Is the study of cultural evolution wrecked?
I’ve been thinking and article comparing cultural with biological evolution for about a month or so. At the end authors asked for feedback. I was wondering whether or not to respond. I’ve finally done so, with a recent blog post, Can the study of cultural evolution be successfully assimilated to a framework that is centered on biology? [No, but the biologists keep trying]. I don’t know whether or not I’ll write directly to the lead author. My problem has been that the article is so relentlessly biological in orientation that I find it hard to imagine that the authors, there are nine, would be able to make use of my remarks.
We’re thinking in different worlds. But the world they represent is, as far as I can tell, the largest more or less organized body of thinkers about cultural evolution – gene-culture co-evolution, or dual inheritance theory. The work these people do is good as far as it goes, but I don’t see how it can handle the kind of phenomena that interest me, music, literature, the arts in general, language, the history of science, and so forth. You simply can’t get to those phenomena from the assumptions guiding their thinking.
That line of thinking dates back to the mid-1980s as does another line of thinking about cultural evolution, memetics. Dawkins came up with the idea in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, but it took a decade for the idea to catch on. Two things have come out of that. One the one hand we have the wide-spread popular idea of memes, as in “internet meme.” That is what it is and I have no problems with. What’s more problematic is the attempt to found a science of memetics. As far as I can tell, nothing has come of it, though a bunch of books have been written, a journal was started and failed, and Dan Dennett keeps pushing the idea. While Dawkins original impulse was valid – an account of cultural evolution needs to be built around cultural entities that are the benefactors of the evolutionary dynamic – the thinking that came out of it collapsed onto the idea of memes-in-the-head which then flit about from brain to brain. As far as I can tell, this line of thinking is all but dead.
So, we have one line of investigation that failed, memetics, and another, gene-cultural co-evolution, which is flourishing, but also short-sighted. Is there any chance for an inquiry into cultural evolution that is suited to the subject matter?
Growth and progress
I continue to think about economic stagnation and growth and the prospects for progress along the lines of my post from August 13, Stagnation, Redux: It’s the way of the world [good ideas are not evenly distributed, no more so than diamonds], which I subsequently incorporated into a working paper, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world (August 24, 2020), which I like a lot. I’ve been thinking about a new version of that paper in which I would add a new section at the end, one that would knit the two facets of the paper together, growth and semantics.
But the thinking’s been going hard, as has the motivation to actually do the writing. As things moved along, I was getting more ideas about the economic end of the article than about the semantics end. So I decided to drop the idea of a second edition and instead do another working paper where I’d just expand the economic side of the article. Things felt better after I’d arrived at that decision about a week ago.
Yet, the writing was still coming hard, and I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about that. It’s difficult in this kind of situation to determine whether or not I’m just delaying the writing for no particularly good reason or because I still need to do some more thinking before writing. And, of course, the actual writing is always a good way to do some thinking.
Anyhow, I actually did some writing this afternoon and made some real progress. We’ll see how it goes.
My working title for the new paper: The Materiality of Ideas in the Universe of Knowledge and the Prospects for Progress.
Rambling about on rambling
So why do I write these rambles? Because it helps me think. I’ve got a variety of interests and I generally keep several of them working at a time. It sometimes gets a bit difficult to figure out what to work on next and push on through to a complete blog post, working paper, or set of photos. Writing one of these posts is a way of putting a bunch of different things before me and letting them bump up against one another. It’s a way to step back and breath.
Which reminds me, I still need to do some media notes, one on To Catch a Thief, and another on Atelier.
And I’ve got to get back to this Facebook business, not to mention GPT-3 and the future of AI. Yikes!
More later.
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