukaryotes the evolutionary prowess to dominate the planet.
What does this billion-year-old cellular biology have to do with memes? Well, Dennett posits that this is happening again literally as we speak thanks to the human brain. Just as those first eukaryotes had a second genome upon which evolution could act, humans now have a “memome” that is subject to evolutionary pressures. Those first eukaryotes passed a second set of DNA to their progeny, and humans now pass memes onto their children.
Ironically, Dennett has ceded one of the mind creationists’ points. He agrees with them that modern humanity cannot be explained merely by genes and old-school evolution. However, Dennett is most certainly not admitting that some sort of skyhook is necessary to explain humanity’s section of design space. On the contrary, he is arguing that we need to look for a new type of crane. Trying to sort out human evolution without memes would be like trying to explain lizards without accounting for mitochondria, according to Dennett. Memetics is a whole new avenue upon which random variation and natural selection can work their evolutionary wonders.
Memetics in the Origin?
No, but Dennett had one last comparison to hammer memes home before wrapping up his lecture. I’ve never read On the Origin of Species, so I’m going to have to relay Darwin’s big approach to natural selection third-hand. (I really should read it, and everyone reading this should, too. My understanding is that it’s extremely well-written and accessible, and is basically a fantastic book-long argument for evolution.) Darwin outlined three stages of selection within populations, the first two artificial and the third natural.
The first type of selection is intentional artificial selection. This is what farmers and dog breeders do. You look at a population, pick out which traits you want to select for, and have the individuals with those traits mate. The second type of selection is unintentional artificial selection. The most dangerous example of this is antibiotic-resistant bacteria; no one planned for MRSA to show up, but it sure did thanks to our willy-nilly antibiotic usage. The neatest example of this is probably the samurai crabs (heikigani) popularized by Carl Sagan in Cosmos; check out the Wikipedia page for the story. And, finally, Darwin marched onward to explain natural selection.
This was a great way to approach his argument, and I won’t dwell on it because it goes without saying that the Origin is good stuff. One thing I’ll add is that we now have a zeroth level of selection (with the above list being the first, second, and third): genetic engineering. Rather than wait around for random mutations to lead to desirable traits, we can directly insert genes that ought to provide traits we’re ultimately interested in. The power this offers us probably cannot be understated, but that’s another story for another time.
According to Dennett, memes are subjected to the same four types of selection. We intentionally teach our children math and art (type one), but we do so with an accent and thus, for no conscious reason, no one from Boston pronounces their r’s (type two). Conversely, sometimes an individual will have a crazy idea that will spread and mutate from person to person with no artificial selection involved (type three). Abduction stories are a good example of this: nowadays aliens beam you into space, before that it was fairies taking you to a magical world (see Entities by Joe Nickell), and before that it was demons possessing you (see Summis Desiderantes Affectibus Papal Bull*, Innocent VIII, 1484). Lastly, we have advertisers, our society’s memetic engineers (type zero). Just Do ItTM.
*Seriously, a papal bull about succubi and incubi and magic spells during the freaking Renaissance. But, hey, I probably shouldn’t cast stones … a former US President and Nobel laureate (Jimmy Carter) swears he saw a UFO. In fairness, and despite ufologists’ claims, he believes it was a top-secret military aircraft and not an alien craft. But still …
Though it probably doesn’t sound like it, I remain skeptical about memes. I’m definitely fascinated by the idea, but I’d like to look into the claims a bit more and check out some formal counterarguments. In the meantime, I think Dennett has made a compelling case for considering memetics as a hypothesis to explain the homo block of design space. If nothing else, memetics is a much more satisfying hypothesis than the mind creationists’ god-did-it skyhook.
I Even Like Latin, But Come On …
As you can probably tell from the hundreds upon hundreds of words and the rare double-entry, I really enjoyed Professor Dennett’s lecture. I’m still thinking about pretty regularly, and I’m admittedly enchanted by the idea of memes. Nevertheless, the skeptical activist in me is rather worried about his "tactics" (for lack of a better word), especially because he’s supposed to be the nice one of the big four New Atheists (the meanies being Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens).
I covered my concern over and reconciliation of his choice to not present hard evidence for evolution last time, so I won’t bring that up again. What I want to cover now during my conclusion is his conclusion. He ended with a little story of how someone once called him out on a Darwin fish pin he had on. This person claimed that the Jesus fish is the first known acronym, because, in ancient Greek, the first letters in the phrase "Jesus Christ God’s Son, Savior" spells the word for FISH. (I could verify that this is the likely origin of the symbol, but not that it’s the very first known acronym.) He then chided Dennett, because surely DARWIN wasn’t an acronym for anything.
Dennett thought for awhile, and came up with a phrase in Latin that he thought was appropriate. (Props go to my mad google skills and a dude who attended his lecture at another university and took copious notes.) Note that ancient Latin didn’t have a w, so he used two u’s:
Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas
Destroy the author of things in order to understand the infinite universe
This a nice point to end on, because it’s something of a microcosm of Dennett’s entire lecture. It is very clever, and people on his “side” will definitely enjoy it. But, it will probably alienate people on the other “side” and, more importantly, it might drive away people on the fence.
If I was commenting on someone else’s blog or posting in a forum, right about now someone would probably be calling me a concern troll. However, I think some concern is warranted in this instance. I grabbed the UW student newspapers the day after the lecture, hoping for some reflection and perhaps a fresh take on the lecture. I got neither. The articles hardly offered any insight on the lectures whatsoever, instead focusing on Dennett’s atheism and his “radical perspective” and quote-mining his statements about life being “meaningless” and “purposeless.” This certainly could be an instance of the journalists either drumming up unwarranted controversy or having the gist of their stories prepared before the event, but I doubt it. I suspect that those stories wouldn’t have been written so negatively if Dennett doesn’t end his lecture by suggesting we destroy peoples’ god.
Looking back, I feel even better about Dennett all but ignoring his opponents (as he implicitly did by not opening with the evidence for evolution or for creationism’s vapidity). In a lecture like this, ignoring them is, interestingly, both the worst insult he could have dealt out and a strategically shrewd move. Completely ignoring them would be insulting because he would basically be saying that they aren’t worth his time (which they aren’t). On the other hand, ignoring them is advantageous because he would be giving them precisely zero ammunition.
Unfortunately, rather than continue to give his cultural competitors the cold shoulder, Dennett decided to end with his little Latin line about destroying god. Don’t get me wrong; I liked that just as much as I liked the lecture as a whole. It was a great comeback to the smartass who called him on his pin, and it’s pretty damn clever in its own right. Hell, I might even try to remember it, in case I ever get called out for the Darwin fish on my car and backpack. Nevertheless, I don’t know that it was worth it. I can’t help but suspect that that one slide turned many attendees’ opinion on the lecture from “philosopher gives thoughtful insight on evolution” to “atheist wants to kill god.” It’s unfair and unfortunate, but that’s public perception for you.
