Rudy Garns's Library tagged dawkins → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

``Memes, The New Replicators''

www.rubinghscience.org/...dawkinsmemes.html

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meme memes dawkins memetics science

`... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'
Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution.
23 more annotation(s)...
- Language seems to `evolve' by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
- the song of a bird called the saddleback
- song patterns were not inherited genetically. Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours by imitation
- Frequently the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories in terms of orthodox gene selection.
- analogy
- all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
- a unit of imitation
- abbreviate mimeme to meme
- tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
- memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation
- longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity
- memes are not high-fidelity repliators
- what a single unit-meme consisted of
- a length of chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection
- Where there is sexual reproduction, each gene is competing particularly with its own alleles -- rivals for the same chromosomal slot.
- co-adapted gene complexes
- a co-adapted set of mutually-assisting memes
- discouraging rational inquiry
- a meme for celibacy
- The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.
- our capacity to simulate the future in imagination -- could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators
- We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators
- exert a statistical influence

Jan

2012

Richard Dawkins, "Replicators and Vehicles" 1982

www.stephenjaygould.org/...dawkins_replicators.html

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dawkins replicators genes evolution selection

What are DNA molecules for?
Living matter is nested in a hierarchy of levels
38 more annotation(s)...
- the dispute between individual and group is different in kind from the dispute between individual and gene.
- what we ought to mean
- most effective
- there are two ways in which we can characterize natural selection. Both are correct; they simply focus on different aspects of the same process.
- any entity in the universe of which copies are made
- A germ-line replicator, as distinct from a dead-end replicator
- an active, as distinct from a passive, replicator is a replicator that has some causal influence on its own probability of being propagated.
- When we say that an adaptation is "for the good of' something, what is that something? Is it the species, the group, the individual, or what? I am suggesting that the appropriate "something," the "unit of selection" in that sense, is the active germ-line replicator.
- It is their phenotypic effects that are the proximal subjects of selection
- Natural selection, of course, depends on the variation
- replicators may therefore be regarded as in competition with other replicators.
- each replicator is a competitor specifically of its alleles at its own locus on the chromosomes of the population
- that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency"
- a unit that is potentially immortal (Dawkins, 1976, chapter 3), a point I learned from Williams (1966). Briefly, the rationale is that an entity must have a low rate of spontaneous, endogenous change, if the selective advantage of its phenotypic effects over those of rival ("allelic") entities is to have any significant evolutionary effect.
- The asexual organism's genome may be considered a replicator, since any alteration in it tends to be preserved.
- there is a hierarchy of nested vehicles
- cell organelles, haploid organisms, and gametes are levels of selection with a higher heritability than diploid sexual genotypes, since the latter do not perfectly reproduce themselves, but undergo segregation and recombination in the course of their reproduction
- replicators are not directly visible to natural selection
- literally indivisibility-being sufficiently heterogeneous in form to be rendered nonfunctional if cut in half)
- in nature behaves as if it had a single purpose
- "The 'ramet' is the unit of clonal growth, the module that may often follow an independent existence if severed from the parent plant"
- The "genet," on the other hand, is the unit that springs from one single-celled zygote, the "individual" in the normal zoologists' sense.
- Each new vehicle comes into being through an act of reproduction. New parts of vehicles come into being through growth.
- In order to make complex adaptations at the level of multicellular organs—eyes, ears, hearts, etc.—a complex developmental process is necessary.
- given that death and reproduction do occur in a lineage, evolution in that lineage becomes possible
- reproduction as the process by which a new vehicle comes into existence, and growth as the process by which an existing vehicle develops
- genetic mosaics
- The whole "plant" would not function as a vehicle propagating the genes inside it, because different cells inside it would contain different genes. Cells would function as vehicles, and adaptations would not be for the good of the whole plant but for the good of smaller units within the plant. To qualify as a "vehicle," an entity must come into being by reproduction, not by growth.
- Groups do not go through a regular cycle of growth (development), alternating with "reproduction" (sending off a small "propagule" which eventually grows into a new group).
- "group selection" in the sense of D. S. Wilson (1980) can only work if there is some mechanism by which genetic variation between groups is kept higher than genetic variation within groups
- Kin-group selection is the special case of group selection in which individuals tend to be closely related to other members of their own group.
- the theory of kin selection does not need to assume discrete family groups
- Where they exist, tightly knit family bands, or "kin groups," may be regarded as vehicles.
- it must use phenotypic effects as intermediaries, but do these have to be bodies?
- When we look at an animal behaving, we may have to learn to say, not "How is it benefiting its inclusive fitness?" but rather "Whose inclusive fitness is it benefiting?"
- competing replicators in germ lines
- Any particular phenotypic characteristic will have to be seen as the joint product of replicators whose influence converges from many different sources, many different bodies belonging to different species, phyla, and kingdoms. This is the doctrine of the "extended phenotype."
- neither the organism nor the group is a replicator

Oct

2009

The tragedy of a priori selectionism: Dennett and Gould on adaptationism

Jeremy C. Ahouse | PhilPapers

philpapers.org/AHOTTO

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Dawkins selectionism adaptationism Dennett Gould evoution

Why so cross?

LRB · Thomas Nagel

www.lrb.co.uk/...nage01_.html

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Dawkins evolution adaptationism Eldridge

'Dawkins vs. Gould' by Kim Sterelny reviewed by Paul R. Gross

www.human-nature.com/...gross.html

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Dawkins Gould evolution adaptationism gradualism punctuated-equilibrium

'Dawkins vs. Gould' by Kim Sterelny reviewed by Daniel Nettle

www.human-nature.com/...nettle.html

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Dawkins Gould evolution adaptationism gradualism punctuated-equilibrium

Sep

2009

The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review - Telegraph

Steve Jones hails Richard Dawkins's new book, which brings together his thinking on Darwin

www.telegraph.co.uk/...by-Richard-Dawkins-review.html

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science evolution Dawkins Darwin

in list: Evolution

Jul

2009

Memes, selfish genes and Darwinian paranoia

Godfrey-Smith makes an excellent argument at some point in the book (chapter 7, on the gene’s eye view) that genes are not at all the sort of things Richard Dawkins and some other biologists think they are. (Psychology Today)

www.psychologytoday.com/...h-genes-and-darwinian-paranoia

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memes genes genetics evolution selection Dawkins

May

2008

Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme

"In Mr. Dawkins's view, the organisms containing those genes are merely "lumbering robots" or "survival machines" that house and carry genetic information. The implication is that, in these terms, selfishness, even ruthless selfishness, pays off, and altruism does not." - April 23, 2008 - The New York Sun

www2.nysun.com/...75178

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biology evolution dawkins grue

in list: Evolution

Apr

2008

Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme

From its attention-grabbing title to its accessible prose, Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" (1976) has (selfishly) spread its message in an impressive way since publication. (April 23, 2008 - The New York Sun)

www2.nysun.com/75178

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Dawkins evolution biology grue genes

in list: Evolution