Its all fun and games in books and videos, but the memetics movement has many problems. This is why the first and only memetics journal had to be shut down for lack of submissions.
I agree that culture evolves, but Dawkins and Blackmore took the gene analogy too far back in the 80's and you just cant model it in the same way.
Indeed! While im an Atheist and used to have an aggressive stance against religion, of late I have realised that the value of an idea is not so much whether its right or wrong......but whether its Fit or Unfit! Everybody has morality of some sort- and thats no science. Religion must have evolved for a reason... just like all the other adaptations. Religious people will easily list the benefits it gives them. Maybe science has better answers, but we certainly have a lot to learn in communicating them.
Not if you consider culture as natural. Besides- where do you draw the line? Culture is often defined as transmitted behaviour, so when ravens on the french-spanish border teach cooperative breeding (they tested this with an egg swap) its culture not genes.
No its not. Population Genetics is an empirical science too and with sequence speeds going up and costs going down piles of data are coming in.
You can measure speed in mean substitution time of beneficial alleles. A substitution event occurs when a mutation creates the allele AND the allele comes to dominate the population. Certain evolutionary leaps can reduce this time; for example recombination helps prevent one alleles fixation process from interfering with another.
To me its clear culture is just another such adaptation, that allows us to accumulate adaptations within a single lifetime.
Notice the phrasing "gene-culture coevolution" is consistent with Dual-Inheritance theory which considers cultural (behavioural) transmission as an evolutionary process on its own. This can also be extended with Epigenetic mechanisms and Symbolic transmission modes. Technology evolves too and seems like a sensible extension.
Its not so far fetched when you consider that Reproduction (or amplification in the continuous case), Variation and Selection are sufficient conditions for evolution. Keep in mind cultural evolution is Lamarckian though... and different in many other ways too.
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Its all fun and games in books and videos, but the memetics movement has many problems. This is why the first and only memetics journal had to be shut down for lack of submissions. I agree that culture evolves, but Dawkins and Blackmore took the gene analogy too far back in the 80's and you just cant model it in the same way.
Indeed! While im an Atheist and used to have an aggressive stance against religion, of late I have realised that the value of an idea is not so much whether its right or wrong... ...but whether its Fit or Unfit! Everybody has morality of some sort- and thats no science. Religion must have evolved for a reason... just like all the other adaptations. Religious people will easily list the benefits it gives them. Maybe science has better answers, but we certainly have a lot to learn in communicating them.
Not if you consider culture as natural. Besides- where do you draw the line? Culture is often defined as transmitted behaviour, so when ravens on the french-spanish border teach cooperative breeding (they tested this with an egg swap) its culture not genes.
No its not. Population Genetics is an empirical science too and with sequence speeds going up and costs going down piles of data are coming in. You can measure speed in mean substitution time of beneficial alleles. A substitution event occurs when a mutation creates the allele AND the allele comes to dominate the population. Certain evolutionary leaps can reduce this time; for example recombination helps prevent one alleles fixation process from interfering with another. To me its clear culture is just another such adaptation, that allows us to accumulate adaptations within a single lifetime.
Notice the phrasing "gene-culture coevolution" is consistent with Dual-Inheritance theory which considers cultural (behavioural) transmission as an evolutionary process on its own. This can also be extended with Epigenetic mechanisms and Symbolic transmission modes. Technology evolves too and seems like a sensible extension. Its not so far fetched when you consider that Reproduction (or amplification in the continuous case), Variation and Selection are sufficient conditions for evolution. Keep in mind cultural evolution is Lamarckian though... and different in many other ways too.