Ideas Bazaar is always interesting. In a post called Names, memes and cultural evolution, they pick up on an Economist article about memes. One Dr Bentley of University College, London
is finding that random copying seems to drive many forms of cultural change, from patterns on ancient clay pots to preferences for breeds of dog.
It’s all good meme stuff. In the comments, though, Marisa Wilson makes one of the best points I’ve heard in while.
Drum roll….
we should not forget that the “meme” is not a paradigm, but one of many organistic models in the history of the human sciences (another is Spencer’s “Social Organism” of 1860). Just as parents are apt to engage in “random copying,” creating households of Johns and Janes rather than Homers and Berthas, social scientists have a “random” number of models, such as the meme. Lest Bentley forget, we, as human scientists, are also part of the syntagmatic structure of human classificatory systems.
Just brilliant.
Glad to see you back, Piers!
Glad to be back!
Could you explain *why* this is brilliant?
Seems like Bently looked at some data and got a result ie. that names displayed a distribution that suggested random copying. But the comment just states the obvious truth that there are other cultural models out there. So what?
The comment also *insinuates* that maybe “memetics” as a model has also been adopted by random copying. But it doesn’t actually bring any evidence for or against that. Maybe the “memes” model has been adopted for an entirely different reason … such as people love models who’s name rhymes with “dreams”.
I don’t see what’s exciting.
Fair enough!
You’re probably way ahead of me on memetics. The Bentley research (random copying in names, pots etc) I thought was interesting. But as I said it was the comment that got me.
What I liked was this implied idea (which hadn’t occurred to me before):
If a model (e.g memes) implies a mechanism (e.g. “survival” of the fittest, random copying), and yet through the mechanisms the model implies the model becomes debunked (e.g. “extinct”), does that mean the model holds or not?
As to insinuation, I have to say I find the meme definition so vague that most of the memetics I’ve read is so vague – partly as a result of the definition – that they could easily be tarred with the “insinuation” brush. Very happy to be proved wrong though š