Months ago, reading up on this area of study, memetics seemed worth considering (especially Blackmore's passionate explanations). But after reading Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2000), a collection of essays by experts from different fields on this new discipline, edited by Richard Aunger. I was quite disappointed that in Dennett's foreword he says 'I am not entirely persuaded by any of the chapters in this book'. (vii)
Of the nine contributors to the collection five object to the idea forwarded by memeticists:
- Rosaria Conte makes a most polite assessment of meme literature using the social cognitive perspective. She praises advantages of the field and describes some disadvantages but focuses on one unsatisfactory aspect: the conceptualization of the requirements of memetic processes.
- Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson conclude that memes are not 'a universal acid' (one of Dennett's metaphors in Darwin's
Dangerous Idea) and assert that 'population thinking is a better mousetrap'. (161) - Dan Sperber's objection has to do with memeticists not having empirical evidence to support their claims that '...in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties for other elements of culture that they replicate.' (173) He ends by saying 'imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided'. (173) But there's hope in studying imitation.
- Maurice Bloch puts forward the previous arguments against the diffusionists by American and British critics:
- Memes like traits don't spread like a virus but are 'continually and completely made and unmade during communication' (I still have to read more on this) and;
- Culture is not a single isolable type which means that transmission of it is of many types. (201)
He simply thinks that memes don't exist and Blackmore (whose 'The meme's eye view' essay argues strongly for memes) hasn't presented convincingly her case. - To this Adam Kuper agrees by concluding that '[memetecists have] yet to deliver a single original and plausible analysis of any cultural or social process'. (187)
Coriana Six provides a more thorough assessment of the collection (December 2007).
In Blackmore's The Meme Machine and most of her articles found online, it is easy to take Bloch's side. Blackmore is quite passionate about her study but most of her research is speculative. She has an article in Aesthetica Magazine (July 2006) called Memes, creativity and consciousness:
We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources. |
Reading this should convince any artist that memeticists like Blackmore 'overstand' the creative processes. In his recent Enlightenment lecture at the University of Edinburgh, Steven Pinker was asked his opinion of memes. His reply: after 32 years, the study of memes has yielded no great progress. In How the Mind Works (1997) he says: '...a complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors...[but] because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints of invents something'. (209)
Mind Hacks also reports that in 2006 Dennett had a falling out with fellow Darwinian Michael Ruse.
Some of the exchange can be found in When evolutionists attack, where Ruse says:
'I am a hardline Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it cost me status and respect--in fact, I am more hardline than you [Dennett] are, because I don't buy into this meme bullshit but put everything--especially including ethics--in the language of genes.' |
