Meme Weaving

This video has a very semiotician-y feel to it, but if you can get around that, it’s a worthwhile piece on potential applications for memetics in language evolution.

Abstract

Critics of Darwinian, meme-based approaches to cultural history have often pointed out that no empirical phenomena have so far been identified which memetic models can explain better than classical theories, i.e. theories which view cultural history as driven by human agents. Taking this criticism seriously, this paper looks at a few long term trends in the history of English phonotactics, proposes a memetic account of them, and compares it to explanations that have been, or might be offered, on the basis of classical, speaker-based approaches. The paper tries to account for the phenomenon that during the last 1000 years English consonants and consonant clusters have been systematically reduced, deleted, vocalized or even completely lost from the phonemic inventory, while vowels have quite frequently been strengthened (i.e. lengthened and/or diphthongized). Basically, it proposes that this asymmetry results from selective pressures which regularities in the organization of English utterance rhythm have exerted on the memorized shapes of English word forms. It is argued that fixed word-stress and the tendency of utterance feet to be isochronous selected for phonemic elements which could be expressed with variable phonetic duration without being misidentified. In short, the development is seen as resulting from the interaction of linguistic competence constituents which are expressed and transmitted together. The role of speakers in the process is seen as limited to providing the stable physiological environment in which the transmission or replication of competence evolution takes place, the potential effects of intentional and context-specific human behavior on the observed trends in the evolution of English are assumed to sum over, or to cancel one another out. After a possible memetic explanation of the changes is given, the paper discusses whether more or less the same story could not also be told in terms that are presently more established in the discourse of the linguistic community – an opinion which is often voiced at linguistic conferences and which has also made it into printed reviews (e.g. Blevins 2006, Berg 2007 of memetic approaches to language change (such as Ritt 2004). In this paper it is argued that while classical, speaker-centered versions of the account may be possible, they necessarily fail to achieve the explanatory depth of memetic explanations if they do not explicitly account for the rationales which underlie human preferences in behavior, learning, and decision making. As soon as they cease to take them for granted, however, also classically hermeneutic theories of language change wind up deconstructing the very notion of speaker agency by which they are supposedly distinguished from memetic theories. The paper ends by concluding that long term changes in English phonotactics do represent an actual empirical case by which the explanatory value of memetic theory can be demonstrated, although it requires some awareness of the problems involved in assessing the quality of rivaling explanations in order to see this.

The Toronto Semiotic Circle organized a symposium on “Memory, Social Networks, and Language: Probing the Meme Hypothesis II” held at Victoria College (University of Toronto), Northrop Frye Hall, on May 15-17, 2008.

Michael Best, a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and an Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, gave a talk on Computational Memetics at the The Toronto Semiotic Circle symposium on “Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis”.

Abstract:

A cultural transmission theory would attempt to explain how “content” moves within a social network. Memetics entails such a transmission theory but adds an evolutionary- theoretic explanation of the cultural unit of selection and cultural design for selection – that is the accumulation of adaptations. I have been exploring computational tools to study both transmission and adaptation of cultural units within online text corpora. The system core relies on basic principles of text analysis and natural language processing. Findings include identification of a putative meme and adaptive significance.

The Toronto Semiotic Circle organized a symposium on “Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis” held at Victoria College (University of Toronto), Northrop Frye Hall, Room 205, on May 4-6, 2007.

Marion Blute’s presentation at the first Toronto Semiotic Circle symposium on memetics has the subtitle: “memes if necessary, but not necessarily memes.” As a researcher in the realm of evolutionary, she is concerned with the ways in which memes can and should be applied, and the pitfalls of attempting to analogize cultural transmission and change directly with genetic mechanisms — processes which themselves are far more messy than typically appreciated.

Abstract

The concept of cultural evolution is central to any discussion of “memes”. It was because of the possible existence of Darwinian evolutionary processes beyond the gene-based biological that Dawkins introduced the concept in the first place as a possible substrate. Strangely enough he, of all people, did not initially distinguish the gene and genome-like from the phene and phenome-like aspects of cultural evolution, a confusion which he corrected thereafter. The meme concept was generally not very well received in academic circles, albeit the reception among those interested in Darwinian-style theories of cultural evolution was more mixed. Publications on memetics were interdisciplinary (which can itself be a problem); they often ignored many of the conventions of academic discourse; they were sometimes written by non-professionals for a popular audience; and they were commonly viewed by social scientists, when they paid any attention at all, as yet another (post-sociobiology) incursion by biologists into their subject matter. At least as important as these obvious reasons for the less than enthusiastic reception was the fact that the concept was introduced at a time when there were rising “discontents” within the biological community itself with neo-Darwinism (as it was known in Britain), or the synthetic theory of evolution (as it was known in America), i.e. with population genetics or the genetical theory of evolution. Moreover, it was introduced by the very person around whose work many of those discontents crystallized. I think it is fair to suggest however that by linkage in peoples’ minds, the wide diffusion of the meme concept gave Darwinian-style cultural evolution a lift, helping drag the latter some distance out of the small, scattered academic niches in which it dwelt at the time.

Beyond the sociology of its invention and reception, objections to the meme concept that there are discrete units of biological information, – genes, but not of cultural information – memes, are not persuasive as will be discussed. For example, the concept of a “gene” has historically varied, changed and continues to do so, which, of course, is exactly what a cultural evolutionist should expect of a concept, including in science. Moreover, memes, defined by analogy with Williams evolutionary gene concept, can be isolated in some cases e.g. in generations of internet posts as Best for example has shown. So the concept cannot be banished on a priori grounds and it can do a job of useful scientific work. On the other hand, many other terms have been used in a variety of social scientific disciplines for informational units in cultural transmission and evolution. Moreover, in some cases, social learning can occur by observation i.e. in the absence of instructions encoded symbolically and transmitted at all. If the meme concept can be useful on the one hand but is not always required to talk about cultural evolution, is it ever necessary? I tentatively conclude that there is no readily available substitute when the conversation is inter-disciplinary and when the social learning mechanism involved in the cultural evolutionary process under discussion is the transmission of symbolic, digitally- encoded information as in oral or written language.

The Toronto Semiotic Circle organized a symposium on “Imitation, Memory, and Cultural Changes: Probing the Meme Hypothesis” held at Victoria College (University of Toronto), Northrop Frye Hall, Room 205, on May 4-6, 2007.