[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Memes & Traits
[The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set]
[Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
[Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]
---------------------------------------------------------
· · · · · · A E C F O R U M - "M E M E S I S" · · · · ·
· · · · · · · (http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/) · · · · · ·
---------------------------------------------------------
Here's something from a paper which I will be publishing in the Journal
of Social and Evolutionary Systems (URL:
http://www.cinti.com/connect-ed/jses). It addresses the question of the
relationship between the cultural genotype (memes) and the cultural
phenotype.
Enjoy.
*******
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1989 [1976]) argues that, in
effect, an organism is best thought of as a gene's way of making another
gene, to paraphrase Norbert Wiener's remark that a chicken is just an
egg's way of making another egg. I don't know enough biology to have a
worthwhile opinion on whether or not that is a reasonable view to take
of biological evolution. Nor do I understand cultural evolution well
enough to pass judgment on whether or not culture evolves in that way.
Yet, as a way of beginning to think about cultural evolution, such a
perspective is not bad. However much we talk about cultures, we don't
really know what they are. The "genes" of culture seem a bit more
tractable. I intend to take them on in the next section (3.1). After
that we can move on to a consideration of cultural fitness (3.2) and
then look at the "organisms" of culture, those things we tend to call
"cultures" (3.3).
3.1 Memes and Traits
To begin with we need a concept in the human sciences which is to
culture and its evolution as the gene is to the biological world and its
evolution. What is it that circulates through human society and history
as the genes have circulated in biological evolution?
I don't have a well-tried answer to this question, nor do I know of
anyone who does. As a practical matter, Darwinian thought managed quite
well for several decades without a usable model of genetic mechanisms.
Thought in the human sciences has been, if anything, even more prolific
in the absence of usable models. Thus I am willing to offer a
speculation with some assurance that, whatever its vagueness and
imprecision, it will not on that account be departing from established
canons of conceptual development in the human sciences.
Following conversations with David Hays, I suggest that we regard the
whole of physical culture as the genes: the pots and knives, the looms
and cured hides, the utterances and written words, the ploughshares and
transistors, the songs and painted images, the tents and stone
fortifications, the dances and sculpted figures, all of it. For these
are the things which people exchange with one another, through which
they interact with one another. They can be counted and classified and
variously studied.
What then of the ideas, desires, emotions, and attitudes behind these
things? After all, as any college sophomore can point out, words on a
page are just splotches unless apprehended by an appropriately prepared
mind, one that knows the language. Pots and knives are not so ineffable
as runes and ideograms, but they aren't of much use to people who don't
know how to use them, that is, to people whose minds lack the
appropriate neural "programs". Surely, one might propose, these mental
objects and processes are the stuff of culture.
What I in fact propose is that we think of these mental objects and
processes as being analogous to the biologist's phenotype just as the
physical objects and processes are analogous to the genotype. Properly
understood, these mental objects and processes are embodied in brain
states (cf. Benzon and Hays 1988). Thus we have the whole of physical
culture interacting with the inner cultural environment to produce the
various mental objects and activities which are the substance of
culture.
Richard Dawkins has proposed the term "meme" for the units of the
cultural genotype, but proposes no special term for the cultural
phenotype, though he recognizes the necessity of distinguishing the two
(Dawkins 1982, pp. 109 ff., see also Dawkins 1989, pp. 189 ff.).
Following more or less standard anthropological usage, I offer
"psychological trait", or just "trait", as a term designating
phenotypical units or features. Note, however, that Dawkins places memes
in the brain and traits in the external world, which is just the
opposite of what I am doing. He appears not to have considered the
scheme I propose and so offers no arguments in favor of his scheme. This
whole arena is so speculative that rigorous argument is elusive.
However, I expect that my reasons for placing memes in the public world
and traits in the inner will emerge in the following section of this
essay. 1
This way of thinking leads to imagery which is quite different from
biological imagery. While biologists talk of a gene pool, the genes
never actually intermingle in a physical pool. The genes are strands of
DNA in the interior of cells. A species' gene pool exists as a logical
fact, not a physical pool filled with genetic slime. It is the
phenotypes of species which intermingle with one another in the physical
"pool" of the environment. In culture, it is the phenotypic traits which
are interior while the genetic memes are out there in the physical
"pool" of the environment. When cultures meet, their memes intermingle
freely.
The fact that a meme moves from one culture to another does not mean
that the corresponding psychological trait moves. Basic visual forms,
such as crosses and triangles, have symbolic significance in many
cultures, but that significance is not everywhere the same. The computer
chip which is an information processing device in the culture of the
electronics engineer is but an intricately crafted bit of "stuff" in the
jeweler's culture. Musical motifs and ritual forms move easily between
cultures, but the psychological traits may not move so readily. Thus
middle-class Japanese weddings are often long elaborate affairs often
including a traditional Christian ceremony as one of its components,
though the Japanese couple is most-likely not Christian (Tanikawa 1995).
Moving in the other cultural direction, the American jazz musician
Roland Kirk (1965) has recorded a tune he calls "Ruined Castles" and on
which he takes composer credits. The same tune, under the name "Japanese
Folk Song," has been recorded by Thelonius Monk (nd) with no
attribution. As far as I can tell, the tune is Japanese, is called
"Ancient Castle" (close to Kirk's title), and was composed by Rentaro
Taki (1879-1901).2 If we didn't distinguish between meme and trait we
would have to assume that non-Christian Japanese couples and Western
Christian couples understand the "picture-book" wedding in the same way,
on the one hand, and that Monk, Kirk, and Taki are evoking the same
feelings when they perform "Ancient Castle Japanese Folk Song Ruined
Castles."
One can speculate that the "misinterpretation" of memes as they move
from culture to culture may be a source of cultural innovation. Whether
or not that is so, it is certain that such movement is very common. This
is a fact of deep significance and gives cultural evolution a very
different texture from biological evolution (see section 5 below).
3.2 Survival of the Culturally Fit
But what is this mysterious "cultural environment"? That is, what is it
that these mental entities are "interacting with" which determines
whether they rise or fall? For example, epistemologists and intellectual
historians ask why one idea succeeds while another fails. One idea may
be accepted because it agrees with the evidence better than its
competitors while another idea is adopted because it is more pleasing.
"Agreement with evidence" is one type of fitness while "elegance" is
another. Ideas which are fit in either, or even both, of these ways are
better equipped to survive in the cultural environment than ideas
lacking either of these qualities.
As a further example, consider the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on
flow (1990, 1993). He defines flow in relationship between task
difficulty and skill level (see Figure 1 below). If a task exceeds
one's abilities by a large degree, one will be anxious. If one's
abilities exceed task demands by a large degree, one will be bored.
However, when task demands and abilities are well-matched, the task is
interesting, and one performs it in a state of pleasant and absorbed
flow.
?
Figure 1: Flow
Given this relationship between demand and ability, it is obvious that,
as we set about adding a skill to our repertoire, performing the
ever-more familiar task will cease to engender flow and instead engender
boredom. To regain that pleasing sense of flow we must set ourselves a
more difficult task, one which challenges our ever-enlarging skill set.
Given then, that we like complexity, that we thrive on it,
Csikszentmihalyi (1990, pp. 225-240, 1993) argues that culture evolves
as a consequence for our collective quest for greater complexity. That
is to say, those traits which enhance the quest for complex experience
will survive, while those which do not will wither. The memes which most
effectively embody those traits will be passed on, while others will be
forgotten. We continue to perform Beethoven's scores and the
Shakespeare's texts while many scores and texts, more popular at the
time than Beethoven and Shakespeare, are no longer performed.
The concept of flow is fairly general, one readily operative in various
domains. That is a desirable property for something which is intrinsic
to the inner workings of cultural "space." For cultural space engenders
new domains as culture evolves. Family and state become differentiated,
cognition becomes differentiated from expression, theories about the
physical world become differentiated from theories about the mental
world, the world of the mechanical engineer becomes differentiated from
that of the agricultural biologist, and so forth. With all this cultural
differentiation, the brain remains much the same. I imagine that the
basic dynamics of flow reflect the physiological properties of the
central nervous system. The long-term effect of generations of
flow-seeking humans is the creation of a wide range of cultural memes
whose creation, use, and/or contemplation have engendered flow in those
generations.
To get just a little more specific about the nature of this inner
cultural "space" I propose that it is a very abstract space whose
dimensions and structure are given by what William Powers (1973, pp.
177-204) has called the intrinsic reference levels of the brain. The
most concrete of these reference levels concern physiological variables
on which the organism's survival depends, things like the presence of
various kinds of chemicals indicating whether or not the organism is
getting enough to eat, drink, breath, and reproduce. If the detected
values of these quantities stray away from genetically specified levels,
then the organism reorganizes its neural programming until the values
return to specified limits. The effect of such reorganization is that
the organism behaves in new ways. An effective reorganization will bring
the organism closer to an environmental source of satisfaction. An
ineffective reorganization will simply waste time.
Powers also admits the possibility of reference levels concerned, not
with the physical and reproductive state of the organism, but with the
more abstract matter of the intrinsic properties of the neural
processing system (e.g. the brain) itself (Powers 1973, pp. 195-97): are
its procedures internally consistent, elegant, beautiful? A reference
level regulating the body's water content can be kept in-bounds by any
set of programs that gets the organism to drink enough to balance water
use and loss. A reference level for behavioral or perceptual elegance
will be kept in-bounds by reorganizing current behavioral or perceptual
schemata. That is, it will be kept in-bounds by learning. Now, as David
Hays has pointed out to me in personal conversation, the conditions
which are most favorable to flow are exactly those conditions which are
most favorable to learning. Flow would thus seem to be the general
experiential mode for the various reference levels concerned with
reorganizing our neural machinery.3 Thus flow would seem to be a general
property of the system which regulates learning regardless of just what
is learned.
Thus flow itself has nothing to do with whether or not one's skills
contribute directly to physical survival. The skills of the hunt make
such a contribution, while the skills of song do not. In either case,
flow is a matter of challenge and mastery, not of biological utility. I
do not, of course, intend to deny the value of skills which enhance
physical survival. Obviously, without physical survival, there can be no
society and no culture. The point, however, is that a society's physical
survival is decided in a biological arena while its cultural survival is
decided in a more abstract arena. Given physical survival, people do
things which satisfy the higher reference levels, whatever they are.
?
Figure 2: Society, Biology and Culture
There are a great many skills which function in both arenas. For
example, one needs a hut to survive cold winters; that hut thus serves
to keep physical reference levels for temperature and security in
bounds. That the hut should have a square door facing North does little
if anything to increase its capacity to provide protection from the
cold, the rain, the snow (and, predators too). But such a door may well
bring the hut's structure into correspondence with a host of other
practices; and that overall correspondence may thus satisfy an intrinsic
need for beauty. Human cultures are replete with such correspondences.
In fact, Claude Levi-Strauss (1966) has, in effect, argued that much of
the work of culture is to inscribe the perceptual and motoric skills of
physical survival in the mental realm of culture. As an example, Edmund
Leach (1972) has argued that our sense of what food is edible is not
simply a matter of nutrition; it is also a matter of cultural fitness.
Dog meat is perfectly edible, but not in Western cultures. That
inediblity has to do with the position dogs occupy is the cultural
system, not with their biochemical composition.
In this view, a healthy society is one where the biological and cultural
needs are both being met (see Figure 2). In order more fully to
appreciate the force of cultural need, consider the phenomena of
"voodoo" and "hex" death and of crisis cults. In voodoo death (Cannon
1972 [1942]) a person violates a taboo, such as talking on sacred
ground, eating a forbidden fruit, and, shortly after discovering that a
taboo has been violated, the person is dead. The closely related
phenomenon of "hex" death (Seligman 1975, p. 1977) occurs when a person
learns that they have been cursed by someone with the appropriate
technical knowledge and supernatural authority. As in the case of voodoo
death, hex death kills within hours or days. While such deaths exhibit a
fairly standard set of physical symptoms, they cannot be attributed to
external agents such as poisons or bacteria nor to externally induced
physical trauma. The death is psychosomatic.
A person who violates a taboo has broken the deepest rules of their
culture and thereby is thrust outside the protective web of memes and
traits which give meaning and structure to the world. The person who is
cursed believes that someone else has severed the link between their
soul and the cultural forms and practices in which that soul lives its
life. Such people are in a situation where, in effect, they see no hope
of ever again satisfying their higher reference levels. They are cut off
from their culture. That kills them as surely as being cut off from food
or water.
Crisis cults are a bit different. Crisis cults arise, perhaps most
frequently in preliterate peoples, when the culture itself is all but
destroyed (Labarre 1972). The example that comes most quickly to mind is
the Ghost Dance cults of the Native Americans in the late nineteenth
century. By that time it was crushingly obvious that the white people
were not going away and could not be militarily defeated. That left
Native Americans two alternatives: 1) live the life of farmers on
reservations, which amounts to cultural destruction for many, or 2) be
physically destroyed, and not even in the brave manner befitting
warriors (which bravery in battle, in any event, was not so available to
women, children, and old men). Some chose a third way. They adopted a
set of beliefs according to which, if they danced the right dances, sang
the right songs, and wore shirts decorated with the appropriate symbols,
they would be safe from disease and from white soldier's bullets, the
earth would open up and swallow all the white people, and both the
buffalo and their friends and loved ones would be restored to life.
Things did not, of course, work out that way.4
For many, such beliefs seemed to be the only way to imagine a way of
living into the next year or three without abandoning their culture.
>From a biological point of view such beliefs are pointless and
irrational. They do nothing to secure the food, water, and shelter
necessary for survival. Worse than that, they lead people to act in ways
which hasten their physical destruction. However, if one grants that
culture makes its own deep claims on human life, and that those claims
are independent of biology's claims, then one can understand and
sympathize with those facing the certain destruction of their way of
life.
Culture is a domain unto itself, separate from biology, but
interdependent with it. Culture has allowed human beings to create
artifacts and processes allowing them to live beyond the warm tropics,
to cover the earth, and even to make tentative steps beyond the earth.
Less tangibly, culture can give life through the simple fact of giving
hope for a future, a point Leonard Sagan (1987, p. 184) makes in the
following passage:
The history of rapid health gains in the United States is not unique;
the rate at which death rates have fallen is even more rapid in more
recently modernizing countries. The usual explanations for this dramatic
improvement‹better medical care, nutrition, or clean water‹provide only
partial answers. More important in explaining the decline in death
worldwide is the rise of hope ... [through] the introduction of the
transistor radio and television, bringing into the huts and shanties of
the world the message that progress is possible, that each individual is
unique and of value, and that science and technology can provide the
opportunity for fulfillment of these hopes.
To the extent that hope is engendered within a specific cultural
framework, that hope weakens when that framework begins to deteriorate.
Those memes and traits which engender hope will be more likely to
survive in the long run than those which do not.
**********************************************
William L. Benzon 518.272.4733
161 2nd Street bbenzon@global2000.net
Troy, NY 12180
USA
**********************************************
What color would you be if you didn't know
what you was? That's what color I am.
**********************************************
----------------------------------------------------------
· · · · to subscribe to the Forum just mail to · · · · ·
· · memesis-request@aec.at (message text 'subscribe') · ·
· · · · · · · send messages to memesis@aec.at · · · · · ·
----------------------------------------------------------
