The question is to what degree has the overclass evolved our culture in ways that best suits the financial interests of the overclass (e.g., plutocrats, large corporations etc)?
Has our culture been domesticated by the overclass through overclass influence on educational curricula?
If so, this would seem to be a strong argument against common core.
Organisms evolve through natural selection - culture evolves in a different way. Memes might be similar in some ways to genes - but there is no natural selection of cultures.
Isn't there? A culture, idea or a meme that doesn't spread from person to person in some way isn't going to exist after the people participating in it die. When you get down to it, "natural selection" is just a similar application of population dynamics.
The real differences are in the radically different composition of an organism and an idea/meme/culture/institution, with implications for the way these ideas are transmitted and transformed.
I believe the 'selection' abstraction holds in culture. It happens to ideas, products and of course living forms. The "forces" are different but still.
There is. The evolution force is an iterative updating process. Fitness can be one-dimensional like "number of likes" or "payoff in a game". Keep feeding in variety and the selection process will do its job.
It's obvious this idea is crap if you think about fads. These are ideas that propagate rapidly until they become quite popular and then mysteriously vanish. This flies in the face of an inherent superiority driving the propagation of the idea.
As an evolutionary biologist and a student of cultural transmission this idea (memetics) has always annoyed me from both ends. It is a bad idea, and I wish it would die. It's even more annoying that it somehow manages to add to Dawkins' misplaced prestige.
> These are ideas that propagate rapidly until they become quite popular and then mysteriously vanish. This flies in the face of an inherent superiority driving the propagation of the idea.
isn't that because fads become "locked" in time? the fad is well evolved for the current culture but as the cluture changes the fad becomes very poorly suited for it, and dies.
i could make the same argument that you make against fads against any once-prolific-but-now-dead species, e.g. how could species x be wiped out by a change in its environment? that flies in the face of evolution creating a superior species.
evoltuionary advantage stems from a superior adaption to the current environment, and culture happens to change vastly more frequently than the environments most (if not all) species live in. hence the rapid rise and fall of memes.
A biological analog that pops into mind is fermentation. Bacteria produce alcohol in an environment until the alcohol reaches toxic levels and all the bacteria die.
I am not saying they are equivalent, just that the propagation of a fad has similarities to the propagation of alcohol-producing bacteria in a closed environment.
So now the analogy is to growth and dying off rather than selection, and the analog of the meme is the bacterial population, rather than a gene?
Why are we trying to make these ham-fisted analogies at all? Ideas do not behave anything like genes; they have almost no properties in common with genes.
No, propagation speed is equal to viral factor. A fad is analogous to a very contagious, but a mild virus. Infected people will gain immunity after a while and the virus vanishes. This happens when a fad becomes boring and not worth sharing with other people.
The crucial difference is that memes (thanks to the way we store them) can be quickly and easily revived, in short time span. However in a long perspective they aren't durable. The genes work exactly in opposite way.
It's an unjust counterexample, because religion is in our genetics, a tendency to symbolism, hierarchy and dogmatism, awe and fear of the unknown. Theism though is anything but durable in the face of scientific progress, but the same can be said about genes. It is durable only in ignorance.
Therefore faithful believe is a marker for predisposition, so the carrier will have to adapt or die out at which point the meme has to be revived, as the GP stated. Religions do change much quicker than the gene-pool. They hardly qualify as memetic if really anyone (counting in antheists with their own cults and rites modulo the theism) follows them, anyway.
When compared to durability/persistence of genes, religions are just short blinks with their mere few thousands years. Actually cave paintings or tools are better examples of memes longevity.
It is an antagonistic relation. Cultural preferences influence the selection which influences the genetics, while genetics influence cultural selection. Genetics have a negative feedback on culture, the culture can only develop as much as the genes allow, but the culture has a positive feedback on the genes (sexual selection).
At points in human history there was almost certainly natural selection for certain behaviors and cultural practices.
Certainly the parallels with biological evolution aren't completely accurate, but throughout history, cultures have conquered and displaced others and were able to do so (in part at least) because they were doing something different (presumably "better" from survival standpoint). So from this perspective cultures have certainly "evolved" partially through a natural selection process.
1) entities exist and replicate
2) changes occur during replication
3) selection processes pertain that mean some entities replicate more than others
If culture meets those criteria then it is evolving. That may not help you understand the details or make any useful predictions. You probably need all kinds of additional models and theories to get to grips with culture. There may be other non-evolution processes happening as well. But to decide if it is evolving, just determine if these criteria apply, and you are done.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadThe question is to what degree has the overclass evolved our culture in ways that best suits the financial interests of the overclass (e.g., plutocrats, large corporations etc)?
Has our culture been domesticated by the overclass through overclass influence on educational curricula?
If so, this would seem to be a strong argument against common core.
The real differences are in the radically different composition of an organism and an idea/meme/culture/institution, with implications for the way these ideas are transmitted and transformed.
As an evolutionary biologist and a student of cultural transmission this idea (memetics) has always annoyed me from both ends. It is a bad idea, and I wish it would die. It's even more annoying that it somehow manages to add to Dawkins' misplaced prestige.
isn't that because fads become "locked" in time? the fad is well evolved for the current culture but as the cluture changes the fad becomes very poorly suited for it, and dies.
i could make the same argument that you make against fads against any once-prolific-but-now-dead species, e.g. how could species x be wiped out by a change in its environment? that flies in the face of evolution creating a superior species.
evoltuionary advantage stems from a superior adaption to the current environment, and culture happens to change vastly more frequently than the environments most (if not all) species live in. hence the rapid rise and fall of memes.
I am not saying they are equivalent, just that the propagation of a fad has similarities to the propagation of alcohol-producing bacteria in a closed environment.
Why are we trying to make these ham-fisted analogies at all? Ideas do not behave anything like genes; they have almost no properties in common with genes.
Therefore faithful believe is a marker for predisposition, so the carrier will have to adapt or die out at which point the meme has to be revived, as the GP stated. Religions do change much quicker than the gene-pool. They hardly qualify as memetic if really anyone (counting in antheists with their own cults and rites modulo the theism) follows them, anyway.
This is actually a single question I would ask someone if wanted to know if they are left/right kind of a person
Certainly the parallels with biological evolution aren't completely accurate, but throughout history, cultures have conquered and displaced others and were able to do so (in part at least) because they were doing something different (presumably "better" from survival standpoint). So from this perspective cultures have certainly "evolved" partially through a natural selection process.
1) entities exist and replicate 2) changes occur during replication 3) selection processes pertain that mean some entities replicate more than others
If culture meets those criteria then it is evolving. That may not help you understand the details or make any useful predictions. You probably need all kinds of additional models and theories to get to grips with culture. There may be other non-evolution processes happening as well. But to decide if it is evolving, just determine if these criteria apply, and you are done.