Susan Blackmore on Memes and Temes (Video)
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is probably the best idea that anybody has ever had. Darwin's idea is not just applicable to biology, though, it also applies to culture.
The application of natural selection to culture has been called 'memetics'. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas - or 'memes' - naturally vary and that (generally) the 'fittest' ideas survive and are replicated across generations.
Neuroscientist Susan Blackmore, who has studied memetics, introduces a new type of meme which she calls the 'teme': the technological meme. Technology, through temes, she argues, is now driving us forward, whether we like it or not.
In this talk Blackmore uses the idea of the 'teme' to pose some interesting questions. She asks whether there are other lifeforms out there in the universe and also whether humanity will survive the arrival of the 'temes'.
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The only noteworthy technology that has surfaced in the past 600 million years is combining sexual reproduction with sensory-motor capabilities. We don't need pseudo-scientific hand waving like "memes" and -- worse -- "temes" to explain our sophisticated brains. Sex is enough. Darwin explains this quite thoroughly in The Descent of Man.
memetics used to be a good science until Blackmore took over. In her TED talk she uses all the psychological tricks as threats like Malthus and so making her talk sort of interesting, it is extremely similar to Al Gore psychology in "The inconvenient truth". There is minimum scientific logic in that what Blackmore says and writes, she only capitalizes on certain movements in human society, she liked to wrote about NDE some time ago and left that topic aside when it was not a fashion anymore and she could not make her money on that topic. That's all about Blackmore.
"memetics used to be a good science until Blackmore took over"
Memetics was never good science (not that Blackmore has done anything to improve it). It is a bit of pseudoscience that caught on amongst geeks, and thus got spread about and popularized in the days when the internet was still dominated by them. Geeks like it because geeks (by definition) like and understand the hard sciences, but do not like or understand the humanities or the social sciences. Although what they really like and understand are fields such as math, physics, and engineering, for the most part they accept that biology should count as a real science; especially evolutionary natural selection theory, because it is both conceptually elegant (almost like physics), and is on the front lines of the battle against the hordes of anti-scientific superstition. The appeal of memetics to such people is that it seems to provide a way to account for all that messy social/historical/psychological stuff (where you actually have to deal with things like motives, emotions, and the interpretation of ambiguity) by applying a bit of superficially understood biology to it.
The truth is that doing evolutionary biology for real involves, on the one hand, having a pretty good grasp on exactly what is meant by difficult concepts such as gene, species, and fitness, and, on the other hand, getting into detailed biology of particular types of organism. Memetics fails on both counts. On the one hand, there is no clear and generally accepted definition of what a meme is: examples will range from huge, complex, internally divided and ever changing ideological movements like Christianity or Marxism, to trivialities such as a catchy tune that gets stuck in your head (of course, much of the apparent "power" of memetic explanation derives from this equivocation, explanations that can be made to look plausible when applied to tunes are then applied willy-nilly to ideologies). On the other hand, memetics enthusiasts generally have no interest in getting into the details of what really happened historically (which would require dealing with historical evidence, with all its interpretive ambiguity), of what motivates people to prefer one idea or ideology over another (psychology and emotion), or even the real inferential relationships and connotations of ideas (philosophy). The whole attraction of memetics is to provide an explanation of history and society that superficially looks scientific and that gets you off the hook of actually having to study history and society. It enables geeks (at least, the young, arrogant kind) to retain their self-image of intellectual superiority (they understand hard stuff that most people don't understand) by licencing then to dismiss the hard stuff they don't understand as empty blather, that can easily be replaced by an application of a bit of half understood biology.
Nigel at: http://www.imagery-imagination.com/
While I am sure we are all well aware of the danger of unsupported pseudoscience preventing real progress, your characterisation of meme’s as explaining away the social sciences and arts is slightly polemical. The concept of a meme seems, at least to me, to be attempting to describe the idea that we are still evolving despite our progress in controlling our genetic shortcomings.
No longer are individuals selected on the basis of their genetic heritage but on the basis of their memetic heritage. A good understanding of arts and history is a powerful meme which allows an individual to compete better in highly selective environment. Far from being dismissive of ‘empty blather‘ an individual appreciative of memetic evolution should work to better understand history and culture as this would benefit them in the new selection race.
You are correct to assert that no readily accessible universal definition exists but this alone does not dismiss meme’s out of hand. I would contend that a meme is a ‘communicable discrete unit of information’ where you draw the discrete boundary depends on the form of communication. It is clear within a system of communication utilising discrete information a form of natural selection will take place. As language user’s we are undoubtedly wired to pass on certain pieces of information and retain others.
Your argument seems more aimed at the Dawkin’s-esque ‘religion is a virus’ argument which I see as half soapbox radicalism and half media sensationalism. Regardless of whether you accept the empirical basis of meme theory it is undeniably an interesting piece of philosophy which seeks to utilise what we know from evolutionary biology to better understand our culture and future. Your characterisation of memetics as ‘geeks’ whitewashing away what they do not understand seems to have missed the fundamental point.
Meme theory seems geared to explain human culture in evolutionary terms. Surely in doing this we have not lost or ignored any of the significance of the culture itself?
Paul at http://www.consciousrobots.org
I have been thinking about the process of evolution by means of unnatural selection for years. Breeding, turning wolves into chihuahuas for instance. Where a meme can be construed to be a concept that implements an intent to that effect then I see her point as valid. Sure its a bit vague and hard to nail down like chaos theory or fractal geometry, it exists but what do you do with it. Her topic overlaps with Ray Kurzwiel's singularity theory. That the rapid aquisition of knowledge is leading us exponentially to point in time where we either succeed or fail to move beyond our own limitations. To that effect we are engineering a system of self selction.