Epistolary Thursday
Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles! I hope you enjoyed the November break and holidays. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Epistolary Thursday, in which we share letters that have shepherded shared conversations.
In June I wrote an article entitled “The Cultural Microbiome: A brief introduction to Hierarchical Cultural Selection.” I was delighted to find that Mark Xu Neyer liked the piece enough to comment on it, starting up a conversation about how it related to their own work. That conversation started what has been a 6 month correspondence that I’m going to share with you today.
Mark:
AWESOME, so glad i found this post / substack. I think you and i are in a similar space, but your knowledge of evolution and biology look much more complex that mine.
Here's some thoughts i've had in the space:
- do you think memes exhibit r/k selection dichotomies?
- https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/ - suggests that memetic parasites exist
what do you think of the notion of a 'memetic superorganism' ?
or, say, 'memetic innoculuation', where being exposed to a shitty copy of a complex idea can 'innoculate' a thinker against the complex idea, by making them consider the complex idea as being not worth investigating, by comparison to the simple one?
sorry these thoughts are all disconnected / rambly - i'm a parent too and this is how i spend my time off duty - hah
Paul:
We seem to be in a VERY similar place! It sounds like you're where I was at the beginning of the year.
- I hadn't thought about memes and r/k selection, but I don't see why not- there's very obviously memes like useful academic and scientific theory that require a huge amount of upfront investment but receive nearly universal adoption in their domain, whereas others like urban legends and wive's tails that achieve much more widespread adoption but at lower rates by being short and easy to communicate.
- The first three posts of the blog are actually about memetic parasitism, superorganism, and informational life, they are definitely scruffier than this post though:
- I read something on memetic inoculation somewhere but I'm having trouble remembering where. I think it's possible, but much more likely that there's just selection occurring on a different level. IMO most of the reason memetics failed was an addiction to Darwinian "fitness" thinking, such that theories expected "fit" ideas to spread on their own- which just isn't the case.
please DM me on twitter or reach out on reddit or something- I'd love to chat more :)
Though we started the conversation in the comments section on Substack, it meandered briefly into a Reddit message before coming to rest in what would become a 28-message long email thread.
Paul:
Hey! Thanks for commenting on my post- you're definitely thinking in the same direction as me in terms of the shape of cultural evolution. I tend to think or large organizations- companies, countries, churches- as primitive informational life. Not intelligent in any way, but resourceful enough to utilize humanity as a resource, similar to how early eukaryotes harnessed mitochondria and chloroplasts.
I'm still split on the parasitism thing, and have removed references to it as I do more research from the biological side. I'd be more inclined to call social organisms (governments etc) obligate symbionts of humanity, similar to ant species that farm aphids and fungus. Most of my current theory involves the idea that we look at species wrong, and thus look at selection wrong- species are actually cooperating groups of organisms that form "solidarity groups". For example, humans are a solidarity group of homo sapiens, their microbiomes, and the meta-aware informational organism that conceives of itself as you.
This is interesting to me in regards to hierarchical/multi level selection because it means that while competition is constantly occurring, it only has relevance on the highest operative level of solidarity- cancer is technically an adaptation of some cells in your body to outcompete others, but no matter how much more competitive that adaptation is it will always be limited by the success of its host (which it kills), and thus the adaptation never carries on. Again in regards to humans, it doesn't matter how adaptive an individual trait is if it doesn't ultimately help the group's survivability. I like to think of greek fire and roman concrete: even though the memes themselves were adaptive enough to become widespread, they vanished with their societies.
It's for this reason that the majority of "people powered" movements get things wrong. We're past the stage in human history where we can effectively implement policy that centers human rights, because it will be outcompeted. Scott's "Meditations on Moloch" gives a good side of the story in how societies sacrifice values on a race to the bottom.
Let me know what you think about all this- and what you've been thinking! I'm very excited to talk with others who are curious about cultural evolution and memetics.
I went ahead and emailed Mark, and he got back to me in a jiffy:
Awesome - will respond shortly, doing family stuff at the moment. Love the domain!1
Next Up: Mark’s Response
The messages get rather long in the email thread, so Mark and I decided to do a similar call and response on our respective blogs! You can look out for a post with his reply to these initial messages on his Substack:
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Did some of the ideas in these initial messages intrigue you, or do you have something relevant to add? Please leave a comment, or contact me on twitter. If you know someone who happens to be a fan of these topics of conversation, why not share it with them?
Thank you for reading, and until next time!
Fond Regards,
Paul
My domain is zaibatsuheavy.industries