Comments on: Golden ideas

By: Cogsys

Cogsys — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:18:36 +0000

why use the word meme when the word “idea” has served us so well for so long
They may have similar denotations, but I think the different frameworks they imply (e.g. self-replicating cultural units in an ecology) would need to be much more interchangeable in order for us to say the more specific term (meme) actually has no use.

By: Jason Malloy

Jason Malloy — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 18:27:29 +0000

Snopes shows the same hoax all the way back in the 19th century!

By: razib

razib — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:55:47 +0000

, why use the word meme when the word "idea" has served us so well for so long, and why elaborately re-make observations that have already been made by wise men and sharpers through the ages well, sperber doesn't use the word meme. i use it here because of its common acceptance. i think he uses the term representation, though since his material is often originally written in french there might be a latinate bias in terminology. the original research is not really done by sperber, it is more memory & cognition work done by people like pascal boyer.

By: Oran Kelley

Oran Kelley — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:46:37 +0000

On memes:
Anthropologist Dan Sperber has been working over the past 20 years on a paradigm he terms an epidemiology of representations, why do some ideas spread and others fail? Though the details of the idea are important (eg., ideas that have a replicative instruction do well), the nature of how well the idea fits with the mind are also crucial, highly counterintuitive ideas tend to fail because they are hard to remember and comprehend, triviallyr intuitive ideas are just too banal. Something that is somewhat novel, but not too out of the ordinary, tends to flourish.
How much prior research and thinking is Sperber duplicating here? These are all essentially commonplace observations of anyone who has ever worked in, say, any marketing-related field. I can’t see how looking at this from the perspective of the putative entity “meme” improves anything (aside from making the commonplace look novel through new terminology, which, btw, is a long established marketing practice itself.)
But if we are attempting to conduct discourse that is a little less centered on surface novelty, why use the word meme when the word “idea” has served us so well for so long, and why elaborately re-make observations that have already been made by wise men and sharpers through the ages?

By: Oran Kelley

Oran Kelley — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:30:04 +0000

This story also appeared in the Sunday NYT, WHO bit and all.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:00:57 +0000

Razib writes: “to some extent some whites take upon the burden of being above racial consciousness, facing racial extinction with equanimity and placidity that only a truly post-modern and civilized people can. Blondes, being the apotheosis of “whiteness,” are an ideal test case to illustrate this superiority.”
A good example is science journalist Steve Olson’s National Book Award-nominated account of population genetics. Of it, I wrote:
“Another curious feature that Olson’s book shares with many other contemporary writings about population genetics is the author’s apparent longing for the abolition of his own subject matter via universal random interbreeding. Although animal and plant biodiversity is routinely celebrated as a supreme good, the conclusions of books on human biodiversity tend to treat it as a temporary evil that will soon be gone, and good riddance to it. It’s as if that geology textbook ended with an ode to the blessed day when the Earth will plunge into the Sun, thus happily eliminating the need for a science of geology…
“In essence, what is so enthusiastically anticipated is the admixture of people of European descent. Evidently, there is something uniquely, even superhumanly evil and dangerous about European DNA that means it must be diluted. Strikingly, the greatest enthusiasts for this view tend to be highly European themselves. (Olson, for example, is blond.) This reflects that weird combination of racial self-loathing and racial egotism found in so many white intellectuals. A psychologist once said that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self-esteem who see themselves as the turds around which the universe revolves. Post-modern whites tend to indulge in the same warped world-view.”
Olson is blond.
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/human_history.htm

By: razib

razib — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:00:29 +0000

john, you talking about the froster paper? you can find discussion at the link, and in the comments the author shows up. i liked the paper, but the data was more novel than the thesis.

By: John Wilkins

John Wilkins — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:47:01 +0000

A few comments.
1. There was indeed an echt paper on the distribution of alleles for blond hair. The fraud was the WHO “report” that claimed blond alleles would be eliminated.
2. Sperber’s view is, in my opinion, both trivially true (of course our prior psychological capacities and dispositions influence the spread of memes) and irrelevant. From a “meme’s-eye view” our brains are the ecological landscape to which they adapt by evolution. Boyd and Richerson’s recent book Not by genes alone has an excellent discussion of this, which they call the “biased transmission” model of culture. IMO neither Sperber nor Boyd and Richerson have quite disposed of the meme problem, only pushed it back a step. Of course, this needed to be done, because the original meme account (which, as it happens predates Dawkins and even Richard Semon in the 1930s, but goes back to TH Huxley) was naive, and trying to find a gene-analog for culture is otiose, but that said, the issue is not whether memes evolve, but whether they are observer-dependent. In short, is a “meme” just a bookkeeping entity, as Goudl noted genes were?
If a meme is something that “exists” because it is salient, then its “mind-blindness” is unimportant. We can track the evolution of intentional, as well as unintentional, objects under the same rubric, just as we can subsume artificial selection under natural selection. And I am of the view that memes *are* phenomenological objects rather than physical ones.
The real problem with the “blond” meme is typology. We try to classify the world in ways that are natural, but our types are often biased by social and cultural constraints, which is why “blond” even matters except as a phenotypic character state. I agree that there is an underlying racism involved in taking it to be significant often, but it does exist as a non-racial trait, and can be studied thus. What journalists do with that (and they have a conservative and restrictive framework for all new issues, particularly realting to science) is not the fault of the science, of course.

By: Nus

Nus — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:36:42 +0000

Good post, Razib. The persistence of this fallacy demonstrates that ignorance of the basic principles of population genetics is not limited to those aligned with the political Left.
The most consistently non-understood (yet crucial) parts of Darwinism are Natural Selection and its younger sister, Sexual Selection. If there is strong enough selection in favor of blondes (and I think there is, at least in females), then the trait will persist. IMO the future probably won’t be alabaster skin-wise, but it might be blonder than the present.