Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Mimetic Evolution | Hacker News Reader

Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Mimetic Evolution

nav.al

44 pointstodsacerdoti31 comments

> Although you can work out in the gym and increase the size of your biceps, that doesn’t mean your children are going to inherit those characteristics.

Our evolving understanding of genetics show a less black-and-white picture than this sentence does. We can trigger certain genes through behaviours, which would otherwise remain dormant, which in turn can be passed onto our offspring.

More info: https://www.science.org/content/article/parents-emotional-tr...

There seems to be alot of hype regarding epigenetics. Many of the grander claims seem to rest on thin evidence, and to the extent a phenomenon is real often given simpler explanations--cultural, genetic, or epigenetic--after everybody stops paying attention.

The evidence is actually quite dramatic. Birds that have difficulty cracking open the seeds available to them give birth to birds that have much thicker and strong beaks. Birds that have trouble extracting seeds from large flowers or other structures give birth to birds with longer and thinner beaks. Large changes to phenotype that used to be thought to evolve only slowly over long periods turn out to happen as quick changes based on environmental inputs.

Epigenetics is very mainstream now. "Big data" was hyped once too, but now MapReduce and stream processing are common and boring.

Just a data point:

mapreduce and stream processing were well published things long before Google popularized them, in the world of parallel computing at least back into the late 80s, when i started grad school doing just those things.

sadly i donated my old books to the library years ago or i'd provide a citation.

I think you missed a point. It is not about passing on a trait to your children but about passing on an idea to anyone else. In this context selective pressures apply as information spreads across individuals

The part the parent refers to IS about passing on a trait to children. It's not in the part of the article talking about mimetics yet.

Really interesting idea. But a word of caution. "Fitness" in terms of survival of ideas might just mean "most viral" which could be very far from most people's cultural aspirations.

There is a relatively low barrier of entry for ideas to spread when compared to genes. Maybe that actually explains a lot of issues we have in society.

I mean what is ultimately the error correction mechanism when it comes down to ideas for societal organization for example? Technology on the other hand to me is area where physics must have some benefit for really testing ideas. But you can still see lots of odd biases and peculiar directions that technology takes if you look closely.

Variety is good for evolution, so I guess having only ideas being fit when they are close to a majority cultural aspiration would actually limit the applicability of the gene-meme analogy in this context.

I am actually afraid that the error correction mechanism is this oligoculture we witness which to me indicates that memevolution is short lived and will have to evolve itself. Wondering whether oligo culture and the move of Overton windows is for memeevolution to use physical survival in the context of conflicts as a means to error correct.

Variety is good for evolution, but evolution isnt always good for individual species or animals. There are countless species that found themselves in evolutionary dead ends and went extinct, and many more more that were pushed to extinction by a new competitor.

I agree. The question is what will species be like in the context of this evolution.

The work of the "postmodernist" historian Michel Foucault (quotes cause that term is usually a red herring) is precisely about specifying a framework with which to understand how this 'virality' works, why some ideas are minoritized and others hegemonized, which has something to do with figuring the 'conditions for truth' over time.

The problem is that in the case of memetic evolution the "fitness" of an idea to propagate is inversely correlated to its survival value to humans. So lots of terrible ideas have become - and continue to become - mainstream. If we think fake news is bad now imagine what it will be like in the future.

> The problem is that in the case of memetic evolution the "fitness" of an idea to propagate is inversely correlated to its survival value to humans.

No it isn't. Lots of memes are human-reproduction positive.

The ideas of cooking food, agriculture, fishing, language, clothes, antibiotics, are all survival-enhancing memes. All technology is memes.

I think the main problem is that the mutation rate and transfer rate of memes is still optimized for tribal settings.

Most mutations are disadvantageous, but if you never mutate, then you can never improve, so you need some mutations to make progress.

Meme mutation rate would be influenced by the structure of the brain (i.e. how likely a neuron is to misfire or make random connections) and meme transfer rate would be influenced by instincts (i.e. how likely a person is to trust another or go along with their idea). It's possible to influence these after birth through teaching, but genetics would still play a significant role this, and genes are generally very slow to adapt.

Just a few thousand years ago (a microscopic amount of time from a genetic view), it would not be possible for humans in one part of the world to quickly spread ideas to another. If one caveman tribe develops a disadvantageous meme mutation, it's mostly limited to that tribe. That tribe with the poison meme might die out, but there are other tribes that can still exist as backups for humanity. There might be that there's a little bit of genetic meme recklessness in humans that took advantage of that for faster development (some memeticly reckless tribes got lucky and grew). But with modern, connected society, meme spreading behavior that relied on that failsafe can now threaten every human.

It will probably be several thousand years before things get better, assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction.

The thing is, just like with genetics, we are not the arbiters of good. A meme might look bad, but if it spreads itself such that it doesn't die with it's last host, it is a good meme. Like viruses, some burn through their host population and go extinct, some cling on but are still detrimental, and some increase fitness, and now we get into the distinction between a parasite and a symbiont.

Interesting that anti-vax is a "bad" meme that actually benefits real viruses. If there were a virus that could induce susceptibility to memes that promote the virus, that would really be something.

I think you may have just inadvertently invented the concept of Meme drive [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive

As another poster mentioned, memes are analogous to viruses in their interaction with humans. I would hazard to guess that any survival value to humans is purely accidental, especially taking into account the time frames involved.

Are you claiming that fire, language, and medicine have no survival value? All of these are memes or composed of memes.

Certainly they do, and perhaps before the internet, a larger proportion of memes were of the useful type. For whatever reason, post-internet, memes are no longer reliant on having survival value to humans in order to propagate. Note that the converse is not true.

The older concept of Noosphere is related to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

Replace evolution with adaptation (since the misnamed "evolution" might equally mean regression in capabilities, intelligence, or any trait that can be measured in general, like speed or lifespan, as long as the new version if fitter for the environment it operates in) and when, we're in the state of "mimetic adaptation".

Which is not as good as "mimetic evolution" sounds.

title should be 'Memetic Evolution'

And since I see one confused person with a dead comment about memes being "funny internet pictures", this comment is here to point out: that meaning was born out of misunderstanding. Memes are just ideas, described in a way analogous to genes. Ideas spread (through communication instead of reproduction), they mutate, they compete. It was coined by Richard Dawkins.

At some point someone described funny internet pictures as memes, accurately, and then roughly a billion people were exposed to the word without looking it up and changed the meaning.

I've never read anything that wasn't a bad regurgitation of ideas better presented elsewhere from this guy, and I have to wonder why he has amassed such a following.

I would love to have so much money that I can contemplate about stuff like this all day!

typo in the title: mimetic != memetic

Chapter 11 of the selfish gene from 1976 plainly states this.

> Chapter 11 of the selfish gene from 1976 plainly states this.

Yep. And the idea has been elaborated upon by many writers since (especially during the '90s).

Yep. I wrote a paper about memetic algorithms in the 90s, before it even was called memetic algorithms and before the whole thing was called AI.

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