March 4, 2009 at 9:51 pm (Memetics)
The theory of memetics is in it’s infancy, it may blossom in to a full and useful theory explaining the evolution of cultural evolution in terms of a second, non-genetic replicator, or it may perish like many unsuccessful theories before it. Until then it will undoubtedly be criticized in many different ways; I’m going to focus on just one of these.
A meme is any behaviour, song, story, idea, any cultural thing that passes from one person to another. The idea of a meme is therefore a meme itself. Now memes compete with each other over a common resource, something I call “mind-time”. Successful memes are those that manage to grab the attention of their hosts (us) and cause them to perform a behaviour that will likely result in someone else picking up that meme. For example a funny story is more likely to be remembered and re-told than a boring story. Now, this raises an interesting point, the truthfulness of the story is irrelevant, there’s no reason to suppose that a boring but truthful story is more likely to be passed on than a funny but untruthful story, in fact quite the opposite, it’s quite likely that the funny but untruthful story will do better in many cases. So, if the theory of memes is itself a meme, then it’s truth value is not important, ergo the theory of memes is not dependent on truth but on how successful it is at replicating.
This is a bizzare argument because this applies to every scientific theory that has ever been proposed. Memetics is a meme which exists in the selective environment which is science. It’s ability to replicate – it’s fitness – is based on it’s ability to explain phenomena, generate predictions and refute criticism. It it fails to do this scientists will drop the theory and it will cease to replicate. The scientific environment in which memetics finds itself ensures that it will only succeed if it contains some truth. The interesting question then becomes, where did this environment come from? Is the scientific method a meme, and if so why did it succeed over other memes?
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October 31, 2008 at 2:12 pm (Critical Periods)
- Can a system be both robust and adaptive?
- What is robustness? The maintainance of certain variables dispite perturbation?
- What is adaptivity? The ability to change state in accordance with perturbation?
- Is adaptivity just a way to acheive robustness? (For example sweating is adaptive but its purpose is to maintain body temperature so the adaptive process of sweating maybe seen as increasing robustness to temperature).
- Is adaptivity mutually exclusive to robustness? Is it possible for a system to be robust and adaptive at the same time?
Why do I care about these question? Well, I think that there is a possibility that systems become critical when they are trying to solve problems that require them to be both robust (the ability to maintain there state/identity despite perturbation) and adaptive (the ability to change their state/identity in accordance with perturbation). In my mind such a system is in a dichotomous situation, it can’t be both of these at the same time. Evolution may drive development towards criticality as it tries to create a system that is robust some of the time and adaptive at others.
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October 2, 2008 at 1:37 pm (Research)
Recently I decided to split my PHD and focus on two separate area of interest, namely development and niche construction. My focus in the area of development has been on critical periods. I have published a paper (my first) on a possible way of predicting when critical periods are likely to occur in development, and have several ways I can extend this line of research. Although this work is going well and is a potential thesis topic it was never my intention to study this in my PhD. I think a PhD should be focused on things that *really* excite you and although critical periods in development are interesting that topic is not where my heart is. This is where the second topic comes in, niche construction. Evolution has always fascinated me, it asks the most fundamental and profound questions that could be asked, how did life come to be the way it is. The idea that blind natural forces, given 3.5 billion years, can create something so marvelously complex as beings that are the centre of a psychological world that is uniquely their own, highlights all that is beautiful about nature. The thing that excites me so much about evolution is that it is an unfinished story, there is so much we don’t know about it. Niche construction, I believe, is a very important process within evolution that has, until recently, been overlooked and so I have chosen to focus my attention on this process. But this poses a problem, on the one hand I have a good line of research in critical periods, and on the other, I have a research area that isn’t as well formed but is my preferred direction. What would be great is if I could marry the two research topics.
Well, I think I may have found a possible way of doing this, I was reading chapter 2 of Niche Construction by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman, in which they give many examples of niche construction from all forms of life. What struck me was the number of examples where the niche construction behaviour didn’t directly benefit the animal performing it, but rather its offspring. There were lots of examples of nest building, chambers for nursing the young, web sacs, cocoons, burrows etc. This nicely ties the two ideas together because the niche construction behaviour affects the developmental process of the animals offspring. I can now start thinking in terms of; what affect this behaviour has on the developmental process and the evolution of development.
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