Memes, and Related Ideas about the Evolution of Culture

12 Aug 2024 14:26

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.
---Attrib. Stanislaw Lem

Just what is a meme? Dawkins calls it an imitable behavior, but most people who use the notion are more concerned with ideology than how to lay the table, and even Dawkins cites religion as a bundle of memes --- "viruses of the mind," is his phrase. Which brings me to: Metaphorical uses, as opposed genuine research. Spread of the meme-meme (just the other year I saw in the cultural studies section of the local bookstore a tract called Media Viruses whose palpitating dust-jacket makes it appear as though the secret workings of the world are to be laid bare by the author using the magic tool of "viruses of the mind"; and whose index and bibliography don't even mention Dawkins.) And thought-cliches. And pseudo-events. And propaganda. Is the reputation of The Selfish Gene as a piece of crude Social Darwinism a meme?

How far back does the contagion analogy for ideas go? (At least to Pliny.)

Can one have a "memetic illness," the same way some people have genetic illnesses? What would it look like? Organized religion? A millenarian movement? Or...

J. M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology [Full text free online]
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 11
Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change [See under sociology.]
Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads throug Society [Review: The Case for the Meme's Eye View]
Olivier Morin, How Traditions Live and Die
W. G. Runciman, The Social Animal [Primer on sociology, from an evolutionary/memetic point of view. Summary and revision of the highlights of his Treatise on Social Theory.]
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach [Review: How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame. Though Sperber would disclaim being a memeticists, this is one of the two best books on memetics. Sperber also ties all this in neatly to evolutionary psychology and to rhetoric.]
Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1, The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts [Genuinely evolutionist --- as in, variation-plus-selection --- picture of how science works and scientific method develops; ditto for other intellectual disciplines worthy of the name work. Excellent, and pre-dates Dawkins by five years.]

Raymond Boudon [Studies of the mechanisms which make people receptive to ideas, especially bad ideas, by giving them what seem like good reasons to believe them --- sometimes they even are good reasons.]
- The Analysis of Ideology
- The Art of Self-Persuasion
John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals [JSTOR]
Alan Carling [See under historical materialism]
Nicolas Claidière, Simon Kirby, and Dan Sperber, "Effect of psychological bias separates cultural from biological evolution", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): E3526
Nicolas Claidière and Dan Sperber
- "The role of attraction in cultural evolution", Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (2007): 89--111 [PDF preprint]
- "Imitation explains the propagation, not the stability of animal culture" [The model is basic but sufficient for the purpose. I am not sure I buy their fitting procedure, but since it gives very high values for the fidelity of imitation, which nonetheless lead to rapid destabilization, it really doesn't matter. PDF reprint]
D. J. Daley, D. G. Kendall, "Stochastic Rumours", IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics 1 (1965): 42--55 [The interesting twist here on a standard SIR model is that they assume you stop spreading the rumor on encountering someone who's already heard it, so \( I + I \rightarrow 2R \) and \( I+R \rightarrow 2R \). This, naturally, makes it very hard for the rumor to reach everyone...]
Daniel Dennett
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea
- "The Evolution of Evaluators"
- "Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination"
- "Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings and Misgivings"
Bruce Edmonds, "The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy — why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results", Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 9 (2005)
Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving [IMHO, the best available book about evolutionary game theory, and so about a large chunk of social and cultural evolution]
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
Jonathan Haas, "A brief consideration of cultural evolution: Stages, agents, and tinkering", Complexity 3 (1998): 12--21 = SFI Working Paper 96-05-025
Jason Kaufman, "Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture", Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 335--357 [Only the third of his three sets of theories is relevant here I think; also, those are the only ones which are actually explanations. PDF reprint via Prof. Kaufman.]
Franco Moretti
- "On Literary Evolution," the last essay in Signs Taken for Wonders (2nd ed. only) [Interesting things to say about how literary forms evolve, but some of his ideas about organic evolution are strange, e.g., that natural selection does not act during radiations.]
- "The Slaughterhouse of Literature", Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 207--227
- Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History [My long (6000+ word) take: Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing]
Richard R. Nelson, "Evolutionary Theories of Cultural Change: An Empirical Perspective" ["the standard articulations of a Universal Darwinism put forth by biologists and philosophers tends to be too narrow, in particular too much linked to the details of evolution in biology, to fit with what is known about cultural evolution." PDF preprint.]
W. G. Runciman
- "On the Tendency of Human Societies to Form Varieties," Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 149--165 [The 1986 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. An early version of his general theory. The title, of course, deliberately echoes that of the paper by Darwin and Wallace announcing natural selection.]
- "The 'Triumph' of Capitalism as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection", New Left Review 210 (March-April 1995): 33--47 [Application of the theory to the classic problem of historical sociology (see: Marx, Weber).]
- "Social Evolutionism: A Reply to Michael Rustin," New Left Review 236 (July-August 1999): 145--153
- "Socialising Darwin," Prospect, April 1998 [Summary of The Social Animal; no longer available online to non-subscribers]
- The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection [Mini-review]
- "The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case-Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 3--21 [Nice illustration of one of Runciman's goals, in that it "eschews any attempt at" "law-like cross-cultural generalizations ... in favour of a selectionist analysis explicitly focused on the particular historical environment", while in no way doubting "the existence of universal psychological capacities and dispositions".]
Michael Rustin, "A New Social Evolutionism?," New Left Review 234 (May-June 1999): 106--126 [Exposition and critique of Runciman, from the standpoint of the weird mix of Marx, Nietzsche and Althusser that NLR is into these days; see above for Runciman's reply]
David Wengrow, The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Adam Westoby, "The Ecology of Intentions: How to Make Memes and Influence People: Culturology" [Preprint. Westoby was a political scientist and historian who wrote an excellent book on The Evolution of Communism, but that, despite the title, was before he really became interested in memetics. "The Ecology of Intentions" was the manuscript he was working on at the time of his death. Since it is, in its incomplete form, one of the most sophisticated examinations of what a real science of memes would have to be like, one can only regret Westoby's death all the more strongly.]
Damían H. Zanette and Susanna C. Manrubia, "Vertical Transmission of Culture and the Distribution of Family Names," nlin.AO/0009046

Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society. [Comments]

CRS and Andrew C. Thomas, "Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies", arxiv:1004.4704 [Self-presentation]

Alberto Acerbi, Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age
Alberto Acerbi, Alex Mesoudi, Marco Smolla, Individual-based models of cultural evolution: A step-by-step guide using R
Emanuel Adler, World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution [Via David Auerbach]
Auger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science [Auger's own book got a really annihilating review by Bill Benzon]
Basalla, Evolution of Technology
Alberto Bisin, Thierry Verdier, "The Economics of Cultural Transmission and Socialization" [PDF preprint for money]
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine [Review by Runciman]
Marion Blute, Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution: Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory
Julien Bonhomme, The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor
Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson
- Culture and the Evolutionary Process
- The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse
Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture
Levin Brinkmann, Fabian Baumann, Jean-François Bonnefon, Maxime Derex, Thomas F. Müller, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Agnieszka Czaplicka, Alberto Acerbi, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joseph Henrich, Joel Z. Leibo, Richard McElreath, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Jonathan Stray and Iyad Rahwan, "Machine culture", Nature Human Behavior 7 (2023): 1855--1868
Melissa J. Brown and Marcus W. Feldman, "Sociocultural epistasis and cultural exaptation in footbinding, marriage form, and religious practices in early 20th-century Taiwan", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106 (2009): 22139--22144
Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, "The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976--1999", Perspectives on Science 20 (2012): 75--104
Taylor N. Carlson, Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy
Robert L. Carneiro, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History
Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity
Laureano Castro and Miguel A. Toro, "The evolution of culture: From primate social learning to human culture", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004): 10235--10240
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach
David Chavalarias and Paul Bourgine, "Metamimetic and the Spatial Prisoner's Dilemna," nlin.AO/0301005
Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory
Anna Collar, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, "You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability", arxiv:1203.6360
Kersten Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (eds.), Imitation in Animals and Artifacts
Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme
Lee Alan Dugatkin, The Imitation Factor: Evolution beyond the Gene
R. I. M. Dunbar (ed.), The Evolution of Culture
Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
E. Anthon Eff, "Does Mr. Galton Still Have a Problem? Autocorrelation in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample", World Cultures 15 (2004): 153--170 [PDF]
N. J. Enfield, Linguistic Epidemiology: Semantics and Grammar of Language Contact in Mainland Southeast Asia
Gabor Fath and Miklos Sarvary, "A renormalization group theory of cultural evolution", nlin.AO/0312070 [Abstract: "We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees of freedom of their world. Cultural coherence among agents is defined as the overlap of mental representations and is characterized using an adequate order parameter. As the importance of social interactions increases or agents become more intelligent, we observe and quantify a series of dynamical phase transitions by which cultural coherence advances in the society."]
Dorothy M. Fragazy and Susan Perry (eds.), The Biology of Traditions: Models and Evidence
D. Gatherer and N. R. McEwan, "On Units of Selection in Cultural Evolution," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 192 (1998) 409--413
Francisco Gil-White, "Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes)" Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Miguel Gonzalez, Richard Watson, Seth Bullock, "Minimally Sufficient Conditions for the Evolution of Social Learning and the Emergence of Non-Genetic Evolutionary Systems", Artificial Life 23 (2017): 493--517
Oliver Goodenough, "Cultural Replication Theory and Law" [PDF]
Jürgen Habermas, Communications and the Evolution of Society
J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll, Culture and Demography in Organizations
Hannah J. Haynie and Claire Bowern, "Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (2016): 13666--13671
Chip Heath [Gave a great talk at the ICOS seminar at Ann Arbor; see the papers linked to off the seminar website (scroll down to "5 March 2004")]
Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds
Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan (eds.), How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge
Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science
Daniel H. Huson, Regula Rupp, and Celine Scornavacca, Phylogenetic Networks: Concepts, Algorithms and Applications
Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
David Kaiser, Kenji Ito and Karl Hall, "Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union", Social Studies of Science 34 (2004): 879--922 [JSTOR]
Yoshihisa Kashima, Paul G. Bain, and Amy Perfors, "The Psychology of Cultural Dynamics: What Is It, What Do We Know, and What Is Yet to Be Known?", Annual Review of Psychology 70 (2019): 499--529
Laland, Odling-Smee and Feldman, "Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change", Behavioral and Brain Sciences [Also a book by the same name]
Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson (eds.), Evolution and Culture: A Fyssen Foundation Symposium
Alan C. Love and William C. Wimsatt, Beyond the Meme: Development and Structure in Cultural Evolution
Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden and Stephen Shennan (eds.), The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach
Susanna C. Manrubia and Damian H. Zanette, "At the boundary between biological and cultural evolution: The origin of surname distributions," cond-mat/0201559
Herbert Donald Graham Maschner (ed.), Darwinian Archaeologies
Richard McElreath and Robert Boyd, Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed
William McGrew, The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology
Meltzoff and Prinz (eds.), The Imitative Mind
Larissa Mendoza Straffon (ed.), Cultural Phylogenetics: Concepts and Applications in Archaeology
Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences [Can't tell from the blurb whether there's anything new here]
Salikoko S. Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution [Review by Danny Yee]
Partha Niyogi, The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution
Michael J. O'Brien and Stephen J. Shennan (eds.), Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology
Barry O’Neill, "Policy folklists and evolutionary theory", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, supplement 3 (2014): 10854--10859
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, "How Phonological Structures Can Be Culturally Selected for Learnability", Adaptive Behavior 13 (2005): 269--280 [PDF preprint, related publications]
Duane Quiatt and Vernon Reynolds, Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge, and the Evolution of Culture
Luke Rendell and Hal Whitehead, "Culture in Whales and Dolphins", Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen (eds.), Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion
Nikolaus Ritt, Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution: A Darwinian Approach to Language Change
W. G. Runciman
- Treatise on Social Theory [esp. vol. II]
W. G. Runciman, John Maynard Smith and R. I. M. Dunbar (eds.), Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man
Donald A. Schon, Invention and the Evolution of Ideas [a.k.a. Displacement of Concepts]
Ute Schöpflug (ed.), Cultural transmission: psychological, developmental, social, and methodological aspects
A. B. Schmookler, Parable of the Tribes
Stephen Shennan, Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution
Stephen Shennan (ed.), Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution
Shils, Tradition
Randolph M. Siverson and Harvey Starr, The Diffusion of War: A Study of Opportunity and Willingness
Paul E. Smaldino, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution
Strauss and Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning
Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection [a view from the cultural studies side of the bookshelf, which also doesn't seem to mention Dawkins, but whose author does seem to have read Darwin, if not necessarily any more modern biologists]
William R. Thompson (ed.), Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics
Bruce G. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency
Harvey Whitehouse, The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity
Andrew Whiten, "Cultural Evolution in Animals", Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 50 (2019): 27--48
John Ziman (ed.), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Jack Zipes
- Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre
- The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

Ander's Meme Page

Henry Farrell and CRS, "Selection, Evolution and Rational Choice Institutionalism "
idem, "Strategic Action, Noisy Learning, Mad Prophets, and Other Drivers of Instituional Evolution"