4) No, there aren’t problems of scale in defining genes. We use other terms for things of different scale (ie. phenotypes, chromosomes, methylation patterns, transposons, etc…), and these larger and smaller scaled things are operated on by processes which are, in many cases, distinct from (or in addition to) the processes which operate on genes.

6) The thing is is that ideas and words are not “parasites”, or any kind of organism or virus in the context of biology. As an analogy: Solar cycles, tides, volcanos, climate, and many other events can change people over evolutionary time periods. The environment can even “evolve” in a feedback cycle with people (witness farming, water wheels, extinction-driven changes in hunting practices). Just because our feedback mechanisms with the environment alter both doesn’t mean it’s accurate to draw an analogy between genes and environmental “units”.

My larger disagreement with this was that Gregdowney’s description of Blackmore’s speech made it seem as if she thought the future possibility of the brain as a living space for memes was how and why memes were driving evolution. The only evolutionary changes that take part as a **RESULT** of the future environment are those made via husbandry – where mates and offspring are selected by an external agent such as a farmer or ant, with an eye toward selecting organisms which are expected to flourish in the presumed future environment.

The hypothetical memes which would be driving the evolution of the brain would only be driving it to evolve to benefit those specific memes. Sure, unintended side effects could occur, but a bigger and better brain would be more likely to drive the original memes out of existence by altering their original habitat. So if memes want to self-replicate, why are they making it so much easier for competing, future memes to replicate as well? I don’t think you see this with the lancet flukes or other parasitic and viral illnesses, except with opportunistic scavengers the equivalent of hyenas.

“So yes, a parasite can evolve to advantage its host.”

Has there been work on explaining how memes evolve to benefit the humans they are supposed parasites of?

8) The thing with this is, that like the hyenas, opportunistic infections can be completely unrelated to the original infection. With memes this is unlikely to be the case. “Catching” a meme of technological advance (ie. the “Singularity”) is unlikely to make a person more prone to catching the meme of Dispensational Christianity, in fact it is likely to have the opposite effect.

This is part of the problem with analogizing memes to genes, then also analogizing them to parasites, other symbiotic organisms, or infections.

9) I have issues with the Gregdowney’s wording here too. No malaria researcher is going to claim they’re using objective science. The science they choose to use will be predicated on eradicating the disease, and they’ll likely freely acknowledge this.

Analogies serve a useful purpose when first learning a subject, but the for-instance analogy of a star system, or Earth and the Moon, toward an Atom and its electron cloud breaks down so fast it could actually be harmful in understanding. That’s the issue here.

using conventions as a proof of memetics is daft: for instance, we say hellos when we meet because it establishes a known starting point, or initialises a ritual, or sets expectations that we can agree on (a ‘hello’ means something different from a ‘who the f**k are you?’). other reasons: identities, signaling theory, coordination, efficiency… i mean, really, i suppose the width of a train track is a roman meme, battling it out in the 20th century and losing it to the nasty detroit car meme, but slowly coming back due to the public transportation & sustainability memes? at this point we may as well abolish all other disciplines and pack up the university departments.

didn’t we all learn something in middle school about theories that don’t explain anything?

Yeah, when I was reading Fluffy’s comment, I just felt like, ‘You want me to reargue the whole @#$% thing?!’ Your response is more elegant than mine would have been — “application of a description of a process, not of any ‘thing’.”

The metaphor itself is not the problem, but the entailments that come from the metaphor can make the metaphor nor terribly apt or even obscuring. Worse, when a metaphor that isn’t terribly apt starts to slip into a substitution, then we’re likely to get confusion. The meme thing, to me, is a way of talking about cultural evolution without reading too much about culture change, cultural systems, or previous cultural evolution; you just take a metaphor and run with it, cherry-picking examples along the way.

But you put the point very elegantly.

Listen carefully to people like Susan Blackmore, and you’ll see that they say non-sensical things such as ‘memes exist when they are copied’. A gene exists whether it is copied or not. Get it? A ‘meme’ isn’t the thing copied, it’s the process of copying – meaning that it’s actually a viewer-applied description of an event, not a copied thing in itself. If a meme has to be copied for it to become a meme, then it’s not all clear how the factual status and existence of something can become altered by a process which has no bearing whatsoever on the original item – i.e., if, say, a phrase is copied, what actual, factual change takes place to the original phrase to turn it from a non-meme in to a meme? Answer – nothing; ‘meme’ is a viewer application of a description of a process, not of any ‘thing’. The same can not be said of a gene, which is a gene, whether copied or not.

The only issue is that not enough academics are challenging the fact that he presents flawed social science as natural science – and he appears to be supported by an increasingly anti-academic set of undeducated but vocal fans who class dissent from Dawkins’ views as ignorance – ironically. Both natural and social scientists should be alarmed at this.