Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I'm your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what's our topic today?

Masimo, today's topic is memetics, which is a study of the concept of Meems, which is a term originated by Richard Dawkins in his very popular 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, where he coined the word meme to refer to, roughly speaking, ideas like language and stories and beliefs and customs, which he argued undergo evolution in a way similar to genes.

So the term memetics is a take off on genetics, the study of genes. So the parallel, as I understand it, between memes and genes goes like this. Genes are units of information that are copied and occasionally changed or mutate during the copying process, and they compete with each other essentially for limited resources. So the information encoded in the gene influences whether that gene is more or less likely to propagate over time.

And the same is true of a meme. It's a unit of information, an idea that is copied either because people tell each other ideas or people observe the behavior of other people and infer an idea from that behavior and so on.

And ideas frequently change dramatically as they're passed from person to person throughout society, over time and ideas compete for limited resources, in this case, space and attention in people's minds. And again, like genes, the nature of an idea, the information contained in it influences how successful it's going to be at that competition. So those three conditions copying one with variation two and and with competition for survival three, produce this process of Darwinian evolution.

I'd say probably two of the most famous recent proponents of memetics are Daniel Dennett in his books Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine.

And in articles like The Power of Memes for Scientific American People in popular culture, certainly use the meme a lot, the word meme a lot. You could say that that the whole concept of memes has itself been a very successful meme, but it's debatable. And we are going to debate today whether the concept of memes was actually a successful insight at all. I would say the main points of contention, as I see them, are over first, whether a meme is even a coherent concept.

Second, how strong are the parallels between memes and genes?

And finally, whether the study of memes memetics has the capacity to make useful contributions to our understanding of the world.

Why would you say that's a good way to lay it out today? Is anything important?

There might be another one or two objections that we might might get to touch on or that please base your contention about memetics. But I first want to go back to your actual introduction to sort of add something to the context, which is the reason Dawkins came up with the with the idea of memes is because he was trying to push the idea that that we can think of, of universal Darwinism, of a generalization or a generalized version of the winning theory that applies not only to biological systems, but to any system that fulfills certain properties and certain properties of certain characteristics.

Those characteristics, in the case of the biological organisms, of course, have to be that there has to be a reliable system of inheritance and the word reliability is important.

In fact, that might come up later if the system is too reliable and if there's no variation, there cannot be evolution. And if the system is not sufficiently reliable, that is that copies are made, but the information is passed only very, very partially. Then there is essentially a meltdown of what what population geneticists call a mutation meltdown.

So the population simply disappears, goes extinct because natural selection can't work reliably enough anyway, so that what is required for either winning system to actually evolve, to take place for evolution by the mechanism to take place is the reliable inheritance system. That has to be, of course, competition for resources. There's to be limited resources. That's the sort of the Malthusian part of Darwin's idea. And there has to be some kind of connection between the variation for fitness and the inheritance of the characteristics that that contribute to fitness.

In other words, there has to be a phenotype that it makes the organism or the entity. Capable of competing, and that is an information pertinent to that phenotype is the thing that has to be inherited to explain what a phenotype of a phenotype. Yes, a phenotype is pretty much anything that is produced by genotype at different levels or a phenotype could be the structure of a cell. It could be a behavior. It could be the morphology of an organism, any any characteristic behavioral or structural that the organism has, except for the actual code that encodes daddy for the genetic information now.

So. So Dawkins was interested in pushing this idea that there can be such thing as a universal Darwinian, meaning that if we ever discovered life on another planet, for instance, assuming that that form of life fulfils those three basic characteristics, then Darwinian evolution would have to occur. Now, that's an interesting idea. And in Dawkins introduced memes because he couldn't think at the time Pendry of it. Obviously, we don't have access to exobiology. We don't have any eggs, a biological system yet.

We haven't discovered life outside of Earth. So there are no other biological systems that are analogous to ours. So he came up with an idea of a no logical system or at least a system that is not directly biological. And that's the evolution of ideas. Now, there are, of course, since that time, in fact, there have been other Darwinian systems. I mean, we have, for instance, and we can study the evolution of computer programs in similar ways and viruses and computer viruses in the same way.

Right. Which is a special kind of a computer computer program. So it is actually, in fact, the case that Darwinism is universal, meaning that if a system, even a no logical system, such as a set of computer programs that have to live in a no logical environment clearly and compete for resources, for instance, memory or access to memory or access to CPU time or whatever it is. As it turns out, those that system, in fact, does behave according to the general Darwinian principle of universal Darwinism, of universal Darwinism is in fact a very good one.

Now, the question of whether Meems, whatever they are, are subject to that, that's obviously a different one. But I thought it was interesting to see where where Dawkins was coming from.

You showed your hand right there. And I believe whatever they are, whatever they are.

So maybe that's what we should start with. There is what one could think of as the ontology of memes. You know what I mean? Exactly. Now, you said something along the lines of their ideas and left it very precisely because there is a lot of disagreement on this point.

So don't don't hold me to that.

No, I will not. And in fact, that's part of the problem, right. That there is a lot of disagreement about what exactly or even approximately I mean, is one of the definitions I pull out of a dictionary is a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes. A cultural item. Yes. Now the question is, what constitutes a cultural item? I would think that pretty much anything that we do as human beings is a cultural item.

Yeah.

In fact, I saw a TED talk by Susan Blackmore in which the example that she started off with of a meme was the custom in hotels of folding the end of the toilet paper roll into a point for elegance, I guess.

I suppose so, yes.

Just just one of many possible examples of a meme right now, Meems, also vary from, you know, a tune or even a bit of a tune that gets stuck in your mind to a symphony, to the entire idea of music, for instance. And again, that seems to be a problem. There is nothing analogous in the biological world, meaning that genes are fairly well circumscribed and prescribed sort of entities. They're not easy. The genes themselves are not quite that easy, actually, to define.

There are several different definitions of genes. The definition of gene has changed historically.

For instance, from what I remember of the selfish Gene, Dawkins defined it roughly as the longest string of DNA that remains intact over a long succession of copying.

Is that yeah, I don't not like a specific cut off, but it gives you sort of the guideline of what you're. Yeah, I don't particularly like that definition because it doesn't have anything functional and built into it. So most people think of most biologists think of genes in one of two ways. They're fundamentally two different kinds of genes. One is pieces of DNA that produce proteins so that encode proteins actually don't have DNA.

That segment dodges the issue of how you.

Well, there actually are, since the genetic code is essentially universal, almost universal on planet Earth, we actually can tell where a protein encoding gene starts because there is a particular code on. There is a particular triplet of of chemicals that actually signals the starting point. Kind of a gene, and that's necessary because the enzyme that has to actually produce first the RNA from the DNA and then eventually these are the protein from the RNA. That's the standard way things work and where genes and proteins that enzyme has to know as to figure out where where Gene actually starts.

So there are there are start codons and there are stop codons that actually very clearly biochemically identified. So in the case of protein, could producing genes. The problem is fairly clearly resolved. You can you can tell where Gene starts and where it ends. There are some complications which we may not want to get into, for instance, that that some genes have multiple reading frames, meaning that they can produce different proteins if the enzyme starts reading the gene at slightly different places.

But but that's but that's only a rather minor complication. It's an interesting one, but it's a minor one. The second category of genes are what are called regulatory sequences that don't necessarily directly produce proteins. They simply affect the production of proteins through their effect on other genes. So these are stretches of DNA that are found often, but not always right before the beginning of an actual protein coding gene. And depending on their on their structure, they modulate when the gene is going to be transcribed, when the gene is going to be active.

How much is going to be active and so on and so forth. So you might have heard that if you remember a few years ago, there was this brouhaha about the fact that biologists found that that human genome is only about 20000 genes. That's not quite correct. It's only 20000 structural genes, meaning 20000 genes that produce proteins as opposed to also regulatory.

These are correct. And if you start counting the number of regulatory sequences in human genome, you probably go up into the millions, into the hundreds of thousands.

So I guess the question is, what is the analogous way of defining?

Right. And I don't have an answer for that and I don't know any matters is to actually have come up with an answer that doesn't seem to be a particular way to end any any particularly interesting way to the delimit. I mean, we don't know where Amien starts and where it ends. How large is small can be.

You mean in the sense of your scope, whether it's, you know, a bar of a song or the song or a genre of music or music?

Right. And if it is all of the above, then then the analogy with the genes begin to break, because that would be equivalent to say, for instance, that a gene is not just a stretch of DNA, but it's also a chromosome.

It's also an entire genome. It's also multiple genomes.

So what I thought was the really interesting way that the the parallels might break down is that it's not clear.

So with genes, as you were talking about earlier, you have the genotype and then you have the phenotype that it produces. And it's not really clear if we have something analogous for Meems.

So as far as I can tell, some artists define a meme as as a cultural item or cultural artifact, as you were saying earlier.

So it would be, you know, the the song as it's played by musical instruments or song as written down or or a fashion as it's manifested in in the actual clothes being sold. So that would count as the. Mhm. So that would be I guess an externalised way of defining a meme.

And, and then the, the alternative is to define it in an internal way to the meme is actually a unit of information as it's stored in our brains as opposed to as it's manifested in in how we in what we make out of it or how we behave because of the meme.

And so, so there trade offs of the two different definitions, the the internalised definition, the sort of pattern in our brain that represents the idea is in one sense, that's really what Marxists are looking for, because that's really what does the replicating it's the idea in our brain that spurs us to tell someone else or to create, you know, something a piece of text that someone else will read. And so so that's sort of what has the replicating power as opposed to, say, a particular style of car that we create and it just sits there.

It can't replicate itself. It's an inanimate object. So so that's useful.

On the other hand, it's not really that useful because we don't know enough about the brain yet to understand how ideas are actually represented in our brain.

Right. And we don't even know whether the same idea that I hear and you hear is going to be represented in the exact same pattern of information in my brain as it is in your brain. Right. So if we're talking about means as far as replicating, you know, if I tell an idea to you and it creates a different pattern in your brain, then it seems problematic to say that that's copying itself. Right? Exactly.

You know, exactly. Defining as the pattern are different patterns.

In fact, I would bet that that that that is probably the case. That is the brain's instantiate ideas in different. Ways, different patterns. That's that's true, by the way, also of genes and phenotypes. There is you can have the same phenotype instantiated by the action of different genes. It's not that there is there is not a simple relationship between genes and phenotype. So the same type of nose, for instance, could be the result of a different number of genes that just happen to converge on the same kind of phenotype.

But is that a problem for genetic? No, it's not genetic, because if you think about it, it's the problem is the other way around, right? It's the phenotype is unique, is is common, but the genetic sequences are unique. So you can still tell the genes apart, even though the effects of those genes may be similar. In the case of the meme that you just described, it's essentially it's almost the other way around. It's like the pattern, which is the thing that needs to be replicated itself, is multiple instantiated, not not its phenotype.

Right.

OK, so but OK, just to be clear, with genes, they are actually the information stored encoded in the DNA or RNA. Right. They're not actually the DNA itself. So Gene is not something material.

It's it's there's a pattern. Right. Am I right? Not really. Biologists would say that the gene is the piece of DNA. Now, you know, obviously the important characteristics of that piece of DNA is, in fact, the information. But for instance, biologists make a distinction between identity when genes are identical by descent and when they're identical by mutation. So two genes are identical by descent. If they actually were transmitted through common ancestors and to genes may be, in fact, identical by mutation if they started out in different ancestors.

Is there any way to tell just by looking at them, or do you know that OK? Yeah, there are ways to tell. You have to have information about about, of course, the family tree of the individuals carrying those genes. But there is a way to tell.

So that would be another analogy, that there would be this analogy in the mean. There's a pattern of information, whereas a gene is the actual physical thing right now.

The Mahmud's could turn this into an advantage because another one of the classic objection to Mendez's is that we don't know we don't seem to have any particular idea about what the physical basis of memes are. And if you define a meme as just a pattern of information as opposed to a particular instantiation of that information, then you say, well, all right, I don't need to find a physical basis. It could be that the same meme in this case is instantiated in your brain by a particular pattern of neuronal firing in my brain with a different pattern of normal pattern firing and in fact, in on the hard drive of a computer by a completely different means.

Right. Again, that's I mean, that's that's that's one way out of the problem.

And what exactly constitutes a mean. But that is, again, a major this analogy. We don't work that way. So the question is, you know, there is a threat out. There seems to be a trade off between, you know, how much do you want to keep the original idea of an analogy with genes and how much do you want to get out of the problems that emerge from that analogy? Right.

And you also have the problem of of the same idea being represented in totally different media, like how are you going to say that there's the same pattern in in music as there is in the.

Well, actually, I guess that that's an easier case because you can sort of have the same pattern of sound. You can represent a pattern of sound and visually. But I guess a feeling maybe or an attitude you could express in in art or in song or in writing or whatever.

And it's not clear to me that there would be any way of drawing a parallel in terms of the pattern in each one.

Right. So, yeah.

And in fact, even even the piece of music, I mean, depends. You know, obviously there are different ways of of replicating that pattern to the ways of rebegin the pattern matter.

Yeah. Or they're inconsequential. If they're inconsequential, why are they inconsequential to or are they a family?

It means that that sort of share something in common and or are they completely different means or is it the same distance between different in different ways? It's not clear.

And actually one of our commenters on the blog raised another good question about how to define a mean that I hadn't thought about.

So if you have a a claim like just a statement, say the example he brought up was Bush is a good man.

OK, so what if it's the truth and they're not quite right.

So if that's the meme, then if you have two people hearing that meme, that that idea, depending on their their personality and their attitudes, they're going to react in totally different ways. So, you know, person might feel positively about that claim and and sort of internally affirm it and person B might feel very negatively about that claim and and totally react against it.

So I'm sure. Represented differently in their brains. They're not both believing the same thing. I think that's the same phrase, but they're believing different things about the phrase. So it's not really clear whether the meaning of the phrase or whether the meme is, you know, the the truth claim about that phrase and the attitudes about that phrase.

Right.

And absolutely. And in fact, certainly that is a that is a good example where the institution in the brain would be different because the two people will react differently, for instance, emotionally to that phrase. Oh, right. Right. That's so right. So, so different areas of the brain will be activated in different patterns of neurons, probably will be activated. We don't know these for for sure which which parts, which, which neural patterns. But we do know that, for instance, dimming the dollars are involved in emotional reaction.

And so if one of the two subjects has more, you know, stronger emotional reaction to that phrase, then clearly the pattern of neurons is going to be different. And again, the question then arises, you know, what actually constitutes the mean? Is it a pattern? Is it the phrase itself? Is it the idea behind the phrase is the way in which the phrase is is presented or.

Yeah. And you have all of these these interdependencies between different means. So if you have a meme like equals empathy squared, it's really it doesn't really make sense to talk about.

It's it's adaptiveness, it's fitness on its own because it doesn't make sense if you don't have a whole host of other means also about physics and and what it means. And that's a good point.

So so there is an analogy there with genes that might come to the rescue, but not really.

Some genes only work in conjunction with other genes. Right. In fact, most genes only work in conjunction with our genes. And, you know, there's no such thing as a gene in isolation for and they are embedded into a genome that has a certain structure, certain properties and so on and so forth. However, population geneticists do have a way to deal with the mathematical theory of population. Genetics talks about qualify, quantify fitness as a in terms of individual genes because it takes the genetic background and averages it out so you can average the fitness of a gene against a certain number of genetic backgrounds in which that gene is found.

And you can calculate what is the average fitness of that gene against a bunch of different backgrounds to see whether natural selection when in favor, in fact, favor it or not. Now, that seems to be very difficult to Meems, however, because we don't have I mean, the point you are raising, it's actually directly leads to what I think arguably is the most crucial objection to memetics, to the whole idea memetics, which is this.

We don't have a functional ecology of Meems.

How would you explain that? Right.

So first of all, what is a factor in college and what do we mean when we need it? Let's go back for a second to one of the most popular and most misguided objections to the standard, that theory. And then after that, I hope that that then that will make sense of in terms of memetics, so often you hear these thing that, you know, the theory of natural selection is simply a tautology. It's it's a truism. It's something that it doesn't really have any content, because after all, we're talking about the survival of the fittest and then we define the fittest as those who survive.

Right. So if you put it that way, it truly Darwinian Darwinian theory really becomes a simple tautology.

You're simply saying just that the genes that are the most adaptive are going to propagate. Right.

And you're then defining the genes that are most that are propagating as and when, in fact, they're most adaptive. Right. It's a complex becomes complex. Now, what standard Darwinian theory from that sort of objection is the fact that we have a functioning ecology, that is we don't define the fittest organisms or the fittest genes as those who survive. We actually can make predictions about which genes or which organisms are going to do better, because we have an ecology, we have an information about the environment.

So we can tell, for instance, that certain environments favor, you know, larger animals and therefore we can make predictions about the fact that any gene that contributes to increasing the size of that particular of the particular species of animals will be favored by natural selection. We also know, however, that if the environment changes in a certain other direction, where in fact smaller sizes are favorable, then then we can recalculate the functioning ecology and therefore the population biology of those genes.

In other words, we decoupled biologists, decouple the definition of thit from from the from the fact that from the observation that certain organisms are genes survive or don't survive. And it's that decoupling that is made possible by an ecological theory of genes that that takes the theory of natural selection out of the problem of being a tautology. Now, in the case of Meems, it seems to me it's not clear at all how you would do that because.

Why don't we consider, for instance, you know, let's let's take one of the most common examples of Meems, which is religion.

Well, religion as a meme is, one could say, successful because it's a widespread idea. Right. But. Why is it successful? What makes that thing successful and efficient? If the answer is simple, it well, it's successful because it reproduces, it spreads fast, then you're not saying anything. You're simply saying that it's successful because it's successful. You're not adding any content to it.

You have to have some ecological idea, cultural, ecological idea, essentially, that tells you why certain ideas or certain tunes are certain, you know, constructs are more successful than others.

Well, with the case of religion, I would imagine you could say a bunch of things about why it's successful.

I mean, it it's sort of self reinforcing, right?

I mean, it has all of these built in rituals and prayers and things you do with the community to sort of keep reminding you of this idea and it encourages proselytization. That's got to be a big one.

Right, like both of those. Yeah, that's true. But both of those are exceptions, right? I mean, there's other religions who dump the dump sometimes for one thing, but they don't spread that. Actually, they do there. You know, Judaism doesn't typically doesn't do anything. But we are still a very small people.

Yeah, well, not not that much actually now and certainly not it's not anywhere close to extinction. There are other there are the other practices that do proselytizing and they don't spread. Hmm. Right. I mean, secular humanism, for one, we certainly try to do proselytizing and we're much, much, you know, very, very small. We're certainly not particularly particularly successful.

Well, so so it sounds like you're saying that we we can't know for sure, at least based on the evidence that I've so far brought up, which traits are the adaptive ones.

But it seems like at least we're generating predictions here, right. That you could either work out some kind of clever way of of looking at just observational data or that you can maybe even set up some experiments in a lab. Like if I don't know if you have the idea, say that that this is a basic example, that simpler ideas are more likely to be retained and more likely the cashier. So they spread. So you could take two different ideas such that one was like a simplification of the other or something and see if that one spread faster.

And I'm just coming up with this like, yes, no, that's that's a good that's a good point. The problem is that you have to be able to have to eliminate alternative interpretations and explanations for why that idea is spreading. Right. So, for instance, religion, again, there are biological reasons. There are biological ideas for why religion spreads, that there are vintages, that that religions are advantageous to human societies, not to the religion themselves.

Remember that we're trying to figure out a way for means themselves to be advantageous to to themselves means they're supposed to be selfish elements. Right. In the metaphorical sense. I know. You know, I'm just reminding myself and of course, listeners.

Yes, of course.

But so we're talking about the entity, the meme that spreads because it has you know, it has a drive, again, on a conscious drive, but a drive to spread for its own benefit, not for the benefit of other of human beings.

If it were just if we were explaining religion, say, because it's it, for instance, favours prosocial behavior in humans, which several people have suggested as one of the possible explanations for the origin and spread of religion. Well, then that's not a mimetic explanation. That's an explanation in terms of advantage to human cultures, to human societies.

Well, what about something extremely disadvantageous to the human host of the meme, like suicide bombing?

That that mean that's that is advantageous to the individual. It's also disadvantageous to the gene. Do genes like to that person's reproductive fitness? And but you could argue from a medical point of view that it spreads because when someone does it, it creates a lot of publicity.

And it it, you know, alerts that limitation to the idea. And yeah, of course, a memetic theory of of suicide bombing.

But counter that to that to the extent, of course, you would expect that meme to go extinct. Right. Because if everybody reached equilibria.

Right. Like if you have a gene for aggression and a gene for pacifism. Right.

You know, but we haven't explained why people would emulate that kind of behavior. I mean, you say, for instance, you know, you just said maybe the publicity generated by that behavior. Well, all right. But going negative in the streets is also also generates a lot of questions.

Why do people want to emulate and it's exactly why it seems like going naked in the streets would be much easier and less costly behavior to emulate then committed suicide. Right.

So but is that really is that really a death blow? Like, couldn't couldn't we I mean, it seems like psychologists do research on why certain ideas are appealing to people and why they do, why it's hard for people to get rid of certain ideas or why people to cling cling to certain ideas.

There's also. It could inform a theory of memetics that we're now getting to the crux of think of the problem, which is, is memetics really a alternative, alternative theory of cultural evolution or does does it do the same kind of thing that psychologists already do?

It just attaches a new name to it instead of talking about ideas and culture as he talks about means. The idea, of course, is that in psychology, you explain. First of all, psychological operations are proximate explanations right there. Yes. Meaning that they deal with the immediate mechanisms that cause certain kinds of behavior, not with the ultimate mechanisms. The ultimate mechanism presumably have to deal with why is it that human beings evolved certain kinds of behaviors as opposed to why certain kinds of behaviors are implemented at the particular moment, you know, today in today's culture.

Right. So, for instance, let's take the obvious example. We all most of us, at least, we all crave fats and sugars. Now, the ultimate explanation for that, it's evolutionary. If we didn't, we wouldn't have had a really hard time throughout most of human evolution to find food, to survive and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, these days we do we don't just crave fat and sugar. We build 24 hour, seven days a week, you know, fast food restaurants and we have gourmet restaurants that specialize in chemical gastronomy and all that sort of stuff. Well, all of that it's not really explainable directly by the evolutionary urge to to eat fat and sugar, because that urge clearly could be much more easily, you know, satisfied than by making all these incredibly complicated cultural phenomenon of of restaurants, gastronomy and so on and so forth.

So there has to be other explanations, more proximate explanations, more explanations that the build on the kind of society that human beings have built over the last several thousand years right there, more much more pertinent than the evolutionary explanations.

The question is, OK, if I if I can provide an ultimate reason for why we crave food, the evolutionary one, and I can provide reasonable, proximate explanations for why is it that in the United States in the 21st century, there is a craze about certain kinds of restaurants, for instance, based on cultural, you know, the cultural environment of modern modern day United States? Then what what is it exactly that I'm adding by introducing the term meme to the whole thing?

Hmm.

So there was a journal of memetics, right?

So the one of actually was close. OK, so why did they why did they fold?

Is that I looked at the website and I couldn't find any explanation for it. And it's kind of interesting. So my guess is, is that they didn't have the funding to keep going, although these days, does that necessarily mean that they were it was a vacuous theory?

No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. But but it certainly seems like these days it doesn't actually require a lot of funding to keep a journal operating because a lot of journals now moving online and online journal and online costs are very, very small. I mean, I know because I'm running I run one of those journals. So it really costs very little and can run entirely on voluntary basis.

The other possible explanation is that they've explained everything there is to explain about memes and somehow I doubt it.

But so OK, so maybe if we let's let's say we back away from the idea of this theory, explaining things in a new way that we couldn't have done without it or or making testable predictions and instead just think of it as a useful new framework of looking at things, maybe as a way of of suggesting hypotheses to us that we might not have thought about it before because we weren't thinking in the right term. So, I mean, I like the idea of thinking about things from the genes I view, or in this case, thinking about things from the memes I view.

And maybe thinking about it in those terms would cause you to think about a competition between ideas and competing for limited resources. And that could generate social, psychological hypotheses you hadn't thought of or are thinking about the human brain as a host, you know, for for the parasitic mean essentially.

Yeah. Those are all interesting analogies or metaphors. The question is, of course, you know, a metaphor has to do some work in order to be useful. I mean, it sounds good or it sounds interesting, but alas, as you just pointed out, this actually translates into some meaningful research program, you know, something that scientists can use to actually make progress in certain areas.

Then it's just a matter for an. And that's therefore not particularly useful to science now. My assessment currently of the memetics, especially because the only general memetics is just folded, recently folded, is that it is what the memetics is. What philosopher of science, Imray Lakatos, who was a student of Pupper, defined as a degenerative research program. That is an idea that is not producing anything anymore. It's not producing anything, you know, suitable for science and anything that can be used.

And therefore he may or may not be right idea in some vague sense of right. But unless it's producing something that people can actually use, it's going to go into the trash heap. In terms of science itself, knowing the culture, you know, the term determinism is probably going to stay.

It's kind of ironic. I know.

Well, now, I think it just means like a catchy idea that spreads. Exactly. Exactly.

But I want to go back also to to another point that that you were making earlier, which is you said that you, like many people, they are attracted to memetics, like the idea, the analogy with Gene, and they like the analogy with the selfish element because it seems to have some kind of explanatory power of its own. But I would actually argue as a biologist that the idea of selfish memes as being one of the worst ideas that have been affecting the public understanding of biology over the last 30 years.

Yeah, because as it turns out, evolution is about a lot more than genes.

Genes are, of course, fundamental to evolution. There's no question about it. But the most interesting things that happen in evolutionary theory over the last 20 or 30 years actually don't have to do the right thing with genes. Have to do. For instance, the most important emerging branch of evolutionary biology is called Evil DVO, which stands for evolution, development and the evolution of development. People work on evolutionary development. Yes, they, of course work with genes also because it's always a background condition that has to be genes that produce certain kinds of phenotypes.

But they really work with at a higher level of organization. They work with cells and tissues and how those those develop to make the full organism. And a lot of the insights that are coming out of Evel Knievel and of similar new branches of evolutionary biology have very little to do really with the idea of selfish genetic elements. In fact, the very idea of self, a genetic element is sort of undermined by the fact that I mentioned earlier. The genes have to work with each other.

There really cannot be such a thing as a selfish genetic element because every gene is always going to find itself in a large number, you know, and the conglomerate known as the genome of other genes.

And there has to be cooperation. These cooperation is in fact well known and well documented at the molecular level. And genes have to interact in ways that so that the gene products actually interact with, to be precise about it, because genes themselves don't do anything. New products do interact, and they have to do that in a cooperative way because if one of them stops functioning or starts behaving too selfishly, the entire organism stops working, obviously, and that's the end of the line for for the gene.

So there has to be some kind of force cooperation, even at the genetic level and in the theory of selfish genes doesn't really tell you much about development. It doesn't really tell you much about high level phenotypes, such as behaviors in a in a large range of organisms. So even that idea is actually of limited ability and much more limited application. You know, we have to remember that the Dawkins book in 1976, as you pointed out, it was very popular, but it was actually a popularisation.

This was not a technical book. It was a popularization of ideas that had been produced during the 1960s, largely by Hamilton in England and and by other people over like George Williams at Stony Brook University, actually, where I was for a few years. And these these are the people who actually developed the mathematical theory of selfish genetic elements and even Hamilton himself to the end of his career. He died several years ago, was actually very reluctant to use the terminology of the selfish gene because he was interested in the way in which genes cooperate and organisms even cooperate with each other to increase their fitness.

So so the idea stuff is really something that took off because of the brilliance of Dawkins writing.

But in fact, as a concept within biology is a limited application. And and therefore its offspring, you know, in terms of mathematics doesn't surprise me. That has been an even more limited application in terms of explaining cultural evolution.

Interesting. Well, we're about to run out of time. But briefly, while we're closing on this gene, do you know if Dawkins, as the originator of the concept of meme, has commented on how that concept has fared over the decades?

He has made occasional comments about it and. Seems to me that he tried actually to distance himself from from the idea. I mean, it hasn't said that that the idea was, you know, bunk. In fact, it's not interested in a very sort of speculative, rough way.

And it was not developed in, you know, a big research program. Right.

And my impression is that he was he was probably taken by surprise by how popular the idea became.

That ironic? Yes. Be careful what you wish.

OK, so on that note, we will wrap up this section, rationally speaking, and move on to the rationally speaking PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our irrational fancy. Let's start with Julie.

Pick things. My pick is actually a fan fiction. It's online only. It's called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. And it's in the process of being written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I think he's up to chapter sixty two by now.

So so this is basically a retelling of of Harry Potter.

It's sort of, I don't know, an alternate universe version of Harry Potter and the it's Lazar's way of exploring a whole bunch of really interesting concepts, ranging from utilitarianism to humanism to game theory to cognitive biases through through told through the the world of Harry Potter.

And and the whole idea is that Harry in this version has been before he he before he's plunged into the magical world he's been trained in, you know, the the scientific method and skepticism and rationality.

And so when he finds himself in in the magical world, he does what, you know, a good skeptic would do.

And he starts trying to figure out how all of this magic works. What are what are the underlying laws and and principles that are governing the way the magic works. And he also it's just it's a funny way. It's a very clever series and it's a funny way to sort of send up all of the irrationality and the unquestioned assumptions that are just rampant in the in the original series.

And I mean, in lots of fantasy world, it's just magic is sort of taken for granted and it's never really studied or questioned.

And that's why I call it magic.

Yeah, well, but I mean, so it's not like like Elazar tries to come up with naturalistic explanations for all the magic, but he does sort of try to find like internally consistent ways of that, of explaining how it works. And so, you know, Harry is constantly coming up with theories and coming up with clever experiments to test the theories about the magic and and questioning assumptions of the wizards in the world.

So, for example, wizards tell him about a this this thing. I think it's called the veil of secrets through which they say you can hear whispering from from the the dead spirits in the other world after after the dead have passed on. And so instead of just taking this for granted, like Harry does in the original series, this Harry says, okay, wait a minute, is that really the only or the most plausible explanation for for what's going on, that there's like a world of the dead?

And this is the connection to, OK, tell me what you observed and let's think about what you know could actually be going on here, which is, you know, what James Randi would do if he if he were presented with some potentially paranormal, just conjured up the image in my mind of James Randi dressed as Harry Potter.

And that's an interesting one.

And it's a very clever and cerebral and fascinating theory, as I encourage you to check it out. Sounds good.

My pick for this episode, on the other hand, is the opinion. The opinion is part of the Opinionator pages of The New York Times. It's called The Stone. The Stone is a series of philosophy essays that The New York Times started publishing several months ago. I think they're only online.

I'm not sure whether they appear or not in the printed version, but the idea is to ask a number of philosophers throughout the country and covering a variety of disciplines in philosophy about their opinions, about a certain number of topics, either topics of actual, you know, sort of interest to for the because of news, recent news items or more more broad, more broad interest from a philosophical, conceptual perspective. So, for instance, the last entry that I have at the moment is called Paradoxical Truth, and it's by Graham Priest who happened to be actually a colleague of mine at City University in New York.

He's one of the foremost magicians in the world who specialises in paradoxes. And and so the article is about the concept of paradox and what does it mean to have a logical paradox and that sort of thing. So it's a really interesting series. It's a little bit uneven. Sometimes the content tends to be a little too technical. In other cases, the content is all over the place that the philosopher in question writes about a little too broad ranging range of topics within a single article.

But often enough is is is very good. And it's certainly far promoting and stimulating, as you can see actually from their comment sections, which is. Yeah, it's a very extensive comment sections and there is a lot of interesting people who contribute to it, but not as good as our common threads.

Right. Of course not. I was worried.

OK, this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, true by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.