Evolution continued

I rarely if ever get reactions to the crap I post here, but this time I did in response to my previous post on religion and evolution. I left a small promisory note announcing some examples of what I think is ill-advised use of evolutionary theory.

One of the best and most wide-spread examples is the idea of meme selection. Though widely discussed and refined by serious scientists, it has been (ab)used to "explain" (and I use the phrase in its most liberal sense) all kinds of things, including the spread of religion. What do I have against it? Nothing in principle, but from what I have seen there are several serious problems with it.

First, what exactly is a 'meme'? Dawkins, who coined the phrase defined it as imitable behavior. Elsewhere, he calls them 'viruses of the mind'. Obviously, this is too vague and too metaphorical. If we stick to the behavior bit: this is a functional description of the unit of selection. Dawkins is consistent as his definition of a gene is functional as well. So basically, a meme, just like a gene, for Dawkins is 'that which gets selected'. Now with genes at least we have a decent idea what it is that gets selected. In other words, we know in what stuff the functional traits of genes reside. DNA (but also other things).

And this brings me to number two. For evolution to have any bite as an explanation at all, you have to be sure that there is a causal feedback loop from the function displayed to the selection of the unit that displays this function (i.e., a gene, a phenotype, a group, or what have you). However, we don't have such a causal feedback loop for most if not all proposed memes. How exactly do bits of behavior get copied and propagated? Through 'imitation' or 'learning' the protagonists of meme-selection say. But that is just a label, until we have more grasp of how exactly human beings (or animals for that matter) 'imitate' or 'learn'. And apart from some theories of the learning of movement through some forms of 'trial and error', we don't know what happens when people learn, for instance, Pythagoras theorem.

I am not saying that therefore meme-selection is a mistake. Far from it! What I am claiming is that just because you observe a change in the composition of a population (of individuals, of ideas, or what have you) which does not seem to be the result of some intentional process, that does not imply that the process of propagation must be evolutionary. In chapter 2 of my 2002 book (here is a blur) I give some examples of this type of quick jump in economics and perhaps one day, when I am a big boy, I will write a paper about it...