Nearly every time I've heard memes and memetics mentioned, by philosophers and by others, it has been scoffingly. At least two of the complaints I vaguely recall is that it's just a pseudo-scientific fad and that it's an example of [academic imperialism]
? at its worst. A commonly made point is that biologists just aren't
trained to think about culture and so naturally the whole notion is facile. Now, I am not saying this in order to get into a debate about these accusations--I'm saying them in order to try to get someone to add some such evaluations to the article. I'm not the person, because I personally don't know anything of significance about memetics (for all I know, I'd be the most avid memetics supporter, if I learned more about it; or I might end up supporting the views I just mentioned). I also have no idea
how common the above criticisms are or whether they are fair. All of these things I don't know are important knowledge to have in presenting this issue as part of the article. But I do believe that the issue needs to be presented, either here or as part of the
meme article.
By the way, we need to decide carefully really belongs in the meme article and what belongs in the memetics article. They can overlap, but as a first guess, I would say that the meme article should be about memes, while the memetics article should be about memetics. :-) --LMS
I think of memes and memetics as the arch-example of scientism, the idea that the *methods* of the natural sciences (as opposed to the *insights* thereof) are appropriate to all things, but then again too much of the 'sociobiology' I've heard in public is biologists talking about society rather than anything more substantive. --
MichaelTinkler
You mean "methods of science" like honest observation, rational discussion, rigorous testing? If those aren't appropriate tools for studying society, then I weep for its future. --LDC
Well. Let's start with "testing". Who's going to conduct the human experimentation to see if memetics works at a
societal level. We're not talking about college students pressing buttons in a cognitive science lab, here! It's much more like the legend of Frederick II Hohenstaufen having orphan children raised without human speech to see what language they would turn out to speak (the Adamic language was the theory). --
MichaelTinkler
Argument from lack-of-imagination is less than convincing. Yes, it's difficult to imagine ways to test societal influences, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Good after-the-fact analysis is one way (comparing similar cultures to determine the effects of a few variable); computer simulation is another. --LDC
indeed, lack-of-imagination is not convincing, but neither is the idea that there can be a few variables between similar cultures. Ants seem to work that way (what I've read about Wilson on ants is very convincing -- I was much less convinced by Wilson on the death penalty) but the evidence from anthropology is more recalcitrant. To begin with, observer phenomenon seldom seems to cause much trouble with ants.
Yes, it's very difficult. I understand
why people often disdain "scientific" approaches to sociology, but what they generally mean to disdain is the jumping to conclusions by some over-eager human scientists on the basis of very limited data; things like evolutionary psychology can indeed be faulted for that. But the problem is not the scientific methods, but the natural human tendency to over-generalize from their results. The cure is
greater adherence to the real principles of science--most significantly honesty and skepticism--not abandonment of them for other methods. --LDC
Current version of article says:
- It tries to explain many very controversial subjects, like religions and political systems, using mathematical models.
How many studies of memetics have actually used mathematical models? I can't see why they couldn't be used, and I think I've even seen one or two papers attempting to construct these models for memetics; but 99% of the work on memetics I've seen has not used mathematical models. (It has mostly not even been applications of memetics, just arguments about the validity of memetics as an approach.) --
Simon J Kissane
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