Some Further Thoughts

Dr. Tom Arcaro, Professor of Sociology, and Cameron Brown, Student, Elon University, Elon, NC 27244

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Humanist Sociology November 5-7, 1999 in Memphis, TN.

"Nequiquam est refragatere"

-the Borg

Prologue

First, allow us a contextualizing comment. This essay is "Part III" of an ongoing effort to publicly invite my humanist colleagues to think about a fairly new area of research within the social sciences. The end goal (still very far off) is to produce a book length manuscript outlining the contributions that I believe a Universal Darwinism can make to modern humanistic thought. Part I of this work entitled "Some further thoughts on being human: epistemological considerations underlying a fourth main theoretical perspective in sociology or How I became a neo-Darwinian sociobiologist who still really likes Marx but feels the need to move on to other paradigms" was delivered last year in Austin at the annual AHS meetings. The paper received varied response. Part II entitled "A case for a humanistic Universal Darwinism: The humanistic implications of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and memetics and the co-evolution of genes and memes" was delivered at the ASA meetings this last August. In Part III, the present work, we hope to (1) clarify some of the basic points included in the first two "chapters" and (2) extend some of the discussion concerning how this area of study may hold critical relevance for humanistic sociology.

Reflexive statement [Arcaro]

In a paper I wrote a few years ago I categorized my humanistic colleagues into two (non-mutually exclusive, perhaps) types, namely those (Type I) who where placard carrying activists and progressives who not only "talked the talk" of humanism but also "walked the walk" in many or most aspects of their lives. The second type (Type II), far, far fewer in number, is the humanist who genuinely cares about the pain and suffering that exists in the world today and heartily applauds the actions of those who struggle to make this a more just planet, but at the same time does not feel called to immediate action. This second type of humanist, for better or for worse, remains bogged down by fundamental questions and spends most of her time attempting to understand mostly theoretical issues. I am this second type, and have spent the bulk of my career as a humanist sociologist pondering one basic question, namely, what does being human mean?

My search has lead in many directions, most outside of what would be the traditional boundaries of mainstream sociology. Most recently (the last two to three years, at least) my reading had been in the area of evolutionary psychology and meme theory (hence the two papers cited above; see the attached list of references for reading suggestions). I have talked with several classes about this idea and the latest group to be 'infected' was my sociological theory class last spring. Since then Cameron Brown (then a student in that class), my co-presenter, has become quite focused on this topic, and I have enjoyed having him to share some thoughts about memes and meme theory.

I, as always, am honored to be able to share my ideas with my humanistic colleagues and hope that those who are of the first type described above will see this as more than an academic indulgence but rather as an exiting invitation to re-think some very basic questions.

Reflexive statement [Brown]

What is it about evolutionary theories, more particularly those involving the co-evolution of memes and genes, that has lulled me out of a passionate hatred for the hard sciences that has lasted for at least 15 years (a short period of time I know, but relatively long in comparison with my age, 21). I can’t rightly say, to be honest with you, there’s just something about this way of thinking that just makes some kind of inner sense for me. Maybe it stems from what can only be described as a lifelong desire to know what we humans are, how we got here, and why we’re so miraculously different from all of the other animals on this planet without the need for a large, bearded magician in the sky.

Well, I’ve still got a lot of questions, but evolution of replicators by way of natural selection has provided more answers for me in a shorter period of time than any other way of thinking ever has. And the theory of memes, in particular, is a revolutionary way of understanding the human condition that requires no hocus pocus or ghosts in the machine to come to a reasonable and logical understanding of what we really are and how we came to be. In writing this, I had a chance remembering of a question that I used to ask myself frequently as a child, how come humans were the ones that seemed to rise above the rest and "take over" the world. How come, say, tigers, or birds didn’t step up to the level that we did? Well, for the first time in my short life I feel like I’ve come to some sort of an answer, none of the animals rose to our stature because the memes got to us, not them.

Some questions and our answers regarding Universal Darwinism and memes

Why look outside of sociology and the social sciences for an answer to the question "what does being human mean?"

As I pointed about in Part I, Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued long ago that paradigmatic change frequently comes from outside a discipline. I believe that this may be true in sociology. At least to the Intro to Sociology student sociology appears to have three main theoretical perspectives, namely structural-functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interactionism. Although there are stark contrasts between these perspectives and each may be argued to be a paradigm in it's own right, I argue that all three are explicitly anthropocentric in their orientations and further progress using any of the three is though cleary not sterile, certainly limited. Ever since Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) the push to approach the study of humans from an entirely non-anthropocentric perspective has been present, and the 'hard' sciences of biology, anatomy and neurophysiology (among others) have been increasingly active in producing research into the nature of the brain and mind. In just one randomly selected example of this trend Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness; 1999) talks about the sense of self being a function of the brain's involvement in the ongoing process of regulating life sustaining processes.

I would urge you to consider looking at some of the works listed in the references we cite and suggest that you may be surprised at how far into the social science realm the fields of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology (etc.) have come. Even if you are resistant to the ideas presented in this work and from this perspective it is inexorable that more an more encroachment will come from the "hard" sciences into the sociological territory and we will be asked to have perspectives about and reactions to the insights and arguments offered. I believe that the social sciences in general and sociology in particular are lagging behind the hard sciences in terms of what has been called the "Third Culture."

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." (p. 17 Brockman)

Writers such as Gould, Dennet, Damasio, Pert and Dawkins are but a few who have made explicit effort to write for a popular culture audience. Social science writers have much to offer but have not, in general, been successful in reaching the breadth of audience that these writers have.

What is a general outline of Universal Darwinism?

In order to have any understanding of meme theory one must have an understanding of the concept of Universal Darwinism. The idea presented by Universal Darwinism is that the evolution of replicators by way of natural selection is an algorithm, a mindless process that once put into motion will produce certain outcomes due to nothing else than the internal logic of that process. In viewing evolution in this light we see that the process is substrate neutral, or as Blackmore says, "all you need is the right starting conditions and evolution just has to happen." (pg. 11)

Dennett (1991 pg. 200) puts it into greater detail by explaining just what conditions are necessary in order for the evolutionary algorithm to begin:

"The outlines of the theory of evolution by natural selection are clear: evolution occurs whenever the following conditions exist:

1. variation: a continuing abundance of different elements
2. heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity to create copies or replicas of themselves
3. differential "fitness": the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on interactions between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists"

In other words, the theory of evolution is not limited to the natural selection of replicating genes in the biosphere. Evolution by way of natural selection will occur in any environment, physical or cultural, in which the above criteria are met. Genes are the most popularized replicators, by far, but they are not the only ones. Viruses, as well, work in this manner, both biological viruses and computer viruses are self replicating entities that adapt to their environment in order to duplicate regardless of the harm or good which it may bring to its host. Memes work according to this algorithm as well, and with the same unequivocal carelessness as to the results they inflict on their hosts.

This is not meant to imply that all we have to do is figure out the algorithm in order to control evolution, for although it may be a ‘mindless process’ it is also an inconceivably complex one, and also one that runs on such a grand timeline that no human will ever be able to sit and watch it work.

Universal Darwinism for those who are generally informed about evolution is not a terribly hard concept to grasp. If you have replicators of various different sorts, and the qualities of these different replicators make them more or less likely to be able to replicate themselves in their given environment, the process of evolution by natural selection will occur. The assertion by Blackmore and others is that human being is the product of the co-evolution of two replicators, namely genes and memes. Given an understanding of this epistemological assumption, we can move on.

What is Campbell’s rule and how does it effect the gene/meme analogy?

Blackmore underlines the crucial point (made by most scholars who work in meme theory) that although genes and memes are both replicators the tendency to extend the analogy can easily go too far very quickly. In her words

"… evolutionary theory describes how design is created by the competition between replicators. Genes are one example of a replicator and memes another. The general theory of evolution must apply to both of them, but the specific details of how each replicator works may be quite different."

"[Campbell] argued that organic evolution, creative thought and cultural evolution resemble each other and they do so because all are evolving systems where there is blind variation among the replicated units and selective retention of some variants at the expense of others. Most importantly, he explained that the analogy with cultural accumulation is not from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model of evolutionary change for which organic evolution is but one instance. Durham calls this principle ‘Campbell’s Rule’." (p. 17 The Meme Machine)

What Campbell pointed out is that because genes and memes are both replicators there is going to obviously be an analogous relationship between them, their ends are the same, self-replication. What is different is the environment in which these two different replicators find themselves trying to reproduce themselves, so the means and methods by which genes replicate themselves through the biosphere are going to differ from the means and methods with which memes replicate themselves through the infosphere. They will not differ in the principles of evolution by natural selection (variation, heredity, and differential fitness) but in the details concerning the rate at which they may move through a population and the directionality of inheritance (strictly vertical down through a family line in the case of genes, and in all possible directions in the epidemiological spread of memes).

Blackmore stresses that

"We must remember Campbell’s Rule when we compare memes and genes. Genes are instructions for making proteins, stored in the cells of the body and passed on in reproduction. Their competition drives the evolution of the biological world. Memes are instructions for carrying out behavior, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation. Their competition drives the evolution of the mind." (pg. 17 The Meme Machine)

The task for the modern day meme theorist is to uncover the processes by which memes replicate, how they come together to form memeplexes, and so on.

One analogy -one of several exceptions to Campbell's rule- that may be helpful is that between a "geneplex" and a "memeplex." Consider that the miraculously complex array of form and function which is the human body is the end point of a very long evolutionary process, and that your body's phenotype and function is produced by a complex interplay of (plus or minus a few thousand) 100,000 genes. Is it such a stretch of imagination to appreciate the possibility that Christianity, for example could be a memplex, that is the complex interplay of perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of memes?

How does Universal Darwinism relate to the very charged question of human freedom?

No small question, this. The assumption of human agency is central to most humanist's rasion d' etre, (certainly the Type I's discussed above) and we understand the magnitude of this issue.

Richard Dawkin's, the creator of the meme meme argued at the end of his book The Selfish Gene that,

"We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. … We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." (p. 215)

This statement implies not only human freedom but as well a seemingly anthropocentric assertion that we alone can "rebel" against our genes because we have culture. In his later writings (including a Forward to Blackmore's book) Dawkins clearly demonstrates an understanding of (just short of taking an explicit position on) the deep socio-philosophical issues raised by a Universal Darwinism that includes a meme replicator. That is, his later writings appear to backpedal somewhat in terms of defending human agency.

Here is what Dennet has to say about the impact of memes:

"I don't know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of a dungheap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora. It does seem to rob the mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who's in charge, according to this vision -- we or our memes" (p. 346 Darwin's Dangerous Idea)

Although he says that he resists the idea, he makes no hard argument against it. Blackmore, on the other hand is unequivocal:

"Memetics thus brings us to a new version of how we might live our lives. We carry on our lives as most people do, under the illusion that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is in charge, who is responsible for my actions and who makes me me. Or we can live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that this is all there is. Thus we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free - not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel." (page 246 The Meme Machine) 

Blackmore not only argues against human freedom but challenges the very notion of the self, a trend in much of the 'hard' science literature on the brain and mind (see Damasio 1999 for example). Price and Shaw (1999) take the conversation in a slightly different but important direction and argue for a kind of free will and human agency.

"We do not however see a need for a dualist homunculus to evoke a mind capable of inquiring into its own existence and own choices. There is a fully self contained explanation. Memetic patterns which permit an inquiry into other memetic patterns residing in the same brain, grant themselves a certain trick in replication space. Some memes have always granted the minds that carried them some power of inquiry into underlying assumptions. Sometimes they got their host excommunicated / burnt at the stake / made redundant or otherwise disposed of but they nonetheless replicated and also, on balance, enabled the progress of cultural evolution. The memes of inquiry live on because they also enable their hosts (at all levels of organisation) to achieve greater results and are an antidote to other, more parasitic, memes." (Price, If and Shaw, R. (1999). "Memetics and the Edge of Chaos")

The issue of human agency and free will in the context of a Universal Darwinism is clearly of paramount importance and is being much debated in various scholarly arenas. There is much to consider, not the least of which is the nature of the "host" which carries memes and the ability of this host to act upon these memes with free will. This replicator, the meme, may indeed be very different from other replicators and we are only in the very early stages of discovery. The meme "Mendel" has yet to emerge to be sure, and certainly not the meme Darwin.

Is it possible to incorporate meme theory into an effective humanistic memetic paradigm?

Not a question to be taken lightly. Could we, for instance, put together a viable Feminist/Meme theory, or a Marxist/Meme Theory? Or are we getting ourselves entangled in a problematic effort of reconciling meme theory with already established paradigms?

First and foremost we must confess that we are no experts in this field, but our confession is almost worthless due to the fact that nobody seems to be an expert in this field as of yet, although there have been several thinkers who have tackled the idea and presented their own thoughts on the subject in an intelligent and well thought out manner. But, sadly, there is no authority on memes. Secondly, we are not devout or dogmatic in our belief in memes, just as we are not devout in any other beliefs either. And we are not trying to convert anyone, we don’t expect you to become true believers. This is being offered as an invitation to understand memetic theory, to throw it in your toy box to be played with later, just another different colored window in your paradigmatic viewfinder.

But back to our initial question. Should we be looking for ways to incorporate meme theory into humanistic sociology? It sounds like the next logical step right? Understand meme theory and then incorporate it into a progressive humanistic program.

But this way of thinking does not take into account, we feel, the scope and intensity of the re-evaluation of what it means to be a human being that comes along with an understanding of meme theory. The idea of the meme is a ‘big picture’ theory. It attacks the fundamental questions that underlie all philosophical, and indeed scientific thought, what are we, how did we get here, and why are things the way they are?

In any, say, feminist or Marxist theory what you have is a dialectical reaction to an already existing culture. There can be no Marxist critique without a capitalist society as your starting point, just as feminist critique can spring forward only in regard to a pre-existing male dominated culture. What these schools of thought are, then, are steps in the dialectical, symbiogenetic, algorithm of memetic evolution. Meme theory, as we understand it, sees every individual culture as a result of this ‘mindless process’, memetics is an attempt at explaining culture with a capital ‘C’. It explains, using the Universal Darwinian principle of the natural selection of replicators, how humans developed the capacity to exhibit those traits, culture, that have come to define the essence of being human.

In any case it cannot hurt to understand feminism and Marxism as the giant, indeed revolutionary, memeplexes which they are. But if the idea is to look at these paradigms in an effort of ‘memetic engineering’ so that we may make them more likely to replicate we are not grasping meme theory in its most enlightening sense. Memes are not just some side effect of being human, some accidental property to be tinkered with by social scientists seeking their utopia. Indeed, they are the essence of what it is to be human, it is memetic evolution that has created the diversity of human being and the malleability of the human condition, and an understanding of this leads to nothing more and nothing less than a greater understanding of what it means to be human. In Dennet's words, and very much to the point,

"We should note that the memes for normative concepts -- for ought and good and truth and beauty -- are among the most entrenched denizens of our minds. Among the memes that constitute us, they play a central role. Our existence as us, of what we as thinkers are --not as what we are as organisms-- is not independent of these memes." (p. 366; emphasis in the original)

As humanist sociologists, where do we go from here in terms of Universal Darwinism and meme theory?

Where not to go is to ignore this movement from outside the social sciences to define what being human means. On the micro level (as discussed above) there is much to learn about the mind and the self. On the macro level memetics addresses the very central question of how cultures change (evolve?) over time. Indeed, much of the discussion in the fairly new online Journal of Memetics is on the topic of cultural evolution (see for example "The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity" by Liane Gabora 1997). There is much serious research being done in an astounding wide array of hard science sub-specialties which is right on the doorstep of confronting some very major sociological and philosophical issues. This movement demands an understanding, especially since the hard science folk such as Damasio, Gould and others seem to be very willing and able to reach into the popular culture arena and explain their positions. Our students will be coming to our intro to sociology classes increasingly with some of these perspectives and will doubt the credibility of a discipline which refuses to have equally compelling explanations.

We believe that meme theory specifically and Universal Darwinism more generally would be useful additional perspectives to present to students interested in understanding and hence changing for the better the world in which they live. This paradigm of understanding offers us an additional framework for discovering what it means to be human, and that is perhaps the most basic humanistic question of them all, one which deserves exploration from as many directions as we can imagine.