The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

By Kate Distin

Book Overview

Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins has suggested that culture evolves and that memes are the cultural... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521606276
• ISBN13: 9780521606271
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Clarifies an interesting idea

Richard Dawkins first proposed the concept of memes, units of culture which replicate within human minds, some 30 years ago in his book The Selfish Gene. In that book, he showed how both individual-centric and gene-centric explanations of evolutionary processes make sense, and some aspects of evolution are only explainable from the selfish gene's point of view. He speculated that culture could be similarly described evolutionarily, and that two narratives, one of individuals, and one of culture units (memes) would similarly be necessary to explain cultural evolution. Various authors, including Dawkins, have had only limited success in elaborating on this concept over the years. But The Selfish Meme, by Kate Distin, finally does this idea justice. Distin does a good job laying out the fundamentals of the meme hypothesis. She locates memes within a concept of consciousness as a representational process, and identifies memes with representational systems indicative of actual physical objects, actions, or relationships. She expands a little on this theme, by distinguishing memes from representations - she instead limits them to Meta-representations, in what I consider a misguided effort to exclude animals from being able to host memes. She further expands on the representation theme in a discussion of memes and language, noting that representational systems like music notation and language are memes themselves, and these meta-meta-representational systems host all our meta-representations. She shows how memes can and do satisfy the basic conditions for evolutionary processes: stability, variation, replication, and competition/selection. She notes that a significant difference between memes and genes is that genes build replicating machines around themselves (individuals) while memes in contrast follow a virus-like strategy of parasitizing somebody else's replicating machine (the minds created by human genes). She addresses and shoots down several of the peculiar misuses which have characterized efforts to expand the meme hypothesis. Dawkins himself is the chief misuse, as he has used the concept as a vehicle to attack religion, labeling religion as a memetic virus. As Distin points out, ALL memes are virus-like, and science and logic and atheism all have the same features that Dawkins slanders religion as having. As second major misuse is in the concept of consciousness, where an influential movement (Dennett, Blackmore, and others) asserts that our minds themselves are nothing but memes (self-deluding us to think that minds actually exist). Distin points out several logic flaws in the Dennett/Blackmore model: * What gets parasitized? If minds could not exist without memes, there is nothing to have been parasitized by the first meme. * Who is deluded? If minds do not exist without memes, there is no self-deception needed. Self-deception assumes there is an I to be deluded prior to the deception. But the existence of this I i

A nascent science examined

Daniel C. Dennett once asked: "Could there be a science of memetics?" Distin responds to this query with a resounding "Yes!". With her title filched from Richard Dawkins, she launches a campaign for better recognition and understanding of the meme concept. Memes, she reminds us, are information packets jumping from mind to mind. They inhabit "hosts" in the same way DNA genes do bodies. They replicate, like a gene, down successive generations. When enough of them are accumulated in a population of hosts, you have a society identified as a particular "culture". Cultures, of course, are distinguished among one another by identifiable traits - dress, music, taboos, even foods. Distin attempts to explain how these distinctions are created. Her approach, the analogy of biological and cultural evolution, was initiated by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene". Distin strengthens that similarity with her analysis. Like the biological gene, the informational meme must be able to successfully replicate. The gene copies itself by assembling the proper chemical elements into a duplicate. The meme, intact in one mind, must find a way to copy itself to another. The copy should be exact, but like the gene, which may carry a mutation, or undergo the "match and swop" process of meiosis, may be modified in the recipient's mind. Like the biological gene, such an inexact copy may be more easily accepted and, hence, strengthened. Such a successful modification from the original is "variation". Variation offers a collection of memes that may prove more acceptable to a culture than are others. This process, called "selection" in both biology and memetics, is the basis of evolution. Cultures may thus evolve in a manner similar to that of biology. The major difference is that memes can successfully vary faster than can genes. Distin presents her ideas of the origins of memes and their heritage so far as it's understood today. The complexities of various human cultures, she says, can be broken down - "reduced" - to assemblages of memes known as "memeplexes". The memeplex is a compound idea or practice that distinguishes one culture's identifiable traits from those of another. Many critics of memetics have challenged the validity or worth of cultural transmission and innovation through memes. Distin brings some of these critics into the discussion and examines their worth. Some criticisms she welcomes as worthy of consideration, but she demonstrates why even their acceptance doesn't refute the idea of memes as the basis for culture. Others Distin dismisses as having missed the point. She points out that too many people, memeticists and critics alike, often make too firm a link between the biological and cultural realms. She is particularly vigourous in her denunciation of Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology. In her attempts to deal with critics or even allies in support of memetics, Distin ranges from the scathing to the subtle. Her rejection of Blackmor

From genes to memes

This is philosophy for the people. It's intellectually rigorous but not in the least dry. Distin leaps from genes to memes and helps us think about how our culture evolves. Is it all mapped out for us from birth, leaving us without any chance to influence our destiny? Or are we thinking beings in spite of our cultural DNA? Thought provoking, stimulating and most of all a ripping good tale.