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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

If TSG has a flaw it is IMHO that Dawkins did not fully have the courage of his convictions. When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes. This idea has a lot of explanatory power. We humans are hosts not just for genes, but for memes as well, in a sort of symbiotic relationship. Sometimes the interests of our genes and our memes align, such as when we invent antiseptics and antibiotics. Other times they conflict, such as when we invent birth control. The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes

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I think he was right to not focus too much on the "meme" concept he invented, because it is quite different from genes, scientifically (which is what he cares about).

1. The crucial thing with genes is that they are "binary", you either get a gene from a parent, or not. Mutations happen, but they produce new genes. Genes are "immortal" (exist for many, many generations in identical form). Memes, on the other hand, are not binary in this way. Ideas constantly change, and we can't reduce them to a binary code.

2. The rules of genetic competition are complex, but we have a good framework: natural selection and sexual selection. However, to explain memetic competition, we need to talk about psychology and sociology and so forth (in addition to biology). There are already fields doing that, from psychology and sociology to literature and religious studies, mostly in a non-scientific way, because we have yet to find a good scientific one.

3. For those reasons, "memetics" never succeeded as an academic discipline. The field has not succeeded in providing useful theories to be tested that tell us quantative things we don't already know.

Of course, at the same time the insights you mention are true. But they are not anywhere near as powerful as the concept of genes. They are mostly useful as an analogy, and to open people's minds, but not scientifically.

I disagree. The reason why memes are not analogous to genes is that when a meme colonizes your head, you as an individual can use some forward thinking, prefrontal cortex, and change the meme then respread the new mutated meme. This is much closer to, but not identical to, lamarckian style evolution than to darwinian or neodarwinian selfish gene style evolution. One is directed and can avoid evolutionary local minima, the other can not.

Agreed, that's an additional very large difference between genes and memes.

> The crucial thing with genes is that they are "binary", you either get a gene from a parent, or not. Mutations happen, but they produce new genes. Genes are "immortal" (exist for many, many generations in identical form). Memes, on the other hand, are not binary in this way. Ideas constantly change, and we can't reduce them to a binary code.

Memes are not ideas, they are behaviors. They are either preserved exactly (like genes) or something modifies them to create a new replicable behavior (again, like genes.) The difference you attempt to paint here is spurious.

> Memes are not ideas, they are behaviors.

Why do you say that? Wikipedia's definition disagrees with you,

> A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".

as does Dawkins himself, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Origins

And Genes aren't behaviors either. Behaviors are something that the phenotype might perform due to certain genes, but the behavior is not the gene.

Genes are a code. They are abstract, discrete, and immortal. That's why they are so useful in biology. As the Wikipedia article notes, the lack of such a parallel in memes limits their scientific utility.

I disagree.

"Genes as the unit of selection" was, at the time TSG was written, a controversial theory. Group selection was the popular viewpoint (the very tempting notion that individual animals make selfless sacrifices for the herd). Dawkins meticulously showed that the contrary gene selection viewpoint was the best theory for the observed evidence - original, conceptual scientific theory at its best.

He introduced "memes" as a speculative addition at the end of the book. There's nothing wrong with speculation, and it can be a valuable tool to discover insights which later form theories, but its fundamentally different to the rigour needed to establish new scientific knowledge.

"Memes" are an interesting concept, but people take the idea too far IMO, and Dawkins was right to confine his speculations to one chapter. I'd definitely agree with a weak version of the theory - ideas which include the notion that 'spreading this idea is good', tend to spread more. (Compare Christianity and Islam versus Hinduism or Buddhism). The strong version of the theory, though, goes too far, and sees people as being entirely determined by their ideas. People have independent minds and can analyse, judge, refine and/or reject the ideas they encounter - they're not passive slaves to memes.

Sentences like: "The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes" - once upon a time I would have said "oh wow, what an interesting possibility". Nowadays I see this kind of thinking as fundamentally vapid and lazy. Historians already knew how to analyse the spread of ideas throughout a society long before the concept of a 'meme' - Gibbon, for example, was writing about how the differences between the different sects of Christianity affected their spread, 300 years ago. (I could say something similar about social scientists, though I'm not a huge fan of modern social science for other reasons).

Saying that memes are alive, or that liberals and conservatives represent two different species, to me represents an ungrounded way of thinking, where concepts float without touching reality.

TL;DR - Dawkins achievement lies in definitively stating the case for gene selection (and writing a damn good popsci book); his concept of 'memes' is mind candy for the reddit crowd.

> liberals and conservatives represent two different species

That is most definitely NOT what I said. What I said what that it might be the beginning of a species split. It will probably take at least a few hundred thousand years for that to play itself out.

And I also advanced a specific causal model: that genes and memes are competing for a common resource, namely, human bodies and the brains they contain. The human brain is the phenotype of both genes and memes (hence "nature" and "nurture") and so it is entirely plausible that they could compete with each other over this resource, and that this competition could result in a species split. Whether the split between conservative and liberal is a reflection of this or not is speculative, of course, but it's also testable. For example, you could see if political affiliation had a genetically heritable component, much like you can test if homosexuality has a genetically heritable component.

Sure, this idea is pretty far out there (this is an HN comment thread, after all, not a submission to Nature) but I think "vapid" is going a little too far.

When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes

Cue all of the younger folks who will be confused, because they're sure "meme" == picture with two comedic captions.

> Sometimes the interests of our genes and our memes align, such as when we invent antiseptics and antibiotics. Other times they conflict, such as when we invent birth control.

One of the most important concepts to take away from The Selfish Gene is that the idea that genes have "interests" is just an interesting thought experiment to explore how gene selection can lead to what appear to unselfish behaviors like cooperation, sympathy, and sacrifice.

Dawkins does not actually believe that genes are selfish, which IIRC he says right at the beginning of the book. So to say that the interests of genes and memes align (or don't align) is a fundamental flaw. Neither genes nor memes have interests. They just are.

And further, to believe that birth control is somehow harmful to the propagation of genes is also to miss an important concept from the book: that there is more to evolution than a strict numbers game. If birth control permits parents to invest greater resources in each child, then each child will have a greater competitive advantage in the population.

Finally, there is a lens through which genes and memes might someday be comparable, and that is information theory. However, we're a long way off from the theoretical and computational footing to try such a thing.

I wonder how the whigs figure into this grand vision.

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