Book: The origins of virtue; Screwy on memes

Author: Matt Ridley

Details: (c) Matt Ridley 1996; Pub Penguin Books 1997; ISBN 0-14-024404-2

Verdict: The origins of virtue overreaches and doesn't make it.

Reasons for reading it: I generally like Ridley as a science writer, and I'm interested in the topic of evolution even though I don't have much to learn from popular biology books at this point.

How it came into my hands: I don't remember; it's the sort of thing I would only have bought if I happened to find it cheaply.

( detailed review )

This reminds me that I've been meaning to post about how Screwy doesn't think that memes are a useful concept. I know he reads the blog sometimes, so if you feel like clarifying your position here, J, that would be great. I don't want to misrepresent your arguments. Anyway, what I understood from our lively discussions over Pesach is this:

The spreading of and competition between memes isn't meaningfully analogous to genetic inheritance, and trying to use biology to argue about ideas and beliefs leads to erroneous conclusions.

I think this is the thing I disagree with most; I think the ideas of evolution and natural selection are extremely powerful and they can be abstracted to things which are not inherited between parents and children. Basically, they apply anywhere where something can be replicated but imperfectly (perfect replication is about as likely as perpetual motion, so mutation is more or less a given), and where some types of individuals survive while others disappear. Both those conditions are true for memes, IMO.

The meme concept and the underlying selfish gene idea were associated with 80s, highly individualist politics, and the whole framing was created to justify that attitude.

This may be partly true, and certainly it's possible to misuse modern evolutionary ideas, just as Darwinism was misused to justify eugenics and other nasty things. But I think that kind of misuse is based on deep-rooted misunderstanding of what the theory actually says (basically, survival of the fittest doesn't mean might is right). Ridley makes an albeit imperfect argument against this kind of stupid conclusion, as do many other thinkers including Dawkins himself. In general, the fact that the idea of memetic evolution has been politically misused doesn't make the theory wrong in the first place!

There is no clear definition of what a meme is; is it the Iliad or a few words of quotation from it?

I think this is a strength, not a weakness, of the meme model. Dawkins makes it clear in The selfish gene that he isn't using "gene" to imply the sequence of DNA which encodes a single polypetide, but rather any trait which can be inherited. The power of gene selection is precisely that it can be abstracted to any level, and the same forces apply to making a particular enzyme the shape that it is, to the makeup of human society.

Calling something a meme doesn't give you any more explanatory power than simply calling it an idea. You don't need the theory of evolution to explain why the popularity of an opinion isn't a reliable guide to its rightness. The Bible and Plato were already aware of this!

This I find hardest to answer. My first point covers it partly, in that I think meme theory allows the use of a certain set of mathematical tools to reason about sociology and psychology. But I'm not sure I can come up with a convincing example where you can make a stronger argument about a meme than about an idea or a cultural artefact or whatever.

Anyway, what do you think? I think it's a very interesting challenge and one that some of you guys would have informed opinions about.