Is Culture Another Form of Life?

The emergence of meme stocks on the Robinhood trading platform suggests it is a great time to revisit the origin of memes in evolutionary theory.

Social scientists explain our behavior in terms of culture (cultural determinism). Cultural determinism seems incompatible with natural science (i.e., physics chemistry, biology, etc.¹). Can they be reconciled? Or is human culture another form of life that also evolves through Darwinian selection, like gorillas or gnats?

One widely-floated idea is to consider units of culture, or memes, as operating under Darwinian selection processes analogous to gene selection. This approach has not galvanized much data collection, however. Nor has it advanced our knowledge of human social behavior (see Richerson and Boyd for a more sympathetic perspective²).

Oh, meme, thou art sick!

Why were memes such a scientific flop? The key mistake lies in assuming that there is such a thing as a culture that can be separated from human behavior in the way that genes are separable from the bodies that carry them and can be propagated into future generations.

Even those who are sympathetic to the meme perspective doubt that there is any fundamental unit of culture analogous to the triplet code of genetics. They doubt that memes can replicate themselves faithfully as genes do. Nor do they believe that memes can be observed in any way except through the behaviors they are assumed to produce—thereby raising the tautology problem of all cultural determinism¹.

Even if cultural variants are not particulate, or separable into small, independent pieces, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd² argue that they can nevertheless evolve through natural selection. This belief puts them in a minority.

Unlike genes, memes cannot be replicated unless the behavior they represent is expressed and copied by another individual. As two critics of the meme concept³ write:

In non-human animals, social learning, including learning through imitation, and even instruction, does not involve the transmission of encoded or symbolic information. That is why it is impossible to decouple the transmission of information and its developmental function. Most transmission is not function-insensitive ‘copying.’ It is reconstruction a function-sensitive developmental process. With this type of information transmission, there is no unit of heritable variation that is not also at the same time a unit of function that is constructed during development.

So lions learn to hunt partly by observing their mothers hunting. Rodents learn which foods to eat and how to process them by smelling, and watching, their mothers eating.

The solitary exception here is human symbolic communication through writing and other media where ideas are transmitted without behavioral expression. This means, of course, that with the exception of humans, talking about memes adds nothing to the equation that cannot be gleaned directly from behavioral observation. So they are irrelevant to pre-literate or pre-representational human societies.

None of this is intended to deny that some patterns of behavior are peculiar to local populations and are acquired by imitation or social learning. This is true of British birds opening milk bottles on doorsteps in the good old days of domestic milk delivery, pygmy chimps clasping hands over the head when they groom, and the custom of wall street tycoons of wearing loud suspenders. It is also true of local dialects in speech, in birdsong, and in the vocal communication of whales and dolphins.

My point is that these behaviors do not survive in an encoded, form analogous to DNA coding, and it is, therefore, inadmissible to see them as an equivalent form of evolved life.

Talking about memes as units of culture thus invokes all of the same problems as talking about somewhat loftier concepts, such as norms and moral values, widely used by cultural determinists within conventional social science. The concepts are circular or tautological: They add nothing to our understanding of the observed behavior.

In the end, memes carry much the same baggage as cultural determinism: circular explanation, untestability, and lack of practical or scientific usefulness. They do not lend themselves to the sort of mind-blowing discoveries that are the hallmark of good scientific theories.

Whatever their scientific deficiencies, this does not stop stock traders from using them to make money.