Memes vs. genes

[nancylebov]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/1/12/11598/8946

"Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second." - Phil Kerby

I've noticed that, contrary to the usual sociobiology notions, people are rather apt to cut down on their reproductive chances in service of their memes. People in one of those dowry murder cultures don't say "Let's marry our daughters off to men who won't ask us to spend huge amounts and then quite possibly kill our daughters to get a chance at the next dowry." People in honor killing cultures don't behave like ideal Heinlein parents and say "If the man you had an affair with has good genes, we'd be delighted to take you back and help raise the kid".

Not all parents want their kids in the military, but some largish proportion do consider losing onw or more children to war to be a worthwhile sacrifice. And it seems likewise for suicide bombing.

And there are people who don't have kids because they're worried about the population explosion.

For humans, the competition between memes is at least as sharp and important as the competition between genes. I'm tempted to say that any meme which can't get people to damage their reproductve chances is too wimpy to survive in the modern world, but that's probably overdoing it.

Link thanks to dark_christian. The link is about an failed effort to keep a homosexuality-is-ok book out of school libraries. Now that I think about it, even that is an example of my premise. If homophobic societies have higher reproductive rates (plausible, but not proven, which makes it good enough for sociobiology), then one should prefer acceptance of homosexuality in other people's families.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that, contrary to the usual sociobiology notions, people are rather apt to cut down on their reproductive chances in service of their memes.

As Dawkins pointed out, in humans, memetic evolution has far outpaced genetic evolution, so one would expect such an outcome. The brains have seized control of the system.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, both the ancient Greeks and Romans and Confucian China were pretty much indifferent to homosexual activity, provided that people, at some point, had children, which was seen pretty much as an obligation to the family. Of course, these societies also saw it as a matter of "This is what you like to do" rather than as an identity, which is a little different from the way it's seen in modern Western culture.

Of course, the Greeks were overpopulating for much of the Classical period, and the Imperial Romans had legislation taxing unmarried people over a certain age, but they didn't care what else you did, so long as children appeared on the scene. I wonder how many other cultures have been similarly indifferent.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Ypu have put your finger on the fallacy of the modern social movement to see verything in terms of genes and evolution. Mostly, this is by people who don't understand the actual science of evolution.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Only one fallacy? And what part of the science are you thinking of?

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

The fallacy that reduces all of evolution to the single mating encounter.

This is why population evolution and population genetics has drifted out and become its own specialty. It recognizes that we are talking about the law of averages over a population. So that things that decrease certain kinds of mating/breeding opportunities are offset by increasing the overall chances of survival. The same failure leads people to ignore that "evolution" is a multi-player, multi-round non-zero sum game, when everyone keeps thinking it is a simple zero sum game played in a single round.

Consider: in many cultures, human beings limit their fertility in response to economic incentives to do so. That looks bad if we are considering the single human in a single round. But my fewer offspring, born later in life, will enjoy economic and societal benefits. And even if I never have children, overall human society around me benefits by my industry and conservation of resources. Is that anti-survival? Not terribly, because the genes (if it is only genes) that say "slow down on reproduction and spread the benefit around" are shared by a large population, with each member of the pool (including me and my more limited number of offspring) having an overall increased chance of surviving.

Second example: The Adelai Penguine seeks mates based on a variety of traits. One of these is rock collecting, so that the eggs can rest on rocks and not freeze. But sometimes, mates are not great rock collectors, but unmated males have lots of needed rocks. The female will go to the single male and mate with it in exchange for rocks. As she will also mate with the male selected, there is a chance that the egg was fertilized by either male (or, in the case of multiple eggs, both males).

Lots of folks think this is bad for the male in the mating pair, because it "wastes energy" taking care of a chick that may not be descended from it. But is it? The male in the nest pair has increased his odds of having a viable descendant from zero (egg sits on ground and cracks) to 50%. Nor would it somehow be advantageous to be able to "root out," the non-nested male's eggs. Because penguins mate multiple times in their lifetime, and a male that nests this time may be the excluded bachelor next time. So all males benefit over time from the willingness of the nested male to rear chicks possibly sired by another.

Humans seem to be doing well for themselves in terms of generating offspring. Every mating pair of humans confronts a set of breeding choices over time. The choices work out for both the individual humans and the human population as a whole, or human beings disappear.

[avram]

This reminds me of r/K selection theory. In population genetics, r-selected species are those that produce large numbers of offspring, each of which has a low probability of survival to adulthood, while K-selected species have fewer offspring, but invest more resources in each one. This is a spectrum of behavior, and "large", "fewer", "more", and the like should be read as relative terms, not absolute.

Anyway, r-selection tends to work best when a species is in an unstable or unpredictable environment, while K-selection seems to work best in stable environments where the ability to compete for limited resources is important, and K-selected species tend to have slow-growing populations near the carrying capacity of their local environment.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Indeed, critically, that behaviors lie along a continum without a "right" or "wrong" answer.

Too many people know jack about actually evolutionary science, but feel free to say all manner of stupid things that they intuit from what little they know. This is why we get books about "rape genes" and how behavior is about propogating "selfish genese" and blah, blah, just like we used to get books which explained everything in terms of Freudian psychology, anthropology, or whatever the latest fad happened to be.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The fallacy that reduces all of evolution to the single mating encounter.

Thanks. That does cover a tremendous amount of what's wrong with sociobiology. Tragically, I'm thereby driven to popularized Freudianism--it isn't surprising that men would make that particular mistake.

There's at least one other thing wrong with sociobiology--thinking that they know a lot more about what's feasible to evolve than anyone does at this point. For example, the riskiness of giving birth has a standard, plausible explanation--it's a combination of the pelvic structure needed for walking, and the large brain needed for intelligence. However, if those factors weren't know, I bet there'd be whomped-up sociobiological explanation of why the high death rate was good for something.

In general, though, there's never a suggestion that any behavior is a kludge, or that we aren't at an optimum yet--and possibly weren't when we were hunter-gatherers, either.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Stephen J Gould wrote an excellent piece on this theme some years back, but I can't remember the name of the essay.

I wrote a blog post on this a couple of years back:
http://osewalrus.livejournal.com/59672.html

[avram]

As I understand it, the highest reproductive rates tend to be found in cultures where women are treated as property. Nowadays these also tend to be cultures where homosexuality is very strongly discouraged, but I don't think this correlation holds throughout history.

[madfilkentist]

I don't buy Dawkins' notion of "memes." Ideas aren't independent, self-reproducing entities. People form them and change them, even if more often for irrational than rational reasons.

The "meme" notion implies that ideas are atomic, independent of one another, just as each chromosome has a high degree of independence from the chromosome next to it. But in fact, ideas grow out of other ideas and are modified by new thoughts.

Saying that people act in certain ways because of their memes casts them as passive products of the ideas they've heard, just as biologically they can't change their heredity.

[avram]

Though chromosomes modify each other, too.

While the coherence of memetics as a field of study is often overstated, especially in SF circles, I find it useful sometimes as a point of view, an informal analogy.

And it may have more utility at the level of populations than that of individuals. Just like many economic phenomena.